A thread about films featuring grief

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fra paolo
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A thread about films featuring grief

Post by fra paolo »

This is not a link to a collection, but a place for me to put a set of short reviews of films about grief. If someone wants to make a collection out of my list as it accumulates, feel free. Eventually I may do it myself, but for now I am only interested in exploiting a criticker.com forum for this purpose of putting my reviews in one place.

My wife died on 1 September. We had been together for 21 years, and have two lovely daughters who in their own way keep my memories of my wife alive. Thanks in advance for any condolences.

I am coping reasonably well in the circumstances, and one of the ideas I had for both confronting the loss and creating a foundation for moving on was to look at cinematic representations of grief. I have been adding films to a list I keep from lists other people have compiled on the Internet, and also serendipitously through coming across references to grief in plot summaries of films that catch my eye on Netflix or Amazon Prime.

The first film was sourced from the comments to a blog post about films about grief.

RETURN TO ME
The comments section of a web site told me this contained a very realistic portrayal of a grieving male. And it did, for about a minute, if that, intercut with scenes that set up the rest of the film. We see David Duchovny, collapse in grief beside his front door and weep uncontrollably, having held it all together until that moment when he is alone, except for his dog.

Then we jump forward a year, sparing the audience the harsh reality of the daily grind of grief. Eventually the film ties the grief and hope together in an exercise demanding considerable suspension of disbelief.

In other words, it’s a chick-flick. The fetching Minnie Driver is the eventual object of romantic interest on the part of Duchovny's character. I found it rather telling that while we are introduced to several members of her family, and shown them going about their lives, the background of Duchovny's character remains very spare. He has a successful career, a dog, and a nice apartment, a best friend and that's it. It is a situation perfect as the framework for a woman under a patriarchal system to move into and transform to serve her own interests.

The structure demands a good supporting cast and the one on offer does decently at what it is asked to do. Except I found the presence of James Belushi difficult to justify in the context of the plot. He was very external to the other goings-on, a piece of husband-comedy. His casting seemed to be inevitable given the Chicago setting, One probably needs to cast him in order to get permits to film there, or something.

Overall this was a near-failure at portraying and helping understand the grief consequent on spousal loss.

Grade: D-.

fra paolo
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Re: A thread about films featuring grief

Post by fra paolo »

TROIS COULEURS: BLEU

It was thinking about this film that started me on this project. I saw it at the cinema when it came out in Britain in 1993, and again on Good Friday in 1996 as part of a an all-day showing of all three 'Couleurs' at the Everyman Cinema in Hampstead. There are many reasons to like this film, and the way it handles grief is certainly one of them.

We see here many of the characteristics of the early stages of grief. There is a wish to end your own life. There is a desire to sweep away all vestiges of the old life. There is a physical need for some sort of almost-random, but life-affirming, sexual encounter(s), which once consummated is followed by disinterest. And rapidly a withdrawal from anything but the bare bones of existence, with only the simplest pleasures indulged.

At the same time we see the beginnings of the rebuilding of life. It starts with defining a new space. Then the establishment of a new routine. Physical exercise, in this case the whole-body experience of swimming (curiously across the width, rather than the length, of the pool), is essential. New relationships follow, usually through random encounters in the neighbourhood. There are surprises about the decesased. (In my case, finding my late wife's photographs from her first marriage, hidden in a drawer.) Finally, a project will present itself, something that will not only complete the past, but may also offer a new future.

Kieslowski, in this film, shows a profound understanding of the process of grief. The only flaw I have identified is that I have no idea how much time elapsed between the funerals and the surrender to the new combination of old and new life at the very end. Perhaps there are clues there in the natural setting, but on this viewing I missed them.

Overall grade: A.

EDIT: I watched the DVD again, this time listening to Annette Insdorf's commentary, and I am wrong about the passing of time. There are clues provided in a reference to it taking months to find someone and the pregnancy of one of the characters. This has led me to conclude that the accident takes place in the autumn, and finale in early spring, so something like October to March. If this is accurate, I feel almost certain the bulk of the film takes place in the February and March following the accident.

fra paolo
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Re: A thread about films featuring grief

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SONG TO SONG

This was not on my list, and would not be in any subsequent collection, but in watching it in between a couple of the other films I found there are scenes dealing with grief. So here is a brief comment for these brief scenes.

Malick does an excellent job in capturing the moment of knowledge of loss. There is a shock, a sense that one cannot believe what has happened, at the same time as being completely aware of the loss. One character wanders along a busy road, having parked in a car park next to it. Why? It is a pathetic search for some new mooring for one's life, but in one's confusion ("Is it true? It cannot be true!") one finds oneself in inappropriate places.

Overall grade: A+ for the scenes.

fra paolo
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Re: A thread about films featuring grief

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GREEN EYES (2013)

Jack Gattanella's mumblecore-oid film at first appears to have nothing whatsoever to do with grief, but it really does. The rest of this review cannot avoid minor spoilers, although the plot synopsis on IMDB gives away much the same information.

The past and present are mixed together in this study of the consequences of our actions. The first clue comes from an impulsive gesture of physical longing characteristic of early grief's desire for sexual release. However, in this case the film wanders off into a study of a continuing sexual relationship somewhat independently of its origins in grief.

Eventually we encounter several people who are experiencing grief and, as far as the film wants to go, they are quite effective in displaying some of the characteristics of grieving people -- impulsive behaviour, resentment of 'bad people' surviving instead of the 'good person' and a 'tear it all down' mentality.

Once again, though, we get little idea of the time-scale for this process. The impression I get is that it occurs fairly quickly, in matter of a fortnight or a month. And the balance is somewhat awkward as the film focuses on two people, one grieving and one not. Thus, unlike SONG TO SONG's highly limited scenes of grief, the result is somewhat more unsatisfactory because the script utilises grieving people to make a wider point about consequences. Thus, the appearance of grief seems to be a means to an end, rather than the study itself.

Overall grade: B+

fra paolo
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Re: A thread about films featuring grief

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EAT DRINK MAN WOMAN

Ang Lee's third film is not directly about grief, except in a small part, but it does include a family that has lost a parent, in this case the mother. Furthermore, there is a death in the film that impacts heavily on the family in question, so there is a small sliver of grief, although it is not the grief I am looking for.

Whatever the family dynamics on display in this film, we can be sure that they were very different before the passing of the mother. There are small clues here to the sharing of maternal roles among the surviving daughters, that give us some indication of what families pass through during the grieving process. Some roles are redistributed, others fall into desuetude. These structures are built during the grieving process, and often initial expectations are challenged by attempting to put those expectations into practice.

What we see in this film is the family emerging out of a kind of entombment of its own, as everything in the aftermath of the death of the mother was locked into place, and became a self-justifying system that preserved the harmony of the family at the cost of a mounting dissatisfaction as the system no longer serves the interests of its participants. This kind of crypto-Marxist analysis is surprising from Ang Lee. The process of revolutionary transformation begins with the actions of the youngest family member, and terminates with the sweeping away of the expected order by the oldest. It is all rather neatly done.

In the end we learn that the most important element of the process of grief is leaving behind the past, allowing for personal growth to continue. To lock oneself into a repetitive post-grief cycle will preserve harmony, but the burden of mourning should be, in its very nature, consciously limited in duration.

The problem with the film in terms of an audience interested in grief is that all of this is sublimated behind the family dynamic. They are trapped in an unconsciously unlimited mourning period. There is no deeper investigation into why or how it occurred. Nonetheless, it is there to see for those who have eyes to see it.

Overall grade: B-.

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Re: A thread about films featuring grief

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SOLARIS (1972)

Tarkovsky's slow-paced meditation is not at first apparently about grief; but once we get to the space station, the main character Kelvin becomes consumed by it. This review contains SPOILERS, so stop here if you want the film to remain a surprise on first viewing.

[spoiler]This is another example of a more advanced stage of grief. Looking back at the early scenes knowing what comes after, one can interpret Kelvin as having been caught in a kind of glacial grief. Indeed, he runs away from his wife, suggesting the relationship might have been dead even before she was, and that his grief pre-dates her demise. However, life is always showing us how what we think we want is not actually what we really want, as Kelvin's first reaction to the reappearance of Hari is to get rid of her. (Again?)

The reality is that we all want the things we loved, and lost, to come back to us. The grieving spouse or parent or child desires a return of the object of affection. After a loss, who has not begged, in some form of words, for the departed to return, even if just for a little while. Given a third chance, Kelvin this time does not want to let Hari go. He embraces the return of conjugal love into his life with more enthusiasm, and one can see that whatever caused him to hold back in the past is melting in the face of her return to reality. I can think of few scenes in cinema that so profoundly depict the sensation of love than the weightless scene.

Of course, nothing human is perfect, and new tensions emerge that drag Kelvin back to the world that took him away from Hari in the first place.[/spoiler]This absence of perfection is the ultimate human tragedy, and grief is in that sense a remind of the need to mourn our Original Sin. However, there is something many people might find excessively intellectual about the way Tarkovsky handles this basic human emotion, perhaps, so I have marked this film's depiction of grief down slightly.

Overall grade: A-

karamazov.
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re: A thread about films featuring grief

Post by karamazov. »

Sorry about your wife. I am however following this thread with interest.

Was actually particularly going to recommend "Solaris" until I got to the latest post. Aside from that, I guess you don't have "The World of Apu" [Ray, 1959] ranked, which is what comes to mind next. Maybe "In a Year with 13 Moons" [Fassbinder, 1978]. Something tells me also to recommend "Mysterious Skin" [Araki, 2004] and "Wormwood" [Morris, 2017], both of which concern deep personal traumas, but ymmv w/r/t how applicable they are. You also don't seem to have ranked any Kiarostami nor Weerasethakul-- perhaps you will find interesting or helpful notions of things like memory and death there.

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Re: A thread about films featuring grief

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PENNY SERENADE

This was the earliest 'grief' film, chronologically, I have found using lists compiled by others (which have a massive recency bias). I ordered the DVD from my local library, without realising it is not strictly applicable, as it is about the loss of a child. However, once it arrived, I decided to view it anyway.

Like RETURN TO ME, the grief portion is quite short, but there is an attempt in dialogue to describe the feelings of loss. This is quite nicely handled, with one of the two main characters describing a desire to walk away from everything possibly connected to the death, and find refuge in drink. But, more than that, it describes a sense of worthlessness applicable to the entire life. Everything has gone wrong, not just the fact that a child is no longer there.

The rest of the film didn't do much for me, apart from seeing special effects handled in a 1940s production. The film was released in 1941, and is partly set in Japan. So there were a lot of Japanese extras, including a wonderful scene in a train station with a couple of extras mugging for the camera.

BUT -- what struck me very soon into the Japan scenes was that in a year's time or so most of these people were probably rounded up and packed off to internment camps after Pearl Harbor.

Grief grade: B. (Excellent at what it does, but too short.)

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Re: A thread about films featuring grief

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THE CHRISTMAS CHRONICLES

This 2018 Netflix special is not typical of my choice of viewing, and was not on my grief list. However, grief is the foundation to the plot of this feel-good seasonal film.

The family has lost a parent, but this is seen mostly from the eyes of the children, so it is not quite applicable to my case. However, these 'children' are a little bit older, into middle-school/high-school, so the film can handle the emotions more comfortably than with a younger child.

The experience of this family is very similar to mine, in that the parent who died made a big point of Christmas. The dynamics of who does not have enthusiasm to mark the first Christmas after the death is, however, quite different. More importantly, though, is the general reaction to the death. We see three different responses.
a) An attempt to carry on as normal a life as possible.
b) A flight into preoccupation with distractions, in this case a necessary response to a changed income.
c) A descent into self-destructive activities as a coping mechanism.

Each of these is within the range of expectations. I think the choices of the characters who take the different options is a little hackneyed, but it makes for more comfortable viewing.

Grief grade: B.

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Re: re: A thread about films featuring grief

Post by fra paolo »

karamazov. wrote:Sorry about your wife. I am however following this thread with interest.

Was actually particularly going to recommend "Solaris" until I got to the latest post. Aside from that, I guess you don't have "The World of Apu" [Ray, 1959] ranked, which is what comes to mind next. Maybe "In a Year with 13 Moons" [Fassbinder, 1978]. Something tells me also to recommend "Mysterious Skin" [Araki, 2004] and "Wormwood" [Morris, 2017], both of which concern deep personal traumas, but ymmv w/r/t how applicable they are. You also don't seem to have ranked any Kiarostami nor Weerasethakul-- perhaps you will find interesting or helpful notions of things like memory and death there.

Thanks for these suggestions.

Only THE WORLD OF APU is on my list at the moment, but my sources are not much for art-house films. There is as strong recency bias, as well. I will have a look at the others you name to see if I fancy them.

This is very much a work in progress, which alternates with another project of mine involving disparities in rankings between audience scores on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic. I am somewhat limited by the resources available to me, which are the library's collection, Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hulu. So there are many films I have not yet ranked because I haven't watched them with an eye to how they treat grief.

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