It's a story about a former truck driver Alain Évrard (Vincent Lindon) who just got out from 18 months jail looking for work and a little understanding from her 70-odd year old mother Yvette Évrard ( Hélène Vincent) afflicted with cancer which has metastasised . Mother and son shared the same house but rarely talked to each other. Yvette is the type who wants everything to be ship shaped and spends her days cleaning the floor, wiping the table, ironing her clothes and even towels and who spends her leisure working on a 2000 piece puzzle and wants everything to be meticulously planned. She does not have any friends to visit her nor does she ever go out to have a meal outside or visit any of her friends or relative. The only time she speaks to her son is to remind him to keep the feet of Alain's dog clean after he takes him out on a walk. They eat their breakfast and dinner separately. If she says anything to her non-communicative son, it's to remind him to seriously look for work. On account of his criminal conviction, Alain could not get any decent job. He did however work for a short while as a garbage picker at an eco-garbage processing plant picking out plastic bottles from an assembly line. There he got to know a friend and went bowling with him and there picked up a girl Clémence (Emanuelle Seigner) with whom he struck up a relationship. But he quit the job after the girl asked him out of interest what he did for a living. He hesitated and then lied and told her that he was a trucker but when she followed up on the first answer to asked him where he went etc, he got mad. He never saw her again.
Life was not easy for Alain. When after a while, his mom told him that he should look for work with more enthusiasm, he flew into a rage and yelled at her and left the house and stayed at one of her mother's friendly neighbors, who learned of the quarrel between the mother and son and paid his mother a visit and suggested that they should at least talk to each other again. Following his visit, his mother fed Alain's dog with rat poison. When Alain got the news, he immediately rushed home and the two of them took care of the dog and then to a vet and became reconciled . Thereafter, he accompanied his mother to see the doctor and do a brain scan. When Yvette learned from the doctor that her condition was getting worse, she did not want to allow the disease to kill her and decided to opt for euthanasia to be concluded in an institution in Switzerland. We are shown Alain attending an interview by the Swiss organization with his mom and then driving her mother to the institution in Switzerland helping people to end their life on a voluntary basis. We see how they were received by the institution, the kind of instructions she received and how she carried out the plan the way she managed her own life, always calmly and resolutely, without any sign of emotion. But when Yvette was comfortably tugged into a bed in a small and tidily kept room looking out on to the surrounding woods in the mountain and waiting for the fatal drink to take effect, she could contain her emotions no longer. Suddenly she pulled his son towards her and put her head on his shoulders and told him how forcefully she loved him. His son allowed her to hold him and told her that she loved her too. The film ends: mother and son are finally reconciled at the hour of death. Is that the meaning of the title of the film?
It's a simple film, done simply, almost clinically, without any fuss, without any judgment, without any exaggerated melodrama. The tone of the film is as serene as its photography and its music Everything is done through images with very little conversation. Hence the tension as mother and son observed each other in complete silence. The cinematography appears to have been meticulously planned. What rivets the audience's attention in this film is the acting by the two seasoned protagonists. They made the uncommunicative mother and tempestuous and obstinate son pair look credible. Although the story ended in the death of Yvette, it did not end in despair. It ended in quiet dignity. We must imagine her happy. We can hardly fail to be moved.
安樂死是長久以來甚具爭議的題目，尤其是主動安樂死及非自願的被動安樂死。
回覆刪除目前，荷蘭、比利時、盧森堡、瑞士以及美國部份州份都立法容許安樂死。
然而，如電影中的女子，能有尊嚴地離開世界是她的意願啊，如果不容許會否反而不人道呢？
[版主回覆12/07/2012 11:01:43]In the film, she was asked her personal opinion on how she "valued" her life. She would not be trapped into an affirmative or negative valuation. Her reply was: "c'est ma vie, quoi" or "I suppose it's my own life", implying that it's no one else's business to tell her how to judge her own life. By that reply, she shows that she knows what she is doing. It's her preference to want to take charge of everything in her own life, including the choice of when to continue and when not to continue to live. Since she sees no point in continuing life until life is "taken away" from her by her disease (the doctors having told her and her son that her cancer would most likely continue to deteriorate until she dies but that they did not know when that fatal moment would arrive), she decides to bravely face the fact of her inevitable death. She is a widow. Although she has a son, there's not much love between them, at least such love as there is between them is hidden deep within the hearts of each, beneath their outward show of fierce independence. She decides that she has a right to determine when she is to go: to go under conditions of control she has rationally chosen or to go in conditions when control is passively taken away from her own hands, her own mind. It's a controversial idea. Christians are against it because to them, life and death is the exclusive domain of God, who as Creator of the universe and of all life within it, has the right to take it away in accordance with the theory that the hand that gives (since it is a "gift" as opposed to a "mutual exchange of promises" as in a contractual relationship in which both parties to it are legally bound to perform their part of the bargain) shall also have the "right" to take away that which it has previously given since the "gift" is a completely gratuitous gift, something to which the receiver of the gift has no right to. Christians ascribe to God the kind of power and right which the medieval kings had over the lives of his subjects. But since then, the theory of the divine right of Kings to rule as absolute monarchs has been rejected by most civilized societies. Accordingly, the right and freedom of individual over his own life has now become quasi absolute, subject only to the moral and legal principle that he shall not harm the equal rights of others to lead their own lives in all the ways permitted by the law. In the movie, in Bourgogne region of France, euthanasia and assisted suicide is not yet legal. Hence Yvette had to go to Switzerland.
Did two depressing movies make a depressing night?
回覆刪除[版主回覆12/07/2012 22:28:01]Yes and no. They're cathartic !
回覆刪除[版主回覆12/07/2012 22:33:55]One is first depressed and then upon reflection, one gets another perspective which enables one to transcend it. That is the transformative power of art !