The film chronicles Goya's years and the ups and downs of a priest in the country due to the changing times. He was originally "Brother Lorenzo" who preached that God saves everything. After raping a woman who was suspected of being a heretic and signing the paper "I am an African gorilla", he defected to the "revolution" and became an officer who preached freedom and fraternity. Married and had children, and eventually became a death row due to another change in the regime. Goya exists more as a spectator, and at the end of the play, when the mad mad dies, he becomes the most painful sober.
Some commented, "The tragedy of Lorenzo is that in an era when the devil drives out God, the humble man cannot keep his position." And I think the main premise of everything is that people realize that they have the freedom to choose. Freedom is the foundation of the existence of good and evil, and it is only after freedom that people have "human nature". Good without choice can never be called true good, just as forced evil is often more easily forgiven. When Lorenzo was a "devout Catholic", no matter how much he envied Goya's ability to approach female models for a long time, he also painfully concealed his desires. But no one would applaud his steadfast will, since wholehearted devotion to the Lord was taken for granted, and here Lorenzo had the same power of choice as any clergyman. Everything changed when he easily gave up his trust in God in the face of physical pain and began to realize that man has the freedom to decide his own life. It is freedom that gives meaning to all temptations. He surrendered to his own desires and brought out the ugliest part of human nature before us. On the one hand, he became a more "normal" person, married and had children, and proudly called himself "Family man"; They were imprisoned in a mental hospital, and they also attempted to "exile" their illegitimate daughter to the wild America at the time. If he had to be forgiven for his sins, the only reason I could find was that when confronted again with Christianity, he refused to "repent". Has he finally realized that faith, although valuable, cannot be a reason for coercion? After all, it was freedom that brought him the life he had truly been born to over the years, and it was probably not too much to dedicate himself to it. At the same time, I am also thinking about another question. If the British did not drive out the French to become the new "liberators" of Spain, Lorenzo would still be his glorious general, would it prove the victory of human nature and the victory of freedom? I don't think so, if freedom means choosing the part of human nature towards evil rather than towards good, that's not true freedom either. There is light before there is shadow, and the two are united within freedom.
What impressed me even more was the distressed expressions of the old priests during the execution of Lorenzo. They were sincerely mourning the bereaved man, as if he had been stripped of the most precious things in life and had become a soulless being. Without the light of freedom and the shadows it casts, their world would be completely black (or white, depending on the angle). In fact, this is to a certain extent the same as the biggest victim of the whole film - Ines. She lost her "humanity" to a great extent because she was deprived of her liberty. In the deep, dark dungeon, Ines never had a life of his own as a human being. Because of her concern for her daughter and her hidden expectations for Lorenzo, she survived, and the slightly brighter color of her life was actually raped by this hypocrite. She was imprisoned as a girl, and released with the mentality of a girl. In addition to the many scars on her body, the unspeakable suffering over the years has also given her a half-crazy but still extremely innocent girlish heart. It is precisely because of this that she has been admired and loved by Goya for a long time as an "angel". (As an aside, Foreman, the daimyo guide, is indeed an out-and-out masculinist.) I sympathize with her experience, but I don't see any value in this woman. She is nothing more than a lost and alienated being, regarded as a symbol of purity by those who succumb to desire.
I don't mean to preach that liberty leads to evil or that the loss of liberty leads to purity. Freedom exists only objectively. Only being aware of it and being able to control it within a moral confines makes everything commendable. In other words, goodness is when a person has the power to do bad things and yet does not do them. Freedom is an extremely important part of our lives and one of the fundamental elements of being human. Like it or not, its light and shadow will be there forever, and we can only see through it to bring the gray areas of life closer to the brighter parts.
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