Plot
The film is divided into two sections, the first telling events from Hilary's point of view and the second from Jackie's. It opens with Hilary and Jackie as children being taught by their mother to dance and play musical instruments, the cello for Jackie and the flute for Hilary. Jackie does not take practising seriously at first, but when she does, she becomes a virtuoso, quickly rising to international prominence. Marriage to pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim follows.
Hilary, on the other hand, plays in a community orchestra and marries Christopher Finzi, the son of composer Gerald Finzi. The film, though focused primarily on Jacqueline, is ultimately about the relationship between the two sisters and their dedication to one another; to help Jacqueline through a nervous breakdown and in the interest of therapy, Hilary consents to Jacqueline having an affair with her (Hilary's) husband.
The last quarter of the movie chronicles in detail the last fifteen years of Jacqueline's life: she is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, loses control of her nervous system, becomes paralyzed, goes deaf and mute, and finally dies. The film ends with Jacqueline's spirit standing on the beach where she used to play as a child, watching herself and her sister frolicking in the sand as little girls.
Read more about this topic: Hilary And Jackie
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
““The plot thickens,” he said, as I entered.”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)