Because of its ability to replicate life, the cinema has long been a preferred medium for exploring the meaning of death. People die in films with numbing regularity. There are entire genres of filmmaking that are essentially defined by the number of bodies they pile up before the viewer. But it is a much rarer thing for a film to examine the thin membrane between life and death, or to treat the medium itself as a tool for negotiating that divide. Even when considering the phenomenon of death, most filmmakers prefer to depict it in ways that are conventional and suggest more continuities between this world and the next. Albert Brooks’s Defending Your Life or Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life are fine films on their own terms, but adopt a comforting, almost bureaucratic vision of death.
Far more radical are those films that regard the end of life as a wholesale reconfiguration of human consciousness. This is one of the animating concepts of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s cinema, explored in depth in both Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives and Cemetery of Splendor. More recently, Lois Patiño’s Samsara employed closed-eye vision of abstract patterns to approximate the spirit’s journey through the Bardo. Compared to those films, Jacqueline Lentzou’s A Day in the Life of Jo: Chapter Phaedra might initially seem much more modest in its aims. That’s because for just over half of its runtime, it is, as the title suggests, a portrait of a single, relatively uneventful day for Jo (Evita Andriopoulou), a 15-year-old girl living with her mother (Eleni Vergeti) in Athens.
Jo misses the bus and her mom, who seems rather disengaged, tells her that she won’t drive her in. She makes it to school, and we see her going about her business, until she has a kind of emotional epiphany. During music class, as her classmates take turns singing songs of their choosing, Jo is overwhelmed by the voice of Phaedra (Anastasia Gouliamou), who foregoes pop music in favor of a more traditional lied. Later on, Jo goes up to Phaedra in the library, they talk about their lives and make plans to hang out after school.
Lentzou depicts Jo’s life as a series of disconnected fragments. There is narrative continuity, but it is not always clear how she gets from one place or situation to the next. At one point, her father (Ektoras Lygizos) drives by her on the street, Jo reluctantly accepts a ride from him, and then he simply vanishes. One gets the feeling that our picture of Jo’s day is composed of half-remembered fragments, and this may indeed be the case. As the film opens, disembodied voices (seemingly from Jo’s dreams) identify four objects that will hold significance for the day, things Jo will be unable to remember: a seashell, a set of hanging chimes, a red ball cap, and a bullet. And indeed, while these objects either appear or are mentioned later in the film, only one of them proves decisive.
Jo never makes her date with Phaedra, because she is killed in a random act of violence. Those around her identify the perpetrator, but we do not see the murder, only its aftermath. The remainder of the film consists of Jo’s disembodied spirit trying to discern what has happened, and where she goes next. As her guides show her, she is able to observe the ongoing activities of the living, and even make her presence felt in small ways. But indeed, this very ordinary day proves to be Jo’s last.
Lentzou avoids the temptation to retroactively narrativize Jo’s story, as if it were always already leading up to her demise. There is nothing in the way of foreshadowing. And again, the “real world” as Lentzou depicts it is hazy and hard to parse. This may be because everything has already happened, and we are occupying Jo’s disembodied consciousness, or it could be because Lentzou is suggesting that our attention is always partial, that our lives are observed only in patchy, indistinct ways. That is, we live in distraction, and then when we die, we enter a dissipated channel-surfing phase.
But what is especially unique about A Day in the Life of Jo is the fact that Lentzou explicitly treats both the film itself and its internal narrative as coterminous. When Jo dies, the voices tell her that her role in the film is over. Jo wonders whether there is a difference between her life and this supposed film, and there is no answer given. But Lentzou implies a solution, since Jo’s ordinary activities are bookended by pure light and sound, color and texture. And once Jo is removed from her own “movie,” she is able to more completely understand the emotional lives of others, especially her mom.
So in a way, A Day in the Life of Jo depicts death as the end of narcissism, the dispersal of the self into all things. Roger Ebert famously referred to cinema as an “empathy machine,” and Lentzou suggests that death is the ultimate cinema, the literal way we get outside of our own heads. Lentzou’s previous feature, Moon, 66 Questions was about a woman learning to understand her estranged father as he succumbed to terminal illness. Death was epistemological in that film, a way to learn who and what we are. But A Day in the Life of Jo is ontological. It regards death as an integral part of what we call life. A Day in the Life of Jo: Chapter Phaedra is by no means a perfect film, but it is easily one of the year’s most ambitious, and it confirms Lentzou as a major voice in contemporary cinema.
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