Autumn is Here: Movie Meditations on How to Face the End

When Bob Dylan sang, “He not busy being born is busy dying,” he took aim at the un-lived life, the stasis that can prevent people from being alert and evolving. (Or at least that’s probably what he meant; the Nobel prize winner could pack many different meanings into a single phrase.) But let’s take “busy dying” as an idea unto itself, and consider whether the act of dying might also be a choice, a busy-ness, an evolution. More than ever, circa 2024, the idea of dying as a process that might be part of an active life is in the air, if still much debated. As though colliding with the zeitgeist, the Stockholm Film Festival offered some major films that looked at the subject, including work by seasoned directors whose perspective might be enhanced by age.

My favorite film of this group, and in many ways my favorite film of the festival, is Matthias Glasner’s Dying (Sterben)—and with a title like that, the movie certainly doesn’t hide its intentions. Glasner’s 180-minute film is languid but never lazy, arranging itself around the dysfunction of the Lunies family: The parents (Corinna Harfouch and Hans-Uwe Bauer) are facing the immediate realities of old age and death, son Tom (Lars Eidinger), an orchestra conductor, is spending an inordinate amount of time preparing a new piece whose depressed composer (Robert Gwisdeck) can’t finish the thing, and daughter Ellen (Lilith Stangenberg) is spiraling into self-destructive partying while sparking up an affair with her married boss, a dentist (Ronald Zehrfeld). Yes, she’s a dental hygienist—one of the film’s many stray bits of incongruous delight.

The conductor is at the center of all this, and deservedly so, thanks to Eidinger’s serenely grounded performance. Along with his musical issues, Tom is also dealing with a kind of parenthood, helping raise a child with his ex-girlfriend, even though the kid is not his biological issue. (The movie strays into Preston Sturges territory as often as it invokes Ingmar Bergman.) Glasner paces all this beautifully, so by the time we come to a full performance of the musical piece, Dying can take the time to absorb the fullness of that, and not feel like it’s slowing down (a previous attempt at debuting the piece is aborted when Tom’s sister has a sustained coughing fit in the concert hall). Death and life, forced into view for this disorganized family and the people in their orbit, offered here as an absurd dance that matters after all.

There’s a very different approach to the subject in Last Breath (Le dernier souffle), a film by 91-year-old Costa-Gavras. Though it technically fulfills the outline of a narrative picture, Last Breath is also a kind of essay film, barely disguising its desire to educate and motivate. The educator in this case is a doctor (the reassuring Kad Merad), who is also a fan of the writing of a patient (Denis Poldalydès). The latter is a kind of Michel Houellebecq type, controversial and famous, and he tags along with the doctor as they visit terminally ill patients (or discuss past patients known to the doctor, which unfold in vignettes).

Costa-Gavras leaves aside any sense of making this somber material jazzy or stylish; the approach is plain and confident, as it often is in films by directors who have been around so long they no longer need to show off. I am sure the movie will seem very square to critics searching for the next transgressive thing, but Last Breath builds an intriguing kind of force, and many of its vignettes are very moving—it helps that some veteran players have lent their presences to these little sketches, bringing echoes of past greatness to brief performances: Charlotte Rampling, Angela Molina, Hiam Abbass.

At 78, Paul Schrader has the right to make movies that focus on mortality and regret—but then, he’s always been able to do that. Oh, Canada is adapted from Russell Banks’s novel Foregone, and observes a well-known documentary filmmaker (Richard Gere) as he recalls his life for a profile being shot by a former student (Michael Imperioli). Gere’s character knows he is dying, and his self-incriminating memories could be affected by the medication he’s on. Or are they? His wife (Uma Thurman) seems to think so, but the movie leaves it open to interpretation, especially as his notable piece of autobiography—escaping to Canada on the eve of being drafted during the Vietnam War—might have had less to do with principled stances and more to do with fleeing a personal trap.

The set-up is intriguing enough, but I confess to being mostly baffled by what Schrader does with the material. Not so much his occasional mixing of Gere and his younger self (Jacob Elordi), which works well enough. But the character’s 1960s-era decisions are not always comprehensible—or at least they don’t seem to come to a conclusion. And if Oh, Canada has something to say about the Vietnam era, or about the tangled business of whether filmmaking is a truth-telling device or a tool of obfuscation, well, this seems to get short-shrifted in the general sense of half-completedness. However, as a look at age, especially filtered through Gere’s blessedly tic-free performance, the movie does have its moments—the fury at bodily disfunction, the irritation of wanting to say something when there’s not enough time to say it all. On that subject, Schrader and Gere are articulate.

The final film in this death quartet is François Ozon’s When Autumn Is Coming (Quand vient l’automne), a delicate study almost perfectly balanced between Douglas Sirk-style melodrama, near-subliminal humor, and out-and-out camp. In short, Ozon is getting close to prime Almodovar territory. The setting is Burgundy, where a retiree (Hélène Vincent) enjoys the peace of the countryside after a turbulent life. We find out more about her past later in the film, but in the meantime, her devotion to her grandson is troubled by resentment from her daughter (Ludivine Sagnier). As the situation winds through its wild twists, Ozon never loses the placid tone, nor the feeling of age and its discontents. The performances by Vincent and Josiane Balasko (as her staunch friend and former business partner) are beautifully lived in, the two actresses embodying the autumn, or really early winter, of life. All that, plus the gloriously inventive Pierre Lottin in one of the year’s best supporting performances, as Balasko’s ne-er-do-well son, whose life has its own unexpected turns to come.

Stockholm was turning wintry itself, and the setting was right for these meditations. So many movies—and so much of popular culture—is invested in the denial of death, it was restorative to encounter a clutch of films that face the subject head on.

Robert Horton
© FIPRESCI 2024