★★★★☆
[First Watch]
It's wonderful. Is it cold?
No, not at all.
I really loved the effect of the gymnast blinding herself with the ribbon in the rhythmic gymnastics routines that bookend the film, and when she wears a blindfold herself to practise both to replicate the experience of the blind woman and in protest of her coach telling her that she would be unable to perform if she were blind. Being so young, the impact of their work hasn't affected her in a way that she is yet able to recognize and comprehend.
Monte Rosa is not as flexible. She is at the point that she isn't able to relate to others as herself, she is lost within these other roles. Her sense of Self is so warped that she is unable to revert when these roles are taken away from her. She attempts to relate to her father as her deceased mother, and then to her father as himself through his dance partner. When she is not able to succeed in either attempt, she returns again to the tennis player's home and she recites all of her lines, desperately, sounding so much like a broken doll.
Living. Acting. Working.
You want to separate these things, naturally, but every one of us spends so much of our life in a role that it becomes your life. When you are older you are more established in existing between roles, when you are young, you are more pliable and not hurt as deeply by the shifting of identities. You also have not fully developed your own sense of Self when you are very young, it is at this point when you have a crisis of identity. It is another person that you step into for a period, but it can be impossible to extricate yourself from who you are as a "worker". It is built into the way you see and respond to things, a store clerk straightening jars and boxes on shelves as they shop for their own groceries.
Being so cold and sterile overall, the warming of the color pallette in several scenes really created an artificial sense of comfort. These scenes in the various homes [Monte Rosa's, the blind woman's, in the tennis player's home], in the ambulance, at the hall where Monte Rosa watches her father dance, in the storage room in the lamp store, and finally at the end where Monte Rosa stands on the patio, begging to be allowed back... many of these were the times that were most uncomfortable to watch, but it communicates the warped emotional reality of these characters, especially Monte Rosa.
This is the most empty that I've felt from Lanthimos. The atmosphere that I usually relate within to myself was translated INto an emotional response... not even bleak, but full emptiness.