Fanda feels alive when he is pulling pranks and acting immature. Unfortunately threatens everything, including his marriage. And well it might. He is in his late 70’s. His wife of some forty some odd years is insistent that he “grow up” and prepare himself to die. She is focused on lining up a grave for them and getting their financial house in order. In many different ways, she asserts that their lives are no longer as valuable as the lives of their son. To her, they are in their last days and last days are less worth living than early ones.
To Fanda, there is no reason not to look at the last days as the days most full of promise. After all, how much serious trouble can an eighty year old man get into? What threats can be made against them if they are rascals and he sets out to enjoy his life with his best friend only to find that it drives his wife to end the marriage.
And thus he agrees to reform. Which, seen for what it is, amounts to an agreement to die. He forswears his geriatric delinquency and, in the great irony of the movie, begins to drive his wife crazy by doing so. Here is the relevant exchange. “You don’t talk, don’t drink, don’t sing, don’t quarrel” she complains, “I can’t stand it anymore.”
“I wanted to please you.” He says.
“Please me? What happened to you? I married a cheerful man with crazy ideas with whom I argued all day and nowadays you sit here like a living corpse. Like some dope that doesn’t care that I am unhappy that I can’t live like this.”
And in a delightful twist of the plot, she sets out to learn how to play pranks with him.
There is an old man who throughout the movie stares out at the world and life and does nothing. As Fanda and his wife set out to play a prank at the end of the movie, she notes that the old man sat there for three days after he had died and no one noticed.
“He was dead even when he was alive,” says Fanda, making it clear that so long as the wife who loves him will join him, he will not make the same mistake.
Question for Comment: Do you think you will be more full of life as you age? Or less? Why?
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