Come Look at Me

The title of the work on which the film is based, While She Died, defines the vagaries and mood of this simple drama dealing with late love. An ill mother doesn’t want to die knowing that her already grown daughter will become an old maid. To put her mother’s soul at ease, the daughter asks a man who accidentally knocks at their door if she can introduce him to her mother as her date. This seems all the more reasonable as he has arrived holding a bouquet intended for his much younger sweetheart living next door. The man is persuaded. The dying mother’s aristocratic manner soon so enchants him that, to the daugh-ter’s displeasure, he begins to act his role with enthusiasm. His next visit, interrupted by telephone messages from his spurned girlfriend, takes place in an atmosphere of anticipated excitement. The mother visibly revives, the daughter panics and thinks up a quick solution: she asks a local salesgirl to pretend to be her illegitimate child. (Karlovy Vary International Film Festival)