It ends on the words "thought I'd see you one more time again," repeated like a grief-stricken dirge.
In the first, we follow Mary through her miserable present, as she hunts down her adolescent history like a grief-stricken detective.
The sarcastic treatment Erika hands out to her pupils makes TV's Anne Robinson sound like a sensitive grief counsellor.
Many of the experiences have a grief-like quality.
Pity was, of course, the last thing she wanted, even though secretly she was feeling something "like grief".
The only sound, a drum like a heartbeat, expands to a grief-stricken chant as a procession of monks following the bier is joined by a second procession — it cuts across the frame much closer to us, its leading churchman as startlingly huge as a saint in a medieval painting — bearing a young woman whose pallor is set off by a black gossamer shroud.
It is almost like a suicidal film – grief that can only be articulated through violence (female) or cold sterility (male).
I listened to Eels's Electro-Shock Blues, E singing about losing his sister and his mother's cancer, revealing so much that it feels like he's drowning under the weight of it all, sadness so overwhelming it almost feels like a caricature of grief.
It is stunningly well-paced, starting with "a great bellow from upstairs – a cry of despondency so deep that it sounded less a response to a single calamity than like grief over a whole life".
In dance, in which a sensation like grief can be transmitted without having to act it out, the overemoting, especially in Ms. Buglisi's work, was distracting.
