Magical Realist Endings

[Sin Agog]

Seems to be a thing to have a film be relatively grounded the whole way through, only to hint at something a little beyond our earthly ken right at the very end.  I actually tend to be a real sucker for these kinds of endings, and there are loads of them.  Ghost World with Thora Birch hopping aboard the magical bus (I don't even think she even had to pay for a ticket), The Big Blue when the sexy Frenchman turns into a dolphin, the green ray in The Green Ray, Chauncey Gardner being too simple to sink in Being There, even something like The Florida Project sort of counts as the kids run off arm-in-arm towards that ultimate panacea, Disneyworld.  You could say they're generally a bit of writerly self-indulgence, but they can really make a movie if done right.

[chveik]

the green ray in The Green Ray

technically not magical :)

(the point still stands obviously)

[chveik]

Antonioni liked this kind of stuff, there's the famous tennis scene in Blow Up, but also the ending of L'Eclisse where all traces of humanity seem to have disappeared.

Magnolia of course.

[chveik]

You could say they're generally a bit of writerly self-indulgence, but they can really make a movie if done right.

I guess it's the way some directors decide to hint at an allegorical "reading" you can have of the film.

[Noodle Lizard]

Breaking The Waves, surely. But it's shite.

EDIT: Actually, it wouldn't have been shite if we'd just heard the faint sound of bells. That might've been quite good.

[Mister Six]

The Lighthouse, I suppose, although that felt more like the writer not really knowing how to finish it, so just going for some obscure symbolic-looking imagery and hoping people will find a depth there that doesn't really exist.

[Pearly-Dewdrops Drops]

Magnolia seems like a classic example.

[Noodle Lizard]

The entire 60's era segment of Once Upon A Time In America could be seen this way, at least according to some interpretations. There are a lot of things "off" about it. Not sure if "uncanny opium dream" qualifies as magical realism in the strictest sense of the term.

[chveik]

Magnolia seems like a classic example.

Magnolia of course.

:(

[Cerys]

There's The Robe, which ends with a pair of soon-to-be-martyrs walking up into the sky.

[Pearly-Dewdrops Drops]

:(

Reposting it was my way of recreating the sing-along scene.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

Does Birdman count? There's a bunch of whacky whimsy throughout, but the ending is the first time it's implied to possibly be real, if I remember rightly.

[samadriel]

The UFO in The Man Who Wasn't There.

[Abnormal Palm]

Grease

[samadriel]

Oh yeah, Repo Man!

[BeardFaceMan]

Blades Of Glory.

[non capisco]

Ordet. I won't spoil it if you haven't seen it.

[lipsink]

The ending of Wild at Heart.

I'm probably getting it wrong but does the ending of Roma

Spoiler alert

the long slow shot of the main character walking up the steps to the sky kinda implies she's going to heaven?

[close]

[Marner and Me]

The ending of The Martian

Spoiler alert

with the sling shot manoeuvre

[close]

[Puce Moment]

If.... is not a mainstream film by any means but it does retain some sense of realism up until the final massacre!

Same goes for Antichrist.

[notjosh]

The ending of The Awful Truth is one of my favourites - really funny and unexpected. If you haven't seen it, just watch the whole thing as it's one of the great screwball comedies.

[Kelvin]

Jaws ends with a nice visual metaphor for them floating in its wet tummy.

[Noodle Lizard]

Battle Royale is obviously pretty stylized throughout, but Kitano getting up to answer the phone after being fatally shot seemed to imply something a bit magicky going on. Similarly, in one of Takashi Miike's straighter efforts, 13 Assassins, there's a character who appears to be immortal by the end of it.

A lot of Coen Bros films probably fall into this territory too. Barton Fink, certainly.

[Brundle-Fly]

High Plains Drifter (1973)?
Sexy Beast (2000)?

[Bence Fekete]

Still fresh, I enjoyed the end of First Reformed (2017). 90 mins of studious, implied batshittery then a well deserved leap into la la.

[Smeraldina Rima]

I watched a film recently called Clouds of Sils Maria which reminded me of The Green Ray. Juliette Binoche as an actress and Kristen Stewart as her personal assistant go up into the hills to see a natural phenomenon called the "Maloja Snake" which is also the name of the play that Binoche's character is reluctantly acting in (as the older woman having played the younger woman in her youth).

The Cloud Appreciation society write about it here:

The Maloja Snake

We were recently contacted by Society member, Tim Oxton, who told us about a film he saw entitled %u201CClouds of Sils Maria%u201D. The film focuses on a playwright who has written a play called %u201CThe Maloja Snake%u201D, a cloud bank that winds its way through the Alpine pass like a river. It%u2019s not often that a film is named after a cloud phenomenon which was previously filmed in 1924 by the famous German mountain film director, Arnold Fanck.

Das Wolkenphaenomen von Maloja - Arnold Fanck,1924

The Sky Library explains the phenomenon:

The Maloja Snake

As the moist air from the Bergaglia Valley rises over the Maloja Pass, occasionally the air's dew point temperature may be reached, at which point cloud will form. The thermals from the valley walls may even shear the flow and create rotation, and the cloud takes on a snake-like form, and is called the %u201CMaloja Schlange%u201D or %u201CMaloja Snake%u201D. It generally forms around 500-700 metres above ground level (roughly 8000 feet AMSL) and is about 50 metres (150 feet) thick. This cloud generally dissipates over the Lakes of Sils and Silvaplana, but may even reach St. Moritz before dissipating, partly due to the Bruescha wind halting its propagation. This Maloja Snake is usually associated with deteriorating weather, but can also form when portions of the up slope fog produced from the anabatic flow in the Bergaglia Valley overrun the natural blocking effect of the Maloja Pass. The capping of these clouds may also indicate the inversion level, with possible shear associated with different wind directions and velocities.

Photo 4 shows an example of a Maloja Snake.

Photo 4: An example of a Malojaschlange or Maloja Snake. The cylindrical cloud formation can extend as far as St. Moritz. (Photo: Rene & Elisabeth Buehler)

Spoilers follow:

The actress played by Binoche and personal assistant played by Stewart go up into the hills to see the Maloja Snake three quarters of the way through the film by which point their relationship has become frayed. We see Binoche and Stewart go down the last little valley but only Binoche comes up the last little hill to reach the top. She observes the Maloja Snake thinking that Stewart is coming up behind her and we never see Stewart again in the film. It's not magic realist really but it was a surprising thing at the end of a film.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

They must have been furious when they got around to watching Cloud Atlas. Barely any clouds at all.

And don't even get them started on Final Fantasy VII.

[Puce Moment]

I would say Possession (1981) but, well, if you've seen it you will understand that it is only a very slight but noticeably more batshit ending than the batshittery that preceded it.

Same goes for Black Moon (1975), O Lucky Man (1973), The Hourglass Sanatorium (1973) and others!

[Dr Rock]

There's something weird about the end of Nic Roeg's Performance.

[Piggyoioi]

Being There