'All Sicilian self-expression, even the most violent, is really wish-fulfilment,' the hero, Don Fabrizio, tells a visitor.
'All Sicilian self-expression, even the most violent, is really wish-fulfilment; our sensuality is a hankering for oblivion, our shooting and knifing a hankering for death..
For all the chaos and pain, it is weirdly romantic: a glorious tale of wish-fulfilment, confirming that writers really can attain self-validation through the pen.
I prefer a more romantic notion: that it's a form of popular rebellion by which the prevailing anti-natalist mores of a manipulative consumer capitalism are trumped by the innate understanding of millions of women (and men) of what really constitutes love and fulfilment – dependence, commitment, the pleasure of guiding enthusiasm and, above all, the privilege of nurturing innocence.
He really has the sense of fulfilment again.
I feel that All or Nothing is a film about potential, really, it's about possible fulfilment.
There's a suggestion, in the 19th-century whores and the 21st-century porno kiosks, that all this travelling is really a restless quest for sexual fulfilment.
The cultivation of friendship, the enjoyment of the arts, participation in useful work, caring for others, the pursuit of self-fulfilment and enabling the fulfilment of others were examples of the things that really mattered, not the acquisition of goods beyond basic needs.
Because, really, isn't that the ultimate dream fulfilment?
One reason for this is that Israel has more powerful lobbyists both in Jewish organisations and in America's evangelical Christian movement, to whom the birth of the Jewish state is a fulfilment of prophecy (some BDS motions passed in American churches really reflect internal Christian rows).
