Grieving in cinema — often perceived as the most painful remembrance of someone whose body you can no longer possess, but whose soul (consciousness, if you’re more scientifically aligned) continues to linger like a ghostly presence in your daily life — is best expressed when it isn’t overly and obviously articulated. Narrative and thematic clarity only take us so far in understanding what the grieving person is feeling; unpredictability — or, at least, an evasive sort of uncertainty — is what best captures grief’s varied expressions of silences, screams, and screaming silences.
Two films that premiered at film festivals in the past two years but were only officially released in cinemas and on streaming this year — David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds, and Courtney Stephens’ Invention — embody this approach beautifully. Cronenberg sets up a Black Mirror-like scenario in which the placement of 3D cameras inside graves enables grievers to cope by “being present” with their loved ones at all times. But rather than simply treating its intriguing science fiction concept as a narrative dead end (the main problem of Black Mirror), Cronenberg — in his entirely off-kilter, borderline absurdly comedic way — allows it to spin outward without losing any of its potent emotionality: the personal ethics of watching (and desiring) the image of your dead partner bizarrely intertwine with conspiratorial paranoia: the feeling that you are being watched (and controlled) by forces bigger than you. Similarly, Stephens’ Invention captures a detached form of grieving through a consistently shifting film form, prioritizing the French New Wave’s slippery, playful mixed-media montage to represent grieving, like remembrance, as fundamentally fragmented. Nothing about it feels prescriptive or planned: it’s like watching the character’s grief take some shape, before shape-shifting again in real time.
Piero Messina’s Another End shares two similarities with these films. The first is trivial: it, too, premiered last year at a film festival (Berlinale) and is only now getting an official release in cinemas and on digital platforms. The second, much more pertinent, connection is thematic: Messina’s film is also entirely about grieving. Specifically, it focuses on Sal (Gael García Bernal), a man trying to cope with the sudden loss of his wife, Zoe, by resorting to a technology that promises to ease the pain of separation by temporarily transplanting his wife’s consciousness into another host body (Renate Reinsve). This not-entirely-original but also not-half-bad conceit raises many philosophical and ethical questions. Do androids (in this case, the host body) dream of electric sheep? What are the company’s terms and conditions of severance for those who sign up to be host bodies? Is it really possible for grievers to achieve the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind? Or is being human so fundamentally heartbreaking that all grievers can really do is lose themselves in the infinitely spiralling web of sorrow and confusion?
Unfortunately, apart from Reinsve’s sturdily reserved, almost enigmatic performance as a host body that never entirely feels suited to “playing” Zoe, nothing in Another End remotely engages, let alone probes, any of these, or really any other, questions. The lack — the discomforting uncertainty — of Reinsve’s performance nudges the film, ever so slightly, into Vertigo-lite territory, centering the focus not so much on Sal’s (mis)use of technology but on his hell-bent desire to try and make the clearly very different-looking woman a physical replica of Zoe, his deceased wife. However, rather than building upon this incredibly prickly idea, Messina simply resolves it before the third act begins, clearly delineating the two women’s differing identities, with our protagonist acknowledging, even apologizing for his, at times, absurdly selfish behavior. Whatever precedes or follows this middle chunk of Another End is either obviously portentous (we know saying goodbye to a loved one is hard), shockingly underexplored (aligning us with a grieving character doesn’t mean that the world outside him is so ill-defined that class, race, and gender politics seem not to exist), or just flat-out shambolic, with the ending, in particular, leaning so hard into regurgitating Blade Runner’s-Deckard-is-actually-a-replicant ending that all this writer could do is watch the screen slack-jawed. If only the film’s stodgy beginning and its semi-interesting middle stretch could match the utter ridiculousness of Another End’s, well, end, then you’d at least have an entirely unpredictable kind of film about grief: an out-and-out pompously sentimental farce!
DIRECTOR: Piero Messina; CAST: Gael García Bernal, Renate Reinsve, Bérénice Bejo; DISTRIBUTOR: Sunrise Films; IN THEATERS: September 19; RUNTIME: dd hr. dd min.
Comments are closed.