Continued

A fourth interpretation existed, though really at the margins of the film, with film school geeks who were willing to listen to records backward and watch a movie frame by frame. The third interpretation is that the woman was already dead herself. This interpretation was based upon the fact that we were never shown the secretary traveling the path to the man’s house, and that her reaching them was a logical inconsistency. She had no knowledge of where his house was, so how could she wander there ahead of everyone else, like it had homing beacon in less she was already gone? Naysayers pointed out that it had just been left out of the film, that she’d no doubt either traveled there with him at some point in time, or at least followed him home secretly, so deep was her love and curiosity about his other life.

This fourth interpretation posited that she had committed suicide in the very waters that she and her beloved had walked. That the strange siren scene, which everyone acknowledged was just plain bizarre, had been a metaphor for her death, did not the sirens call ships and men to crash upon the earth. The scene also included a brief moment of her fingering stones, and these film school types insisted that the rocks were meant to recall the death of Virginia Woolf, filling her dress with stones.

They also insisted that if you watched the film closely the light changed becoming almost imperceptibly airier after the conclusion of the siren scene. Many critics argued with this idea, pointing out that after she emerged from her encounter with the siren, the path also bent away from the river leaving her and the film, more exposed to natural light than was possible under the canopy of trees. This latter interpretation, about the lighting, was widely accepted as the true one.

However, these few critics also held a tiny piece of errata, akin to the sexual innuendo in a Disney movie, that they felt conclusively proved their point that the secretary had almost immediately walked into the river and committed suicide. They insisted that, as the woman looks in the window, right before the movie darkens, a figure appears in a mirror directly across from the woman, a mirror that gives access to the rest of the room, and, that the figure, which you could really only see if you sliced it up frame by frame, was clearly the woman’s husband, standing watch over his family, in the same way that the secretary has come to see his family, and that he’s made his final choice and is staying with them to watch over them, or that he’s gathering one last look at them before slipping into eternity. Either way it was debatable whether any figure appeared in the mirror at all, and was widely debated in the small inner sanctum of movie lovers, roughly 100 in comment sections under the clip on YouTube, and in one long and unremarkable article that appeared in an esoteric journal of film review that was published biannually out of Columbia, Missouri.