by Julian Wood
Worth: $15.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Denis Podalydes, Charlotte Rampling, Kad Merad, Karin Viard, Marilyne Canto
Intro:
… filled mostly with gentleness and understanding, but just occasionally flashes of anger …
We are all going to die. Sorry to break it to you, but that’s the facts of the matter. And our awareness of this inevitability burdens our species. Or, to put it another way, we are in a life and death struggle with our death.
The great director Costa-Gavras, whose seminal political thriller Z (1969) put him on the map of world cinema, has every reason to make this film now. At 92, he could reasonably be said to be in later life and perhaps intimations of mortality are understandably his concern. His latest film is both a meditation on mortality and a look at how doctors and patients see it, and how society manages the whole issue.
Before What Comes After (aka Last Breath) is set in France, but the themes are obviously universal; filled mostly with gentleness and understanding, but just occasionally flashes of anger as characters face age and the only end of age.
One of the Big Questions, of course, is what comes after life (and there are many answers to that), but Costa-Gavras’ film is more about the run up than the big leap. This being France, one of the main characters, Fabrice (played by Denis Podalydes) is a philosopher, and we know this because he can drop the names of other French intellectuals into his discourse. He teams up with his friend Augustin (popular comedic actor Kad Merad); an amiable doctor who has become the head of a palliative care unit. Before having an epiphanous experience in the French colony of Senegal, Augustin had the typical purely clinical view of this stage of life. As he observes, Western medicine is largely set up to treat everything as a disease to be cured, but that paradigm makes no sense in relation to the incurable nature of dying.
Augustin takes Fabrice around his wards, and this allows Costa-Gavras to give us examples of the various ways in which palliative care can work. When occasionally baffled patients ask Fabrice what he is actually doing there, he says rather gnomically that he is just a philosopher. Again, this being France, this non-explanation seems to satisfy most of them. Fabrice doesn’t have much to offer, but then, when have philosophers ever really set out to solve things? Their job is to keep asking questions.
To call the film episodic would be perhaps unfair, but there is a slight sense that the various ‘examples’ are being juxtaposed and laid out to illustrate the essay, as it were. Also, Augustin seems almost saintly in a way that could be cloying. Some of the scenes are a little too neat, with a skew towards people who are mature enough to arrive at acceptance. There is less time spent on those who cannot afford a decent death, or do not have a loving family, or those in absolute denial, let alone those who insist on screaming the house down till the very end. Maybe that exemplifies wisdom in its way. To assume that the film on this topic has to be grim speaks to the problem that the construction of the whole idea that death is just unspeakably ghastly. Perhaps Costa-Gavras is asking to consider that it doesn’t have to be like that.
It is certainly a film that casts a certain mood, and you will feel like quietly contemplating things when the credits roll. That too is part and parcel of the whole mystery. It invites us to think about what it will be like for each of us at the very end. Well, we shall find out.
