"Would you still love me if I couldn’t play?" Jackie asked her husband Daniel.
Daniel hesitated, and then said: "You wouldn’t be you if you couldn’t play."
When the cello became Jackie’s world and her life’s obsession, when the fierce love for the cello became everything her life stood for, even to the point that one might call it, the sole purpose of one’s existence...
And yet one day she woke up and found out that the cello had in turn, taken what she needed most from her. She had everything that a human being could dream of… Except love.
The love and caring that she so desired since she was but a child.
True love that comes from not what you do … but who you are. The unconditional acceptance.
Her husband, Daniel, loved her for her musical talents but not herself as a human being. Her sister, Hilary, loved and protected her since she was a child, but in her arrogance and desperate need for love, her childish behavior drove her sister away. And she probably had already forgotten what being with her family really felt like.
Her outstanding performance came from her inborn passion for the instrument – and yet how could she continue to give when her inside world had already become empty? How could one devoid of love have the capacity or the ability to convey love to the audience?
Day by day, she traveled around the Europe to continue giving concerts despite it all. Just like the concerto she played best, Cello Concerto in E minor, Op. 85, one that had been created filled with the author’s despair and disillusionment, her later performance was filled with the same sorrow, angst, and unspoken sadness.
Until one day the relentless disease, multiple sclerosis, struck her.
Slowly yet steadily, it stripped her of the ability to play cello. I don’t really know whether the disease was a blessing or a curse… To her playing was so natural and yet when she discovered that playing was also the cause of all emptiness that she felt, when passion turned in on itself, when playing had become nothing but an illusion, a cover for what she was really feeling… can we honestly say that continuing playing was still the best choice for her?
It’s just so diabolically cruel. Giving a person the talent and passion for music, then robbing her of all love she had by no other means than playing.
*
"Jackie, I just want to tell you… that everything would be alright."
The music rose to the climax; the camera gradually pulled back, to show the two sisters standing together, locked in an eternal embrace.
"Greatness is not just a gift… Sometimes it is a choice."
Such was the implication and weights of the very words in the trailer.