- A quirky TV show or The Final Judgment? How sure are you of your own desires? Or maybe it's all - what someone else wants? You only have one life. Please welcome our Protagonist. She'll have it all.
- Ear-splitting sirens, medics shouting - and then the terrifying scenes of the ambulance service disappear... and we find ourselves in talk-show TV studio, along with the woman who'd been on the hospital stretcher. The spotlights gleam, the presenter exudes charm - and the audience delightedly cheers something... that's not-quite-discernable...
This is how it all seems for the heroine of Final Judgement - or perhaps it is [Non-]Final Judgement? - a television show which puts her whole life under the microscope, and where every decision she's ever taken is judged, evaluated, and assigned a tag-number. Was hers a good life? Maybe at least adequate? Boring? Exciting? Would she do it all again? Or would she change anything? How sure are you of your own desires? Or maybe it's all... what someone else wants? Is it worth basing your life on your desires, when you stop to think... you only have one life?
The Protagonist is miraculously transported from the hospital stretcher to the Final Judgement.. which isn't any kind of live scenario from a Bosch painting, but instead seems to be.. a TV show, with a presenter, cameras, and an applauding cast of extras. Her life flashes before her eyes, in the finest traditions of the genre... except that here she even gets feedback from those who shared her life with her - family members, friends, and colleagues.
Yet despite the show's punning title - the Non-Final Judgement - the verdict delivered by the studio audience will be the sentence, life or death... it's for you to say. To win the TV show, you have to prove that you took all life's vital decisions for yourself, and that public opinion has no affect on you. Are you able to win - to break out of the endless cycle of rebirth (in other words, to die and disappear)? Or will you lose - and return to the eternal drudgery of life on earth?
The film is edited with parallel editing techniques (pioneered by Eisenstein) along with music, speech and images presented as separate elements, yet combining to create a logical composition.
The Protagonist exists simultaneously in sharply-contracted situations (the ambulance, the talk-show studio, and her real life - along with the life which she could, perhaps, have led?)
The way the interior of the TV studio is handled is worth looking at - because it actually only exists into the Protagonist's mind. She assembled its interior in her head for years, sat the audience there in their seats. We could even say that the 'righteous' life she led was lived especially so she would have footage for the TV studio.
As the story develops, it goes as she feared it would - the scenery wobbles, the lights go out, the audience disappears, and... ... the Protagonist is left entirely on her own.
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