page_title: Into Invisible Light
section_title: Themes, interpretations, and influences
hierarchical_section_title: Into Invisible Light / Themes, interpretations, and influences
caption_attribution_description: Anton Pavlovich Chekhov. Oil on canvas. From the collection of the Tretyakov Gallery.
context_page_description: Into Invisible Light is a 2018 Canadian romantic drama film directed and co-written by Shelagh Carter and starring co-writer Jennifer Dale as a recent widow re-examining her life and her identity in the wake of her husband's death. Confronted by an odd directive from the estate, the widow is inspired to rekindle a long repressed desire to write after she unexpectedly crosses paths with an old flame from her youth, inspiring her to explore her creative voice, and to put into words the feelings and desires that she has experienced and sometimes repressed in her life. Carter's third feature is an independent film loosely based on characters from Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, Dale's character being based on Yelena, and Keleghan's on Dr. Astrov. The film features an original score by Shawn Pierce.
context_section_description: Into Invislbe Light was described at its world premiere as a story of forgiveness, second chances and the revitalizing power of art. Through the events of the film, Helena is inspired to write many years after giving it up, to express her creative side, to put her feelings and desires into words; a meditation on the creative process, self-confidence, and "life-altering decisions" (in this respect comparable to Carter's previous feature Before Anything You Say). Richard Crouse quotes from self-help author John Tarnoff by way of summing up the theme of forgiveness: "In order to create your future, you have to reconcile your past." As Jennifer Dale puts it:
  The point of this story is that Michael coming back into her life affords Helen the chance to see how their youth botched it all up, and it's another chance to understand where he's coming from, to forgive each other and free themselves, especially Helena, to be able to find her own voice as a writer, even by the beginning act of trying to engage this gift of writing that she had abandoned.
   In an interview with Sheila O'Malley when the film was still in development, Carter suggested that it, and indeed, all her work to date, has in some way been about aspects of betrayal and abandonment: "It's something really deep in me from my own childhood, and it's coming up in different forms."
  The story is "unapologetically a story about adults for adults", and deals with characters asking "if you had been given the chance to begin again, would you, could you, what would it take to rise to that?" at least from the Baby Boomers' perspective, though the question is also reversed from the point of view of Monica, in that she is confronted with something which makes her ask "What if my life went that way?" As Dale puts it more explicitly:
  That is the flaw and dilemma and sadness of Helen, who is kind of drowned in this weight of remorse.  She's only partially conscious of having abandoned something of herself for no good reason she can even defend or blame. There are many of us who come with a certain point in our lives in middle age and later middle age and it's true for me and for you, we can look back and examine moments and choices that we made and those that made us veer off into what she would have done. It's impossible not to have regrets of one kind or another.
   Or as Sheila O'Malley puts it: "It's not about the first flush of hope. It's a movie about flawed human people with some miles on them, miles where things have been dropped along the way, things they all thought were lost forever." In this respect, the film is also a meditation on ageing and loneliness, and the "confusion that comes from being left behind after a partner's death." Helena's writing is also about being "in mourning and grief, the act of writing about her grief."
  For Dale, the film's title, a "poetic phrase that works as a metaphor on many levels", referring in part to the "invisible light" from the other world, where her deceased husband has now gone: "this very strange challenge and demand, in a way his hand reaching across time and space" sending her on the path that he knows she should be on.
  It's also about invisible light that is always working on us. I don't think people's hopes ever die, they go on forever, no matter how we self-sabotage or deny or put things behind us, our grief and disappointments, if we're lucky enough to recognize it, we can see how life conspires to give us another chance.
  In an interview with Debra Yeo, Jennifer Dale says she and Shelagh Carter were inspired partly by performances they loved in other movies, including Tilda Swinton in 2009 romantic drama I Am Love, Kristin Scott Thomas in 2008 French-Canadian drama I've Loved You So Long and Juliette Binoche in Abbas Kiarostami's 2010 film Certified Copy: "Films with central female characters who were going through big transformations and, particularly in the case of the Binoche film, talking through it."  They also drew on their own lives and on the character of Yelena in Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya (and in turn, basing Mic
caption: Detail of Osip Braz's 1898 portrait of Chekhov, on whose characters Helena and Michael are based. (Oil on canvas. From the collection of the Tretyakov Gallery)
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