Understanding Jane (1999)

Amelia Curtis: Dallas

Quotes 

• Dallas : There's a boy. After the death of his mother, he lives alone with his father. He drowns his sorrows in the bottom of a whisky bottle. Every day, he goes to school and is taunted by the other kids about his alcoholic father and his dead mother. Every evening, he goes home and fantasises that his mother is alive. Remembers her dancing. Beautifully, gracefully. Wishes he could dance with her again. Every night, when his father passes out, he goes to the graveyard to be near her. He knows the other gravestones by heart.When he gets there, he sits and talks to his dead mother. One night, he's discovered. The caretaker finds him. Far from being angry, the caretaker is gentle and kind. He asks the boy what it is he wants. When he tells him, the caretaker replies that he can have whatever he wants, if he's willing to pay the price. The boy agrees the price. The caretaker reaches out his hand to the ground, and the Earth parts. A coffin lifts out of the ground. And from it steps the wretched corpse of the boy's mother. The boy didn't flinch. Takes his mother's hand, and they start dancing. And as they do, the music plays in the night air, and skin appears upon her bones. Eyes fill the holes in her skull. Her lips bloom upon her face. Until, as they dance, her beauty is restored. The boy stares at her with an unending love and impossible joy. And they keep dancing. And as they do, the boy's flesh creeps from his face. His hair falls from his skull. His eyes dissolve into liquid pools until as they dance, his lungs stop breathing and his mother is dancing with the wretched corpse of her son. The music stops, and the boy obediently steps into his mother's grave. As the Earth seals back over it, his mother walks away to join the father of her child.