Women standing between love and lunacy

The thriller “Misery” based on the novel by Stephen King and produced by director Rob Reiner in 1990, features a woman who is a former nurse.

She takes good care of a novelist who got in an accident. She feeds food and buys valuable things, serving as a faithful caregiver to the novelist, like a mother. The novelist overcomes slump and starts writing novels again thanks to her help. However, as he regains health and is close to completing a novel, problems start to emerge. She denies the reality that she must let him go. The more she tries to detain him, the more he tries to escape from her.

At last, she breaks anew his leg that has recovered, thus dampening his will to escape from her. She wants to keep him on her side even by doing such a cruel thing. Kathy Bates, who plays the main character, conducts amazingly acting of reality by wearing a warm smile of a mother at some times, and facial expressions of a lunatic at other time.

The movie sheds lights with "desire to give care" or "imperativeness to control" on the fact that love and affection or obsession and lunacy unique to women are not far away from each other.

The main female character in the 2006 movie “The Unknown Woman” by Giuseppe Tornatore who is known for the film “Cinema Paradise,” is also an extraordinary woman.

The woman, who is hired as maid by a rich family, displays abnormal obsession to a young daughter adopted by her master’s couple. As the girl often exaggerates pain and stubbornly badgers, she tightly ties up and brutally punishes her while the parents are away.

The child who is hopelessly bashed by schoolmates is reborn as a super girl who courageously and violently defies scoundrels who molest her. Looking her in secrecy, the woman wears vague expression, which is difficult for a viewer to tell whether she is smiling or crying. The secret of her past, when she was deprived of her daughter soon after her birth and finds the daughter at long last, gets revealed.

She effectively teaches how to stand on her own feet to the girl who might be her own daughter and who she will have to separate soon. The movie makes a viewer feel uncomfortable due to violent and shocking scenes that appear frequently. When the puzzle is resolved, however, the viewer feels truly pathetic and sympathetic to the girl.

What are differences of the main female characters in the two movies? The woman in the “Misery” put into practice her commitment to keep one that she loves even by destroying him. The woman in “The Unknown Woman” displays strength and invincibility of a character who enables a child to stand on her own even by driving her to the edge.

They have the same starting point of love (motherhood), but their choices are two extremes. The one pursues possession and the other independence. Women in reality stand on a single rope while keeping a fine balance not to fall off to either side. They fear if their children resist because they seek to control and embrace the children too tight, or if the children get too weak because they give them too much freedom or get negligent to them. For this reason, these women are always anxious.