Venezia 71 – The Farewell Party (Mita Tova)

mita tovaCinema is always a staging of Death.

Even when it does not become the undiscussed protagonist of the story, even when it remains discreetly out of the reassuring boundaries of the narration, Death is the condition itself of filming.

A motion picture is after all the impression on film (or other digital media) of the transition of a moment that will never come back. Here lies in essence, its beauty and its utopia: it bequeaths to posterity the end of something.

Yet, in the values of our contemporary western world, death has become a taboo that is hard to confront, if not within the reassuring dynamics of melodrama. Mentioning it is considered bad taste, making it a topic of reflection appears out of touch with a present time where a picture  must be first faked, and then it must be sellable in order to be consumable.

The Farewell Party recounts Death from the Reverse Angle of old age. This is very rarely done in contemporary cinema. It features a nursing home and a group of nice old fellows who are faced day after day with the reality of a slowly fading existence. It tries to answer this question: who benefits from prolonging the suffering of a terminally ill patient who only asks that somebody would please pull the plug on him? Why deny to him a compassionate gesture that is conversely so easily granted to an animal?

It’s a question of no little account, especially considering the fact that it shapes up in the context of the israeli culture, still very much painfully aware of how simple it was, in a time so still painfully close, to slip from the gentle death afforded to the terminally ill, to the forced euthanasia imposed on the mentally ill, all the way down to the Final Solution.

Sharon Maymon and Tal Granit, directors of a movie that we do not hesitate to define a little dramaturgical miracle, maintain a safe distance from these cultural considerations.  Similarly, they barely touch upon the religious dimension from which it would have been easier to address such a complex topic. They prefer to choose the path of a minute tale, built around the characters, in a secular dimension that does not preclude a relationship with the sacred, just like Kieslowski, who stated he did not believe in God, but he had a relationship with him.

There! The cinema of the top polish director, probably last of the great authors from a time when cinema was still pursued as a form of Art, seems to illuminate the path followed by the two israeli filmmakers.

Perhaps the greatest compliment you could bestow on The Farewell Party is that it is frequently inhabited by Kieslowski’s spirit. Because here too, as in the Decalogue, all seems to spin around the eternal carousel, caught between the need for moral imperatives and Free Will.

The storyline in short: in the attempt of putting an end to the suffering of a terminally ill friend, a group of friends  in a Jerusalem nursing home decide to build a machine capable of delivering a painless death. The mechanism is completely automatic and can be started by the patient himself by simply pressing a single button, thus releasing the others of the responsibility of the gesture. Rumors about this machine start spreading among the other nursing home residents, in the fashion of the best vintage English comedies, and soon other terminally ill people start requesting access to the same remedy.

The story does not resolve the existential dilemma by searching for an abstract thesis, but rather it lets it palpitate, disturbingly, in each single frame. The directors weave an incredible web of plausible stories around the ethical question, and each story is capable of taking charge of a moral direction, each representing an individual destiny. Including the story of the little old lady who never accepts Death and advocates Life at all costs.

The scope of the awareness of the design can be felt in its totality when the film shows us one of the characters, whose destiny is to have the memory of herself taken away by Alzheimer’s, as she watches the recordings with the last statements from the terminally ill patients just before they press the button that will lead them to their death. In this shot/reverse shot between the cinema picture that defies the passing of time, and the slow fading away of the individual conscience lies the expression of a question investing the very sense of the function of the audio-visual medium in contemporary society.

And yet, despite the sublime dramatic height of the themes that are addressed, The Farewell Party has and pursues, in every sequence, the rhythm of a comedy. Above all, and here lies its greatest merit, it has the courage to go beyond the shortcuts of black comedy, that fakes to face the taboo and instead works to reestablish the status quo of the dominant cultural values.

It is a courageous film, The Farewell Party, in that it closes the books not on ideas, but on the stories it puts on the stage.  And in doing so it utilizes a perfect cast, from the actors to the last extras.

It’s a film that firmly asserts the conviction that poetry can only be where we can find the real Life that makes us laugh and cry at the same time, without there being any contradiction.

 

(Translated from italian original by Maurizio Izzi)

From: Close-up