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Good Grieving
Tony McKibbin reflects on how family loss is treated in recent
films by Nanni Moretti, François Ozon and others.
Something happened, the title of a Joseph Heller novel about,
amongst other things, the death of the narrator's son, seems
somehow the perfect phrase for dealing with sudden familial
loss. And we can say that something happening, some apparently
inexplicable act, often asking for no reason and yet demanding
a response, is usefully explored in both Nanni Moretti's The
Son's Room and François Ozon's Under the Sand,
and also, more abstractly, in Raoul Ruiz's Comédie
de l'innocence and Hirokazu Koreeda's Distance.
We might ask whether the films are simply using an easily
lachrymose subject to milk the audience's emotions, or are
they finding a deeper truth within the material, a truth that's
revealed more fruitfully through familial loss than through
a less emotionally devastating device? If we believe that
manipulation would rest on the immediacy of loss, as opposed
to reflective recollection, we might see that of the four
films Moretti's and Ozon's are the more manipulative. In each
instance the interest lies in the immediate - the lead up
to the loss, the loss itself and its aftermath. But the films'
diametrically opposed takes on grief suggests an escape from
expectation and a search for the emotionally specific. In
Moretti's film the fascination lies with a family in relation
to a son's death; and in Ozon's film with a childless person
(Rampling) coming to terms with her husband's (Bruno Cremer)
disappearance. In Ozon's film we could say Rampling doesn't
actually come to terms with his disappearance, that she in
fact conjures up a fictitious husband to avoid having to deal
with his absence. Thus Under the Sand has a certain
calm missing from Moretti's film, or rather a calm that's
reversed. Where in the first couple of scenes in Ozon's film
we see a woman slightly irritated by her lumbering, hefty
husband's presence as she dictates what he should eat, and
the exercise he should take, after his disappearance he can
more readily play the perfect husband by virtue of his absence.
In Moretti, the perfect family is in place. Yes, there may
be moments when the film questions its perfection - the son's
involved in trouble at school - but these are crises of such
minor significance it's clear Moretti's put them there to
point up the glacial simplicity of the family's life. In Ozon's
film, however, it's as if Rampling merely needed the husband's
disappearance to perfect her icy isolation, almost as if her
husband's heavy presence, so at odds with Rampling's carefully
controlled leanness, disturbed the self-possessed cool of
this advancingly middle-aged woman who goes down to the gym
and cares about what she eats.
The full article is printed
in Film Ireland 94
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