The Sunflowers

Rating: 10/10 (7 May 2007)

This sounds silly, I know, but bear with me. Remember the house that was turned into a hospital? Zhivago has been tending to the soldiers and Lara has assisted, as a volunteer nurse. They've fallen completely in love with each other, but neither has acknowledged this. The war is over, the hospital is empty, and Lara leaves while Zhivago stays. After he watches her wagon pass through the gates, he rushes back into the house and passes a vase of sunflowers (no doubt picked by Lara - there is another vase of sunflowers in her house, later in the movie). The camera lingers on the sunflowers for a moment and, magically, petals begin to fall from them. Something beautiful is dying.
This small miracle is so typical of David Lean. Think about it. He wanted those petals to fall from the motionless flowers at just that very moment. He couldn't use a fan because it would have made the flowers move. He couldn't have used artificial flowers, not for a huge 70mm screen, because we all would have noticed. He couldn't have used a nylon string, because the flowers would have moved. Instead, presumably, he just waited until the flowers were on the verge of dying and then filmed the scene. Now that's film-making!