The pressure on women to get married and have children has always been great, our mothers and grandmothers went through this, but now in the middle of 2023 with women being asked to share the bill at the restaurant, work, be independent, sexy and cool, all this repertoire that we already know, some of us still have to deal with the ghost of mandatory motherhood, that's right you heard, I say mandatory because if you are a woman and openly say you don't want children, you can prepare yourself because the crossed glances and judgments what will come.
Although today this pressure is much more subtle than it was a few years ago, it still exists and always has a way of showing its face, and if we are not well aware of ourselves, eventually, we end up giving in to the pressure of society and conceiving children, simply to follow a social standard, often without being truly convinced that this is what we want.
And the madness is so great that sometimes, when we decide to have children because of social pressure, we go to the last consequences to accomplish this intent, an example is late motherhood when the woman spends a lot of money on treatments to have a child that many times she didn't even want to begin with, and then goes through the whole gestation and has the child and many still deal with feelings of frustration with their role as a mother, all because they decided to have a child to please the world and not themselves.
But when a woman decides to submit herself to an experimental treatment to realize the desire to be a mother, then we already cross all the limits of madness, and this is precisely what happens in Clock. The film follows the story of Ella, an independent, successful woman in her thirties, with the perfect life and apparently the perfect marriage, who lives in peace with her choice not to be a mother.
Until the pressure that has always existed from society for her to have a child, ends up getting bigger when a close friend of hers gets pregnant and Ella, who at first is happy with the news, is slowly being taken over by her father's demands, by anxiety and discomfort because she simply doesn't have a natural desire to have children, until in a routine consultation she finds out that there is a new method that can help her.
The weirdness begins with the doctor when she asks if Ella and her husband want to have children, Ella then says that she is not ready yet, and the doctor simply turns to her and says that because she is thirty-seven years old, she simply does not have time to be ready. "And it doesn't end there in the Sequence when Ella explains that she doesn't feel like having children and that she believes she doesn't have that biological clock that it seems all of us women are obligated to have, and otherwise we are defective, the doctor simply says that maybe Ella's biological clock "is broken", in the doctor's own words, she then indicates to her a method that can fix her biological clock.
In the sequence, we see how Ella's father, also pressures her in an almost toxic way, to have a child during a family dinner, and when Ella goes to talk to her husband Aidan (Jay Ali) about her insecurities and how time is passing for her, he comes with all that talk about it being okay for me because the important thing is that we are together, and in the end he lets out a "there is no magic formula that can fix you" as if the fact that she doesn't want to be a mother is some kind of character deviation, increasing Ella's insecurity and anxiety even more.
In the face of all this, Ella, who had previously refused treatment, decides to accept the doctor's recommendation and, without her husband knowing, admits herself into a clinic, where she undergoes several dubious and painful treatments, to say the least, to fix her biological clock.
It is revolting on an absurd level this situation because, for what should a woman who is successful in her career and apparently has the perfect life and is happy with it, suddenly have to force herself to go through the enormous trauma of a treatment where her body is invaded, her mind is invaded and all this simply because she has to serve a role that society has for her because if she doesn't, she is a defective woman? Frankly, fuck society, we are the ones who have to decide what we want for our own lives because in the end it is not society that is going to have to deal with dirty frauds and angry teenagers.
I'm not against people who want kids, but I think that in the 21st century, and in the year 2023, society should have normalized this shit, and not only that, but the fact that some of us may not want to get married, or have kids, or a fucking car, things that are all seen as important to society, some of us may be happy just living our lives and that's ok, life should be about what makes us feel good and not about what society expects what our do, life is too short for that shit.
And Ella discovers this in the worst possible way, when she returns home, she starts to feel the harmful effects of such treatment, with effects not only on her body, but on her life and relationships with outbursts with her father, and friends, and the level of her visible lack of control only gets worse, when she invades her friend's house, who which is also very insensitive, and soon after when she goes to attend to her father who is ill and is terribly rude to the man, in the sequence she arrives home and when she tries to conceive a child with her husband and things go wrong, and she finds out that her husband knew about the project and the treatment she had been submitted to all along. When she understands that she was being manipulated, she returns to the clinic and in a grotesque scene, she rips out the implant they had placed in her uterus, with this, she frees herself from everything that pressured her and feeling free, she goes on a hallucinated escape.
Ella thinks she is being persecuted for breaking into the clinic, but the truth is that she had killed her father in a fit of rage and her husband called the police, and in the end we see a scene confusing and I did not understand if she died or if she was just lying there near the water, finally the fact that a beautiful woman, independent, a brilliant professional had his life ruined simply by wanting to fulfill the role that a hypocritical society wanted to impose is tragic, everything because her friend who the pinnacle of life was to have a child, the father who, having already lived his life, still wanted to have validation in a grandchild, the husband who wanted the child perhaps for ego, perhaps to show his friends the perfect family, in short, all these people were only seeing what they wanted, what was not to see Ella happy and fulfilled with her career, which, in fact, seemed to cause some discomfort in these people, and all Ella should have done was simply walk away, this would have been much healthier for her life, but unfortunately, she fell into the trap of society and consequently had a tragic end.
And what this film of weak performances and a somewhat dubious plot left us with as a lesson was, don't give in to the pressures of society or anyone, whoever that someone because your parents have already lived their lives, your friends who may not even be that friendly, and your husband or wife or partner, whoever it is, if he loves you, he will want to see you happy and will accept it, if He cannot go find someone else and be happy because what you can't do is be unhappy to make others happy because when you are at your worst, all these people who took you out of your way and your peace will probably be the first to turn their backs on you and in the end it will always be you with yourself, no matter what others say.
