Heal the Living (2016)
Imdb Rating 7.3/10 (as on 02.05.2017)
1h 43min | Drama
An interweaving of three stories connected to each other via
an accident.
Director: Katell Quillévéré
Writers: Maylis De Kerangal (novel), Katell Quillévéré
(screenplay)
Stars: Tahar Rahim, Emmanuelle Seigner, Anne Dorva
IMDB link
Movie rating ★★★★★
Pulsating transplant drama
Careful. No powerful emotions.”
Claire (Anne Dorval) smiles wryly, undermining the brittle anxieties of her
loved ones by gently mocking the cardiac disease that could shutter her life at
any moment.
And “no powerful emotions” is
central to the approach that French director Katell Quillévéré adopts for her
stunning third feature, an adaptation of last week’s 2017 Wellcome Book
prize-winning novel Mend the Living by Maylis de Kerangal. No swampy melodrama
or misery tourism here. Quillévéré favours uncluttered empathy over
sentimentality. Her film-making is as clinical and precise as a scalpel
incision, but it’s also peppered with moments of lyricism. It reminded me a
little of the blend of lean realism and transports of fantasy of Jacques
Audiard’s A Prophet. And yes, it really is that good.
Transplant co-ordinator Thomas
(Tahar Rahim) takes a moment out from the scalding anguish of his job to watch
YouTube clips of finches. Jeanne (Monia Chokri), an emergency nurse at the
frayed edges of a double shift, enjoys a brief sexual fantasy.
Several scenes stand out. An
early morning skateboard dash has a lawless, Lords of Dogtown exuberance; a
surfing sequence that follows is remarkable both for its fluid editing and for
the airy, adolescent invulnerability that it conveys. The score, by Alexandre
Desplat, has a shimmering, aqueous quality that harmonises with the use of
water as visual motif. Most affecting is a flashback that shows teenage surfer
Simon (Gabin Verdet) impressing a girl by pelting up a hill on his bike to meet
the funicular in which she is riding. He greets her, triumphant, breathless,
utterly smitten. This truly is cinema to make the heart beat faster.
Read full review at The Guardian
The heart is both a life-giving
blood pump and a highly symbolic organ in Heal the Living (Reparer les
vivants), the ambitious third film from French writer-director Katell
Quillevere. This adaptation of Maylis de Kerangal’s novel Mend the Living is a
bipartite drama that first looks at the death of a surf-loving teenager and,
then, the 50-year-old former musician and mother of two who is waiting for a
heart transplant. Like Quillevere’s second feature, Suzanne, this is a
sprawling narrative, though now instead of a handful of characters followed
over several decades, we get a huge cast that experiences a rather turbulent
couple of days as the unexpected death of one character makes the continuation
of life a reality for another.
Though the film’s two halves
aren’t equally as strong, with the second half lacking some of the complexity
and breathtaking sweep of part one, this is an impressive step up for
Quillevere. With a uniformly excellent cast chock-full of Francophone name
actors — including Tahar Rahim, Emmanuelle Seigner, Anne Dorval, Bouli Lanners,
Kool Shen, Alice Taglioni and Dominique Blanc — as well as the audience’s
familiarity with the 2014 best-seller (also shortlisted for the Booker Prize),
this should do well at home, where it’ll open in November. Art house pickups
elsewhere are likely, with the film’s festival life starting as a Venice
Horizons and Toronto Platform title.
People grappling with the death
of a loved one in a hospital is perhaps one of the most cliched staples of
modern drama but Quillevere, who wrote the adaptation with Gilles Taurand,
avoids facile melodrama without relying on the mannerisms of slow or more
extreme art house fare. The fact that there is no clear protagonist — except,
perhaps, Simon’s heart — means that the film feels more coolly observational
than really lived in, with the audience identifying more with the characters’
plights and situations than with who they really are as people, since they all
only have a handful of scenes. But that also means that there’s more time for
audiences to ruminate over many of the concepts connected to life, love and
death that the film explores as well.
The most expansive part is the
first half, which looks not only at Simon, first seen caressing his girlfriend,
Juliette (Galatea Bellugi), in bed before jumping out of her window and onto
his bike, but also his separated parents and a handful of characters that are
touched by what his post-accident condition sets in motion: Rahim’s Thomas is
an organ transplantation coordinator obsessed with goldfinches while, at the
same hospital, Pierre (Lanners, effectively cast against type) is a rap-loving
surgeon and nurse Jeanne (Monia Chokri, from Heartbeats) is overworked and in
love.
Precision writing and editing
(the latter courtesy of Thomas Marchand), as well as an impressive grasp of the
power of mise-en-scene, come together to deliver resonant scenes even if we
don’t know the characters very well.
The film’s second half, which
focuses on Claire (Dorval, from Mommy), the mother of two children of
university age (Finnegan Oldfield, Theo Cholbi) who has a degenerative heart
condition, feels more linear and intimate, with the director paying precise attention
to the clinical details of the operations to the detriment of the section’s
secondary characters, a host of surgeons (Karim Leklou, Alice de Lencquesaing,
Dominique Blanc) that never really registers beyond their profession.
Despite the fact it is clear
that both Claire and her sons keep secrets from each other, for either their
own or the others’ (perceived) benefit, this second part (extrapolated from the
novel, where Claire was a barely sketched character) never grows as complex as
part one. Crucially, it also lacks the earlier directorial flourishes — the
funicular flashback; Simon feeling on top of the world riding within a wave;
the road of the accident transforming into the ocean — that made part one
really sing. That said, the film’s insistence on documentary-like precision
concerning the heart transplant does beautifully underline the idea that
everything that the characters experience in part one (and, thus, in life) can
possibly be extended through the procedures so minutely detailed in part two.
Read full reviews at Hollywood reporter
Movie rating ★★★★★
Staggering organ transplant drama hits you right in the
heart
Robbie Collin,
The
boy can’t be more than 17 years old, but his smile suggests a life lived at
double speed. He climbs out of bed, steals a picture of his still-sleeping
girlfriend on his phone, then slips out of the window into the tawny
half-light. He cycles through town as fast as his feet can pedal, his body
glowing with the pleasures of intimacy and exertion, and an eagerness to meet
whatever’s on the road ahead. His heart is getting the workout of its life. In
a moment, yours will too.
So
runs the opening sequence of Heal the Living, the new film from France’s Katell
Quillévéré, which turns two bisecting organ-transplant dramas (adapted by the
director and Gilles Taurand from Maylis de Kerangal’s 2014 novel) into a
quietly staggering, pristinely acted ensemble piece about the negotiation of
loss and tempering of hope.
As
with Quillévéré’s previous film Suzanne (2014), the plot in Heal the Living
doesn’t coast from A to B, but equips us with what we need, and not an atom
more, at the moment we need it. A flashback to day one of Simon’s relationship
with his girlfriend (Galatéa Bellugi) provides a perfectly timed romantic
detour, while his fateful car accident – during which the road itself seems to
turn to water – has the crisp, transfixing strangeness of a dream.
Throughout,
Quillévéré keeps asking her cast for the impossible, and gets it. The
conflicting currents of emotion Dorval has to conjure for the film’s final shot
are unfathomable – yet she does it, and the camera holds on her for exactly as
long as it should.
Of
course there are scenes of surgery too, as frank as they are pivotal – though
even viewers who clench up at the mere mention of a sternal saw may be
surprised by how easy they are to take. The methodical cleaning and cutting of
flesh feels somehow ceremonial, while watching the transplant itself feels like
bearing witness to a secular miracle. It gets you – please picture me thumping
my chest as I type this – right here.
Read full review at Telegraph
Heal the Living,’ a Sentimental Sales Pitch for Organ
Donation
JEANNETTE CATSOULIS
If you have ever been moved to
tears by a television commercial, then prepare to be devastated by “Heal the
Living,” one of the most gorgeous and beautifully acted sales pitches you are
ever likely to encounter. What you’re being asked to buy, however, is not
cereal or sugary soda; no, this juggernaut of sentiment — whether intentionally
or not — plays like nothing so much as a hugely expensive advertisement for
organ donation.
The organ in question is a
human heart, which first belongs to Simon (Gabin Verdet), a tow-haired surfer
of 17, before being transplanted into the body of Claire (Anne Dorval), a dying
mother of two doting college-age sons. Between those events lies a voluptuous
wallow in sound and image, at times so captivating that we barely notice it’s
an ideational wasteland.
And so we are mesmerized by an
opening sequence that fluidly follows Simon from the bed of his girlfriend,
Juliette (Galatéa Bellugi), to the early-morning ocean. The velvety silence and
slow-swelling breakers lead us seamlessly to a car, a sleepy driver and a road
that appears to dissolve into rippling water — brain death delivered with
tender poetry.
Small personal details, like
the erotic fantasies of a novice nurse and a transplant specialist’s love of
goldfinches, lend color without meaning, functioning merely as simplistic
reminders that medical professionals are people, too. In the background,
Alexandre Desplat’s swoony score piles on the sentiment, but it’s all just
empty calories; what this movie desperately needs is conflict.
Not a chance. Here, everyone is
loving and admirable and largely untroubled by religious or philosophical
considerations. Simon’s parents may be separated, but they make the decision to
donate without real argument or extensive soul-searching. The transplant
liaison is compassionate to an almost laughable degree, halting Simon’s organ
removal to place the sound of surf in his ears. And the recipient, a beautiful
musician whose estranged lover returns at exactly the right moment, could not
be more worthy if she were tending to a houseful of orphans.
Unlike Simon, tunneling
fearlessly beneath the water, “Heal the Living” is content to skate on the
surface, leaving as little lasting impression on our minds as Simon’s surfboard
on the deep blue ocean.
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