16/04/2026
This beautiful Rilke quote was used at the end of the movie, JoJo Rabbit. A rich, colorful, sometimes absurd, always beautiful, movie on our impulse toward tenderness.
I remember deeply crying at this scene, when Elsa calls JoJo āa fu***ng Naziā and then, after a beat of stunned silence, they start dancing together in the bombed-out street. Itās a truly heart-wrenching and vivid bit of cinema.
My tears were not just because of the unresolved tension and broken connection between the two (whose arc was mesmerizing), but in the recognition that the self simply doesnāt snap back into shape after trauma. As much as we would like it to. As easy as it would make our lives.
Jojo, who lost his mother, killed his imaginary Hi**er, watched his best friend die, and had his entire ideological world collapse, didnāt forget all this and just dance awkwardly with someone he loved. And love her, he most certainly did: he begins protecting her out of fear and obligation, but gradually she becomes the primary reason he starts dismantling everything he was taught to believe, which, letās face it, was needed. Thatās not loyalty, thatās love.
And he did it with no illusionā¦ the imaginary Hi**er was merely a tool to escape loneliness that he created to feel belonging and safety in a world that was terrifying him.
For me, perhaps the most brutally sad part of the ending is its deliberate withholding of catharsis. We wanted to see them hug. We needed to. We wanted their union to heal everything.
But, life doesnāt work like that and sometimes you just need to dance awkwardly in the chaos in which you find yourself. This is how you hold grief.
