‘You don’t wanta make any promises you don’t wanta keep,’ says Mr. Bernstein. ‘These’ll be kept.’ Kane finishes to read aloud a declaration of principles making himself an audience, more so than the close collaborators in the room or the people who are going to read it on the front page of his newspaper the following morning. Then he signs it, whispering his full name like a kid would do—the one he was—acknowledging to have done something true after a long time. His candid stare hesitates on those little dark symbols neatly put one next to the other not just to affirm, this is who I want to be, but rather to challenge himself and prove that that is who he really his. Sottovoce, Charles Foster Kane.
I could be completely overwhelmed by the beauty of this moment only because I know the full journey Kane will be going through, and what Rosebud means. Even the famous rage scene has now taken a completely different shape. Not the frustration of a man who’s accustomed to considering himself almighty, let alone that of a husband who’s been abandoned by his wife, but rather that of someone who has let his own self down just like others once did. And failed to be better. We spend half of our lives fighting against what we secretly fear we are, trying to be what we hoped the child we were would have become. In that tragic instant where we can’t hide anymore from admitting that that person was never to exist, that’s to me where Citizen Kane is. And once again, my heart sinks.

The complexity of Lillian Hellman’s characters is fascinating. Our position towards each one of them is constantly teased. And as we are torn between conflictual feelings of comprehension, sympathy, or hatred, a harsh sociopolitical message starts to bite and take shape in the back of our minds.
The whole final act is no less than astonishing. In its climatic epilogue, Bette Davis’s monstrous Regina Giddens looks down from the once imposing staircase of the sumptuous family house as they were about to crumble. Her final words for her fleeting daughter are as bitter, brutal, honest—but also disillusioned—as she’s always been. And as the film itself is. ‘Alexandra, I’ve come to the end of my rope. Somewhere there’s got to be what I want too. Life goes too fast. You can go where you want, do what you want, think what you want. I’d like to keep you with me but I won’t make you stay. No, I won’t make you stay.’ Young Alexandra, now an adult, is not less of a determined woman than her mother is in a time led even more by men than today. ‘You couldn’t, Mama,’ says young Alexandra, now an adult, and not less of a determined woman. ‘Because I don’t want to stay with you. Because I’m beginning to understand about things. Addie said there were people who ate the earth and those that stood around and watched them do it. And just then Uncle Ben said the same thing. Really the same thing. Tell him from me, Mama, I’m not going to watch you do it.’ But have we started to understand about things too, or have we accepted to be the ones who eat the earth? Or worse, become those who watch?