But you can’t hide from fear. There’s no escape from the fear of being alone. It lives on inside us from the moment we are born.
Jan slowly begins to realize, after his conversation about Africa with Martha, that the hotel where his mother and sister are, no longer feels like home. Yet, he feels the obligation and love towards them that makes him conflicted. He reveals that he is afraid of being alone, despite having Maria, which means that he never filled his loneliness with her, never found true home with her. But this loneliness is not filled with his return home either, which indicates that it comes from deep within himself.
If you start out pretending to be something you’re not, you’ll end up in a mess.
Maria desperately tries to convince Jan to simplify things and introduce himself directly to his family to avoid misunderstanding (hence the title), but Jan decides to go the harder route. He decides to inspect, test the waters before revealing himself, which can only unnecessarily complicate things and might end up in a mess.
Anything that could last through twenty years of silence deserves the name of love.
After discovering that Jan is her son, mother no longer wants to bear the burden of her sorrow and conscience and decides to follow him in the afterlife. She tells Martha that her love for her son is incomparable to her love towards her, and that despite not seeing him in twenty years, it matters little in comparison to her motherly love. This incites extreme jealousy and contempt in Martha, who starts to feel that her brother robbed her of the life she could have had.
