Priest (1995) by Antonia Bird 

In which an attractive Catholic priest newly assigned to a parish finds his idealism (to wit: illusions) colliding with the church’s compromises and hypocrisy while becoming aware of his own forbidden homo-erotic longings.

 

Based on a story about as fraught with meaning and conflict as is conceivable--more than than we have a right to expect even of a melodrama--Antonia Bird's Priest packs a wallop. It may be a very good rather than a great film (a circumstance I will attempt to account for below), but ultimately its value as a distillation of enduringly relevant themes outweighs its formal short-comings. Bird's courageous treatment of a fraught subject matter guarantees the film continued relevance, however cynical Christ's flock becomes about its church.  

I was shattered by Bird's film on my initial viewing, which came during a period when being shattered at the cinema [thanks to films like Tavernier’s Béatrice, Téchiné’s Wild Reeds, August's Pelle the Conqueror, von Trier's Europa, and Rohmer's L'Ami de mon Ami] was a regular occurrence. I wouldn't hesitate to call it one of the most significant films of its decade, and certainly the most unflinching film ever made about the Catholic church's central thematic--if not by intention, by the accidents of history--: the love of man for man in all his valences. 

Bird's film deals with a smorgasbord of issues. Beside the specifically Catholic dilemma of whether celibacy is God’s will, it considers the nature of a religious vocation; under what circumstances the seal of the confessional may be broken; by whose power the church excludes; how far the authority of the institution extends into congregants' lives; what sin, loyalty, justice, and forgiveness signify, etc.  The fact that it embroiders this quilt of themes with the thread of homoerotic desire should have guaranteed its banning. Alas, we live in a world where truth, however blasphemous, will out. Through its ministry and the office of the confessional the church itself helped create our openness to all things hidden in shame.

The film isn't equal to the depths evoked--and it would be foolish to expect it to be, as only a dissertation or novel could adequately address the themes in play. It is the nature of the cinematic beast that it must unfold intellectual conflict as a series of dramatic episodes. Priest has the merits of an exceptionally powerful British television drama. Since that alone puts it head and shoulders over the vast majority of psycho-dramas produced as feature films, it seems niggardly to withhold the final half star. Put it down to my focus on style, a focus central to critical evaluation but mostly irrelevant to the 'moral of the story,' and if Priest is emblematic of anything it is the tradition of the ethical focus of the English novel, which has never been content simply to describe moral turpitude.

Priest's shortcoming lies not in the performances, which are uniformly as good as they need to be, but its cadence. The impact of numerous scenes is undermined by sudden cuts away, as when Greg walks off into the countryside with his bicycle. To yield their maximal significance shots need holding. If there is no slackening of tension it’s hard to sustain must less augment interest. Just as an over-stimulating personality, a hypo-manic film induces withdrawal, while a self-contained one draws us into it. Great film-makers know how to exploit our desire to be absorbed by withholding information, the practice of diegetic entropy.  

Leaving aside the questionable selection of music, the basic shortcoming of Priest is the pace: the film seems at times to race through (or past) its plot-points, undermining our ability to take up residence in the interiors, landscapes and emotional states inhabited by the characters. It is, perhaps too much in the head and not enough in the body, a circumstance that invites comparison with Claire Denis' resolutely anti-expository mis-en-scène. The andante pace was likely suggested by the amount of character needing development, and the fact of the inherently ideological/intellectual nature of the conflict dramatized, which necessitated a lot of dialogue. In film psychological development does not occur through a privileged first-person narrative but must be revealed from one incident to another. 

 

To absorb the import of developing events momentum must be allowed to abate periodically. The ideal cadence increases gravity by reducing mobility, allowing events to resonate in such a way as to implicate us in the proceedings rather than leave us looking in from outside. (To be made aware of one's spectatorship always indicates a failure of absorption.) The point of character-driven drama is to transport us out of the role of the spectator and into the characters' (our alter-selves') perspective. 

During the initial viewing when we're trying to figure out what happens to whom, the unstinting pace serves that interest, but it short-changes anyone returning to immerse themself in Priest's characters and atmosphere, which turn out to be only sort of 'there.' In her desire to be 'in your face' politically provocative, Bird seems prepared to sacrifice nuances of character. It would have benefited from letting us get closer to the ordinariness of its personages, but this is only possible up to a point in a feature film. Priest could easily have been a two-part Masterpiece Theater production without exhausting its themes. 

That being said, what strikes one on second or third viewings may melt into insignificance on the fourth, whence the perspectival and tentative nature of this review. If one never steps into the same river twice, how could one be expected to do so with film unspooling at 24 frames a second?

Excursus:

Great acting does not a great film make. Greatness arises out of the happy convergence of sundry elements of the film-maker’s craft. In addition to the fortuities of location, casting and degree of thespian accomplishment, film style emerges through the interplay of cinematography, editing, and scoring (the audio dimension in general). Cinema is a Gesamtkunstwerk--a totality in which every element co-determines the effectiveness of the other. 

 

Styles range from minimal to maximal, a distinction which in no way corresponds to that between the artless and the artful. One can err on the side of stylistic poverty as well as stylistic excess. It is a supreme achievement of any art to conceal itself. A barrage of stylistic devices, on the other hand, tends to impress principally as a barbaric and tasteless over-determination of content. There are great examples of cinematic art at both ends of the spectrum. Both the use of flash-montage and hand-held camerawork at one extreme, and the aversion to cutting evinced by “slow cinema” at the other, constitute excesses of style that call attention to themselves rather than serving the emplotment of a story. It is easy to distinguish styles geared to impress from styles determined to erase any trace of style. The distinction partially corresponds to those techniques that raise the temperature of a film and those that lower it. One's preference for one or other convention is a question of age and temperament. 

Just as a Largo movement is ‘deeper’ than an Andante, a deliberately paced film gains the most traction in the least manipulative manner, affectively speaking. It determines the depth of the groove into which one's attentional needle drops, so to speak. The editing of a film doesn't have to be a dazzling display or completely seamless. The conspicuousness of editing may reflect both a shortcoming on the editor's part and the cultivated awareness of the critic. A discerning body will detect what is effective, though it may also resist being manipulated to feel a particular emotion.

The amount of cutting doesn’t stand in any symmetrical relation to whether a film is fast-paced or contemplative. A fast-paced action sequence shot in a single take will still be experienced as a Scherzo, while a long drawn out conversation chopped up into shot/counter-shot will retain its amplitude (and possible longueur). Though these examples that may also constitute exceptions to the rule (viz, that single takes augment amplitude and therewith decelerate momentum while discontinuous montage, as the name suggests, accelerates the sense of forward momentum by contrastive means.) A preference for the long take indicates a reluctance to be forced into seeing confrontation by purely formal means. In other words, a preference for ambiguity, continuity, and holism (totality). 

If the criterion of stylistic maximalism (Hawks, Orson Welles, Godard Fellini, Hitchcock, Kurosawa) were the measure of cinematic greatness, a lot of classical cinema [Preminger, Wyler, Besson, Ozon] would be out of the running. My own preference is for technique that does not call attention to itself. Kazan's America, America is an example of the exuberant maximalism that makes one forget the point of what one is watching.

Eisenstein observed that montage is the "nerve of cinema." And that "to determine the nature of montage is to solve the specific problem of cinema." I accept those observations as axiomatic. But if montage generates conflict, it does so, as Bazin notes, by manipulating film sequences and the viewer's perception. There is something at once dazzling/captivating and deeply off-putting about rapid montage sequences. Like hand-held camera-work, it is the technique that allows for the least amount of reflection. This makes it the most cinematic and least novelistic aspect of film technique. 

Psycho-drama is the instance of maximal co-determination of character development and plot. As such, it’s the most perfectly satisfying kind of film for adults. 

There isn’t enough consideration given to the comings and goings of people in the real world in Priest. We are sort of plopped down in the middle of things. It is a film about ideas told in the style of a thriller. There are no formal introductions to places and people, though there are establishment shots. They just appear. The film is blunt and self-consciously in-your-face. As it moves into its concluding 15 minutes there's a noticeable relenting of the forward momentum. Greg’s stay in the country with Father Matthew is a little eddy in the torrent of conflicts and confrontations. A moment of coming to terms. The heart of great melodrama is as much about re-acting as about taking action, and here we are given an opportunity to immerse ourselves in the dilemma faced by both priests. It is a welcome respite. 

In conclusion, my reservations are largely but not merely formal. Form is content, after all. As any work of art, a film must make an impression and can do so only by selecting some aspect of the world from a particular angle. However, Priest may be seen as a thematically over-loaded film whose construction, perhaps fittingly and by a necessary constraint, is merely functional. But both of these considerations pale to insignificance in light of the tour de force Bird's drama of tortured consciences unleashes.
 

Schindler’s List - Spielberg (1993)

Spielberg has succeeded in bringing life to Europe’s defining ethnic cleansing event. The opening scenes are abuzz with a Rockwellesque multiplicity of Jew-types filing en masse into ghetto-life. Spielberg may be more than a commercial artist, as Rockwell has been dismissed as being, but he definitely has something to sell us. Don't be put off by the dreary subject, or the fact that Schindler didn't make Cahiers du Cinema's 10 best of the year list. Schindler, I mean Spielberg, finds a way of making the unspeakable saga of dispossession and murder entertaining.  

Schindler’s List, which might have been called Schindler’s Memorial, would, for all its well-oiled mis-en-scène, have benefited from some old-school studio intervention. Instead of leaving it up to the movie-maker-business-man in one. Given that he wasn't attempting an edge-of-your seat thriller but something between action-packed biopic and period drama with an epilogue, the observation that he allows the punch of the film to dissipate in solemn commemorative festivities, is somewhat gratuitous. Still, it points to a basic flaw in the work, setting up a tension between the prerogatives of aesthetic vs. moral judgment which informs the problematic nature of all Holocaust renderings. I will exploit every opportunity to highlight those aesthetic cum moral discontinuities in my review.

Lest I dissuade anyone from seeing the film, there is plenty of graphically staged and expertly shot ethnic shooting, er--cleansing, making Spielberg's felicitous production an instant classic. It's originality outside the context of its prototypes--Jakubowska's The Last Stage (1947), Pentecorvo's Kapo (1959)--may be overstated, but it's iconography of Holocaust horrors is indisputably unique.

There isn't any actual shooting until forty minutes into the film, which is remarkable considering it's reputation as an endless series of horrific executions. The wait seems calibrated for optimal effect.

Framed in zoom by columns of ghetto residents clearing the street, we see the figure of an old man--the one-armed senior Stern transferred to Schindler's workforce at the eleventh hour. He stands slumped over facing a wall between two implacable SS officers as shovel-fulls of snow are thrown left and right, briefly obscuring our view. Culled from the line of workers for his want of productivity, the man points out his special status but makes no further appeal for mercy, frozen still where his over-seers position him. Having for all purposes exited the world of humanity, his execution seems a mere formality. And it is carried out with understated 'dash.' 

 

The sequence feels slight-of-hand, but is unforgettable in its matter-of-fact precision and great but too-brief visual beauty. I hesitate to call it "tastefully executed," but that is exactly what it is.

The conscripted Jews assiduously apply themselves to shoveling. When two siblings peer in the direction of the men their mother, attempting to redirect their curiosity, exhorts them to ‘look at the snow!' In deep focus one officer stands imperiously behind the old man, his pistol-wielding arm stretched out in the direction of his head. Snow is flying across the screen as the shot is fired. A dot of white signaling the bullet’s ejection is answered by what looks like ink shooting out of the man’s head as his body sinks to the ground like a sheet from a clothes-line. It's a kinaesthetic marvel in a film replete with visual master-classes. 

Cut to Schindler in an office decrying the loss of work-force and demanding compensation. Then back to the old man lying face-up, slowly imbuing the snow with his blood.

Spielberg makes no attempt to spell out what made killing Jews so irresistible to Deaths' Head functionaries. It suffices that the perpetrators of the slaughter are there--the ciphers of Pure Evil. This is warranted enough, as the liquidators themselves were frequently mystified by their 'duties-are-duties.' It took less antisemitism than simple obedience. That is to say--conformity. Whence the "authoritarian personality" and all the attendant nonsense. As if the invitation to conform were not universally accessible and required a special morally degenerate type.

 

Spielberg's film focuses on explaining why one man, untouched by eliminationist zeal, would go out of his way to throw a monkey wrench in the orderly process of ethnic liquidation. Spielberg is at pains to leave the all-too-entrepreneurial soul of Schindler untransfigured for the duration, repeatedly underlining that Schindler’s motivation was largely economic. Or in some perhaps unparseable ratio moral and economic.
 

The nocturnal arrival of a train in Aushwitz as snow falls and the chimneys glow is genuinely eerie. We see figures descending into the bowels of the crematoria throwing up their endless clouds of glowing ash. On repeat viewing I discovered that my memory had assembled a single master-shot of the sequence that exists on film only as separate shots of the various elements. A fact for which I credit the magic of film-construction (= editing) rather than the suggestibility of my imagination. The two work in tandem to create such totalizations, in any case, illustrating the synergy of spontaneity and convention at the assimmilative end of artistic creation.

It is during this scene that the disparity between a formal, shot-analytic approach to the horror of the Holocaust becomes conspicuous. One could of course just acknowledge that the spectacle of mass extermination has its own distinct beauty as visual production, but then one must also accept that the aesthetic point-of-view over-rides the moral. That displacement is precisely what the taboo against  the cinematic treatments of the holocaust was concerned to obviate. The pleasures of the visual-auditory perspective are beyond the morally crucial disjunction of good vs. evil. Not because that perspective is cynical or immoral, but because it is abstract; it brings to bear the same power of concentration (focus/selection, therewith omission/elimination) which informs both the artist's construction and, here, the act (= art) of making entire communities disappear.  

Has Spielberg put this dilemma to rest? has he vindicated the capacity of the medium of cinema to 'mount' the Holocaust in such a manner as not to dishonor or trivialize the memory of its victims? Perhaps. I'm not certain, but at least I am not convinced that he has traduced that memory. It is his prerogative and perhaps even his duty as an artist to conceive the inconceivable. For is there not a danger comparable to misconceiving the inconceivable? namely to mythologize as irreducibly unique the brutalization of Jews during the Holocaust? to institutionalize historical fact as untouchable and sacred?

The film celebrates lighting effects, of which it is a kind of compendium. One obvious example: the panning beam that illuminates Goeth’s villa in the background while Schindler and Stern negotiate. Some of the indoor shots are elaborately lit in German expressionist style, the high-contrast luminescence flattening features and obliterating detail. Figures seem to loom in light that has no source in the locations they occupy.

The zoom lensing during Schindler’s hill-top epiphany evokes the documentary feel of films like The Battle of Algiers, with its epic crowd scenes. I was frequently reminded of Toland’s use of ceilings to frame his figures. A rather mannered approach, but then Kane was the brain-child of one of cinema’s most manic stylistic maximalists.

 

One shot in the sewers that looks like a wide-screen version of the famous sequence in The Third Man. Near the end there are a couple of miraculous shots of snow-covered rural landscapes traversed by a smoke-spewing locomotive that recall the conclusion of Grand Illusion. Not just a work of remembrance and a gesture of tribal solidarity, Schindler’s List, in its black & white Sachlichkeit, is a magisterial homage to the art of cinematography. 

The duality of light and dark enforces moral clarity. Or at least--the polarity that informs a dualistic version of the world riven by the forces of good and evil. A vision which, in its Judaic embodiment, is inseparable from the dialectic of obedience and transgression, repentance and forgiveness. 

 

It is a tribute to his post-dualistic appreciation of the grey zone which complicates simple oppositions that the portrait of Schindler emerges as ambiguously as it does. The portrait of an opportunistic profiteer and well-nigh unwitting humanitarian who embraces his philanthropic potential almost as an after-thought. The fact that lives destined for extinction were saved strikes us as miraculous.

During he evacuation of the ghetto a father obstructs the line of fire of an SS man attempting to shoot his fleeing son only to be shot down himself to blood-curdling and horrific effect. It is the first time in the film when I felt taxed by the excess of violence, though the frisson that surged through me was as much a response to the formal brilliance of this sequence as the abrupt brutality of the SS man’s "order-keeping." A dovetailing of literal and formal executions that will only seem problematical to those indifferent to the formal requirements of art.

By canceling the reflective distance between audience, perpetrator, and victim, the cinema-vérité style heightens not just our sense of immersion, but of our complicity. Cinematically, qua instrument of entertainment, it constitutes an effective tool of the trade. But if all imitation--including cinematic 'emplotment' or mis-en-scène--implies a moral dimension (Rousseau), then seduction and holding imaginations captive are subordinate to supra-aesthetic criteria. From this perspective it represents a gratuitous heightening of immediacy.

As for the cast, Kingsley just looks too jewish, while Liam Nesson resembles a hapless bear and has difficulty conveying a believable level of callousness. Fiennes' bloated fairy-prince may appeal to pre-pubescent girls, but is a bit delicate to portray the colossal Goeth. He does manage to convey an appropriate level of malice, progressively modulated by a sense of quasi compassion.  

 

Schindler's pointing out that real power resides in refraining from the gratuitous violence to which the work-camp tempts some is enough to make him question his proclivity to torment Plaszow inmates. Though not to the point of rising above his need to randomly pick them off from his perch above the campground. Besides a spell of clemency we don’t get any sense of Goeth's ideals, beyond his love of absolute freedom. In archival footage of his execution he can be seen hailing his Leader seconds before a chair is kicked out from under him.

There is one brilliant sequence which plays with our expectations of moral regeneration that I can’t praise enough. Having pardoned a young servant for using soap instead of lye in his bathtub, Goeth sends him away. The lad descends from the villa while Goeth stands in close-up scrutinizing his own dark reflection in a mirror. He raises two fingers in a Christ-like gesture, in mesmerized incantation announcing, “I...pardon you.” As if he were trying on the part of pardoning judge to gauge it's potential to empower before reverting to the baser yet more accessible thrill of playing actual executioner. 

 

Cut to the boy at the bottom of the flight of stairs proceeding across the camp grounds. Then back to Goeth, his self-transcendent moment dissolving in the here & now as he examines his fingers for what appears to be an irritating spar. He looks pensively up in the direction of the youth. Shots are fired. The youth pauses, casting a glance in the direction of the villa, before continuing on his way. Just then Stern passes. A tracking shot follows him as he overtakes the youth lying face-down in the dirt. Cut to an extreme close-up of Goeth’s hands being manicured by his Jewish love-interest. The scene ends on a close-up of Goeth looking almost innocent. He is in love!

We've come a long way since Adorno’s exhortation that to write poetry after Aushwitz would be barbarous. Evil seems less and less ineffable these days. Or we have grown a lot less pious. In Schindler’s List we are led with the huddled masses covering their nakedness in a modern-day expulsion from paradise. They wail and moan awaiting a fate no one believed the German Geist could impose.

But this is Hollywood, so rather than cyclone-B, actual water streams out of the shower-heads, to the ecstatic relief of all and sundry. The end-of-the-road has not yet come for these Schindler Jews--they really are being disinfected. 

 

However historically accurate the scene, it feels like the vicarious collective miracle Hollywood’s miracle-workers have always been at pains to produce. The fact that it is staged with sweeping gestures and swelling chords makes it at once instantly effective and instantly offensive.    

This film might have ended less tendentiously had Spielberg saved his commemoration for the extra features of a DVD. As it is, he has made a masterful film with an epilogue that feels tacked-on and sanctimoniously manipulative. What made Schindler's List exceptional was the relative absence of sentimentality, so its ponderous implementation seems like a return of the suppressed. Or the suppression of better judgment. 

Appending a sermon, even a wordless sermon to a fact-based world-historical tragedy, renders dramas tendentious. Especially when the film already contains an explicitly stated morale in the form of a speech from the mouth of its eponymous 'hero.' Spielberg's humanitarian commemorative gesture constitutes a dual violation--it detracts both from the film's formal dramatic integrity and from the genuine solemnity of honoring those exterminated.

 

Granted, there are notable lapses in the rest of the film, mostly pertaining to sentimental scoring (the children’s choir during the liquidation of the ghetto; a chorus to soaring strings accompanying the exhumation and burning of corpses at Chujow Gorka, etc.). These lapses would be less objectionable in the absence of Schindler’s self-reproach-filled speech and the grave-site tribute of modern day survivors. Feeling compelled to spell out what should have been left to the viewer’s imagination does not render the film more moral, only more formally commemorative. That is to say, it heightens it's propagandist valence.  

 

The common-thread of all these failings is a certain heavy-handedness. 

Its camp-scenes are incomparable, in any case. Polanski may have been able to avoid the melodrama of Schindler’s confession, but it’s hard to imagine he or anyone could have improved on the mis-en-scène of concentration camp life. He himself confessed he would probably have failed to muster Spielberg's "objectivity," given his own 'brush' with Auschwitz (his mother died there). He certainly would have been able to avoid the heavy-handed sentimentality Spielberg pours like syrup of his production.

 

A film that matter-of-factly emplots the systematic destruction of persons and goes to great lengths to show Schindler in all his pragmatic fallibility, ends with an old-fashioned paean to...character. Instead of leaving the theater in state of moral outrage, we exit feeling morally surfeit. 

Postscript: German Guilt

 

I've never been able see ethnic cleansing as the inevitable out-come of Germany's history. Though to many contemporary lecteurs of Peter Viereck's famous diagnosis (Metapolitics: From the Romantics to Hitler), including Thomas Mann, it seemed self-evident. 

 

The obligation to attempt to comprehend the motivation of Hitler's henchmen--the duty of attempting to understand the crimes and sacrifices of those who could have been my brothers in arms--imposes itself. As descendant of the Tätervolk, I feel the shame of the perpetrators more intimately than those whose ethnic identifications allow them to view the Holocaust as the unique derangement of a hateful foreign people. At the same time, against all better judgment, I feel a preparedness to understand. As if there could be some supervenient post-historical reconciliation with the perpetrators of Zivilisationsbruch.

 

There are limits to understanding. To see an entire ethnicity as carrier of contagious degeneration is too fanciful. Though perhaps no more than the belief that Germans were collectively Jew-haters of eliminative propensity. As has been demonstrated by historical inquiry (see: Ordinary Men: Reserve Battalion 101), shooting entire communities into ditches required no particular animus towards Jews, just a sense of obedience. 

 

It is at least questionable whether believers in the 'misfortune' of the Jews were any more numerous among Germans than Europeans of other nations. Ethnic identification that is more than a linguistic-territorial sense of belonging always runs the risk of distortion and xenophobia, as present day Israeli policies towards Palestinians bear witness. 

I do not subscribe to the idea that one can humanize National Socialists too much. A film that normalizes the unthinkable by putting us in the hearts and minds of its perpetrators further humanizes the victims. It drives home not just the evil of those who murdered, but the absurdity of the whole racist distortion. 

 

Perhaps it is unavoidable that the work of mourning confronting anyone who contemplates the fate of Europe during the Second World War picks and chooses its victims. That Spielberg's film does so by focusing on his own people rather than Poles, gypsies, Jehovah's witnesses, POWS, or some other group, is understandable given that he was telling a specific story. Its specific fate is intended to be emblematic of the fate of humanity writ large. 


In spite of its shortcomings, Schindler belongs on the short list of great World War II films: Rome: Open City, Paisan, Germany Year Zero, Le Silence de la Mer, Murderers Are Among Us, Decision before Dawn, Mr. Klein, Lacomb, Lucien,  The Ascent, Das Boot, The Tin Drum, The Wannsee Conference, Europa (Zentropa), Les Misérables (Lelouch), Black Book. 

 

Memory, for Max, Claire, Ida and Company (2005)

Memory, for Max, Claire, Ida and Company (2005)

Alan King’s documentary about a Jewish retirement home in Toronto beautifully illustrates the adage that destiny is character. That it does so in the context of a fate shared by most of us who survive to senescence--marginalization in a world in which we serve no further purpose--makes that insight all the more poignant.

An array of pre- and quasi-scientific discourses has accounted for human character, with varying degrees of perspicacity. With every disposition resembling a set of unexamined prejudices, an interpretive strategy wearing the mask of self-evidence--the sheer variety occasions wonder. Each claims singularity, but in life as in art the collective range of individual difference readily reduces to a cast of repeating characters. King's documentary captures this compendium of coping strategies at their closing days and hours. 

The intersection of proclivities, afflictions, and fixations, a single life does not suffice to develop its myriad possibilities, nor exorcise the ghosts that haunt it. Yet each of us, in our terminal stage, is called to offer summation of a game rigged form the start. It's never obvious what is in and what out of our hands, but everyone has a play on the ball speeding toward them like a freight train. 
 

The room of every Baycrest resident sports a wall of memorabilia--remnants of irreducibly individual lives reduced to a curated display. An afterlife of sorts is already underway, with each guest showing as much as they can fit of the distinctions that accrued to what must now be reckoned the lost cause their lives. Portraits, certificates, and trophies attesting mastery and successful integration. Their self-substantiation as citizens a fait accompli, each prepares to become the same stranger to their public self as when first embarking on life's journey--unburdened or bereft, as temperament decrees. 

A yawning indifference towards the guarantors of identity haunts Baycrest's halls, where people of not altogether sound mind lounge about awaiting the inevitable. As memory and family ties attenuate, the fabric of formerly autonomous selves frays to reveal a delicate yet still distinctive weave.

Diminutive Max Trachter shuffles about in suit and fedora like an old vaudevillian, a brow raised in perpetual bemusement. His bewildered innocence may be an inch thick, but it disarms all comers. Blithely unaware of the magnitude of his situation, he laughs up his sleeve at a joke no one else seems in on. When it's revealed that he never married we can't help wondering if bachelorhood was the key to his surreal self-enchantment.

 

Robust and deep-throated Claire Mandell is the resident voice of reason. She enjoys the authority a sense of responsibility brings, in her own estimation and that of the community. Comfortable in her skin, she requires no one's permission to be who she is. For all her earnestness, her enchantment with Max inspires genuine silliness. She strokes his cheeks and showers him with kisses; new-born with every encounter. “Oy, oy, oy,” they chant, dancing about in second childhood. The dearest thing in her world--Max is the blessing reserved the righteous. 

At ninety-three Fay Silverman periodically breaks into tears as she peers out a window like some lost school girl. Everything in her life has diminished except her expectations. “I wish my son would come,” she confides with weary emphasis. “I’m so lonely...I wish I was dead.” Now dejected, now beside herself with glee, she wears her emotions on her sleeve, lamenting, exulting, and railing away. Theatrics that once moved mountains now only raise eyebrows.

She waves impishly from across the hall in a game of virtual peekaboo, making reference to a new boyfriend downstairs. “I like men!” she exclaims with defiant resignation. An instant later she's turned inward, riveted by a sense of abandonment. When her son brings a watch from China her amazement knows no bounds. “I’m so excited!...I can’t help crying!” Maybe she just enjoys shedding tears, her daughter-in-law dryly suggests. In her gentle, maudlin volatility Fay is as out-of-place at Baycrest as her antiquated Christian name.

When not despairing she puts the bravest face she can on her situation. “I'm still here because I said I want to be here. I’m a strong woman. I don’t give up.” In the fullest sense one only gives up once, of course. But Fay means something else: that to live is to look-forward. To expect gifts, if not miracles. 

“I’ve been happy my whole life. As bad as it was...” she affirms in closing judgment. Thereafter she disappears from the documentary, leaving us to wonder not if but under what circumstances she passed from the world of the expectant. Protesting to the end, no doubt.  

Of all the characters in King's documentary Fay--in her credulousness vis-à-vis her own affective indications of reality--comes closest to embodying Sartre's verdict that man is a "useless passion." A being who begins and ends in the same want of purpose. Unless it be simply--to go on existing.

Ida Orliff, a retired nurse and doctor’s assistant, had a blessed life. She considers herself lucky to have positive memories. Her one regret is not having anything to keep her occupied. “Life is funny,” she muses, preternaturally cheerful--"but the last years are not good.” As if asking for permission to be candid, reluctant to draw definitive conclusions whose weight barely registers, she appends words of grateful gladness with a convivial smirk. She knows the world will go on in all its crazy glory and does not presume to speak for the dead. Life is all there is. Even in the ending. Diminished, yet still ardent. 

Certifiable Helen rants in toothless, free-associating dementia to the annoyance of her cohabitants. “What kind of a home did she come from?” Ida inquires disapprovingly. Helen doesn't recognize her own daughter, who continues to visit, resigned to being just an acquaintance. At times acutely cognizant of her surroundings, Helen's not above deflating an unusually up-beat Fay with questions about her son’s whereabouts. Habits of the heart--the malicious no less than the life-affirming--defy the infirmities of age.

The day comes when the news of Max’s passing must be broken. Residents and staff members gather in support. The favorite of Fortune, little Max had a fall, was hospitalized, and promptly gave up the ghost. Cradling her head in her hands Claire remains incredulous, roundly defeated by the necessity of grasping the imponderable. “Where was I? Why wasn’t I told?” 

Try as she might, there's no sense to be found in his sudden exit. Her perplexity channels itself in queries about the circumstances of his death; interrogating the mundane markers of time and place in an attempt to dissipate the inconceivability of his demise. As if fixing the chain of events leading to obliteration would refute the remorseless fallacy of natural consequences.

What remains of life will go on in a profoundly diminished capacity. “I’ll never get over this,” she prophesies. 

Lingering in her mind may be the sense that death is punishment for the violent presumption of birth. In the ensuing days she has repeatedly to be told of a disappearance she keeps forgetting. Each time it’s broken the news is a revelation. One night she dreams about it.

“I dreamed he passed away. Does that mean anything?” 

“I think it does, Claire. Max has passed away.” 

“What? When?”

“Five days ago.”

“Five days ago? I just had that dream last night...Why didn’t you tell me before...?”

Claire struggles to make a connection that seems to require a leap of faith. “... I’m not dreaming now,” she insists, as if to reassure herself. 

Thus do perception and reality diverge as life approaches in-difference, never having revealed the seam of its unmendable rift. 

“He was the captain of his ship of soul,” the Rabbi announces at a make-shift service in the lounge. He celebrates Max's friendship with Claire, who sits dabbing a handkerchief in her sunken eyes, exhausted from weeping. Ida, comfortingly folding her hand over Clair's, looks on respectfully. The Rabbi concludes with the standard appeal:

“May his soul be bound up in the bond of life.” 

Given the enormity of the change death effects, the request seems modest. Fittingly for a religion that sees pride--the forgetting of one's origin--as the basic sin, and salvation as a collective transformation. Yet in bridging the breach opened by death, the plea to be resumed in life's bond performs the essential work of all eulogies--pledging continuity on behalf of the discontinued.