The Guardian states that ‘Jean-Luc Lagarce was 38 when he
died of AIDS, four years older than Louis, the protagonist of his play – It’s
Only the End of the World. Though he never comes right out and names the
disease, Louis is going home to tell his family that he is dying. What he
doesn’t realize is that they don’t want to hear it, or maybe they already know.’
Every
time I find myself a little adrift, I find an anchor in this film. For the
world it may be cruel, melancholic, quarrelsome, pressured, or even barmy.
Similarly, the critics must have found umpteen flaws, as for me, I quite care
less for both, because the world is fickle, and reviewers, well, the less said
the better it is; their summation rarely stems from knowledge, purely out of an
obligation to finish their job. In hindsight, they might have written it off simply
because they might not have grasped the depth of the play, or the adaptation to
the screen. Plainly put the individuals here aren’t glorified and etched to be
cotton candy; they are as factual as they can get, and those of us who possess
the power of observation know that no family is perfect. We may not understand
each other, but we love each other, and that is the beauty of familial bonds.
Why can’t we take a
film for what it is – the vision of the man who realises it. Why do we have to
make nonsensical comparisons with the same filmmaker’s earlier films, and effort
to tailor everything into a previous mould? Or even start drawing parallels
with films in the same genre made by others. While some below par commentators
may consider this technique cool, it is nothing less than absurd. Give me a modern
version of a Berger or Kael, and I would consider their word of some
consequence. Not these brand-wrapped, vodka-holding scroungers who oscillate
their opinions with the shifting drift of the most expensive perfumes in the
wind. Sadly, we are indeed, currently rather starved of that one human being
who can murderously shred every nerve of a film to reveal its basest strength
and weaknesses.
“I
prefer the madness of passion to the wisdom of indifference,” said French poet
Anatole France, and this is a brilliant and hallucinatory evocation of family
dysfunction presented in the most stylised and superb manner by the close-ups
of André
Turpin’s cinematography that pays quite the ode to the words of the poet France.
I am thus habituated to the
magic of Gaspard Ulliel that if I do not watch this, and, A Very Long
Engagement, I feel that both my limbs are missing. Marion Cotillard is as
fascinatingly fabulous as she can be, the ideal embodiment of grace and flair. For
me, this film is a celebration in the same way as Rilke said death is our
friend, precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence
with all that is here, that is natural, that is love.
A
lot has been spoken about how the motion picture is suffocating. About how the
characters essayed by Nathalie Baye,
Vincent Cassel and Léa Seydoux yak incessantly, and so very incessantly that
the man, a successful and famous playwright, who has been away from the house
for the last twelve years, is unable to convey to them that he has come to tell
them that he is dying. His intention to visit them has been termed as selfish
as well, and none of what is being written about it is as blemished as it is
being made to appear. Just look around you, we talk incessantly to the very
people we meet regularly, so when he comes visiting after those many years,
they are excited as much as they are miserable, they want to catch up in their
own respects on the time that has been lost betwixt them. They inundate him
with their version of what they think of him, and keep making subtle pleas in
wanting him to reassure them that he won’t disappear this time like he did the
last, and that they shouldn’t have to know about him from the news dailies when
he is their own flesh and blood, when what they need from him is a little
approval and recognition, even though he is the younger one. Yes, there is
theatre, and yes, the characters here seem to fly off the handle with rage, and
yes, there is a tint of ridiculousness, but even in that anxiety there is ample
art.
When
I am writing the most imperative parts of my new book, I play this film in the
background. I find the reverberation in it help aid me work on my work with
such lucidity that I have no one but the director, who is also the writer and
editor, to thank for the reactions the work evokes in me. I might have possibly
watched it close to fifteen times by now, and I can watch it a million times more,
and never tire of it really, and, mind you, all this I say, when I do not know
a word of French. Language is like that – its registers generate in one the
ability to understand what needs to be understood without having to know the
syntax of the language, and for that reason, I adore the melody the dialogues produce.
Their cadence, upheaval and rhythmic rolling, so to say, which reach me where
not many have been able to reach me before.
Whether
it is the ephemeral quality of unexpected death in Remember Me (2010), choosing
between one’s loyalty to one’s country or one’s suitor in Suite
Française (2015), the expression of profound grief in my buddy Mohit’s Aashiqui
2 (2013), the repentance in my
friend Anubhav’s Tum Bin 2 (2016), the
throttling of desire and genius in my brother Asim’s Ho Mann Jahaan (2015), the driving force behind a family in The Hundred Foot Journey (2014) to honour their lost family member in the iconic cinematic expedition written on the novel of the same name by my dear friend Richard C Morais, or the
minxy and manipulative face of death in the newest offering My Cousin Rachel
(2017), death does that to us, does it not? In more ways than one, it frees us
from the restraints of life. And death does not necessarily have to be of the flesh.
It could be the death of words, of thoughts, of feelings, of relationships. In
my case, they take birth in my insanities and die almost immediately on my page,
and I am more than glad that Xavier’s film keeps me company in such an excursion.
Rilke
in this poem below somehow sums up everything that Xavier’s film says on the
screen so marvellously well in his words.
“My life is not this steeply sloping hour,
in which you see me hurrying.
Much stands behind me; I stand before it like a tree;
I am only one of my many mouths,
and at that, the one that will be still the soonest.
I am the rest between two notes,
which are somehow always in discord
because Death’s note wants to climb over—
but in the dark interval, reconciled,
they stay there trembling.
And the song goes on, beautiful.”
in which you see me hurrying.
Much stands behind me; I stand before it like a tree;
I am only one of my many mouths,
and at that, the one that will be still the soonest.
I am the rest between two notes,
which are somehow always in discord
because Death’s note wants to climb over—
but in the dark interval, reconciled,
they stay there trembling.
And the song goes on, beautiful.”
Rainer Maria Rilke
