One of the main joys of watching movies for me is that the movies give me an opportunity of discovering humanity from the characters in them. I had the exact experience while watching this movie. None of the situations that Sandra was going through were something I have experienced personally: raising a young child as a single parent, working as a real-time translator, taking care of her dad who has a neurodegenerative disease, and having an affair w/ a married man. And often Sandra is too busy tending other people’s affairs that she barely has time for herself and yet, these different interactions make Sandra an extremely realistic and humane person.

The main interactions the movie show are those with her boyfriend and her dad. And in those moments, she sometimes does show strong emotions, which I appreciated because one might have stereotypical image of a person like Sandra as a very muted person. Probably that’s why it was interesting to watch the evolution of her relationship with Clément and her dad Georg as well. It was particularly more intriguing to me that the movie showed the harrowing process of Sandra and her family finding a suitable care for Georg. And later in the movie, when Sandra visits her dad and she just bursts into tears because seemingly she can’t take it any more.

There is also more layered symbolism in the movie such as Georg being a philosophy professor and losing memories and speech skills. Sandra even says the books her dad owned feel more like her dad than who he is now. In an interesting way, this implies how Sandra becomes alive in the movie and how we perceive her as a person because she just has a lot going on with her life, her identity is almost entirely shaped by her coping with life in different situations, and perhaps that’s similar to Sandra’s perception of Georg’s identity found in his books.