Review of Wit (2001) by Qi Z — 10 Feb 2014

How does one's intelligence, however sharp and tough, counter the world of illness? As we are stripped off all our shields of protection, kindness and faith are the only options for any last creatural comforts. This is a sobering film about human frailty, limits of science and medicine, saving grace of human kindness, and an implicit longing for the divine.

Emma Thompson's best performance as an artist.

In the progression of the movie, we see that her worldly identity is stripped away. Her scholarly intelligence, implicit trust of medicine and science, stoic self-reliance, was finally laid bare to the comfortless isolation that modern men and women find ourselves in the end. There were no offspring or loved ones hovering around. But this fact only streamlined the narrative. By sidestepping the inquisition of the adequacy of human lineage, the story compels us to question the modern spirit held aloft and aloof above the biological, communal and ritual. For certain minds can not fully be absorbed and comforted by the weak milk of humankind. When such individual's finite life is delineated without the fuzzy warmth of cognitive delusions, the urge to be inserted into something infinite becomes imperative. She did think about the meaningfulness of her past as a scholar and a teacher, but she was mightily taught to suffer by her illness and unchecked inhumanity of scientific research. Being a scholar of poet John Donne has taught her to question the fear of Death, and welcome death as a "comma", a pause between here to hereafter. It is the simplest narrative opened the final gate to accept death and peace. We are the "runaway bunny", called back to home when we have tried to escape our bodily limitation as fish or birds, or being a scholar or being a experiment subject. For those of us, the greatest task is to envision and create our own eternal dwelling of peace where each runaway would be glad to go home.