Chron­ic

Tim Roth was the pres­i­dent of the Cannes Un Cer­tain Regard jury that award­ed its top prize to the film After Lucia in 2012. After the cer­e­mo­ny he sought out its direc­tor Michel Fran­co to tell him how much he admired his film. Chron­ic is the result of that meet­ing. It’s Franco’s third fea­ture and one of the most com­plex and inter­est­ing roles that the fre­quent­ly under-utilised Roth has tack­led in recent years.

After Lucia was a cease­less­ly bleak study of teen bul­ly­ing that felt cheap­ly sadis­tic and manip­u­la­tive in its con­struc­tion, but it also showed an impres­sive sense of craft and an uncom­pro­mis­ing direc­to­r­i­al vision. The pres­ence of an Oscar-nom­i­nat­ed actor in a first Eng­lish-lan­guage film often sug­gests the soft­en­ing of a for­eign auteur’s approach to appeal to a wider audi­ence, but that’s far from the case here.

Chron­ic fol­lows David, a qui­et and intro­spec­tive care­giv­er, as he attends to a series of ter­mi­nal­ly ill patients in Los Ange­les. David is method­i­cal and ded­i­cat­ed, and there is lit­tle doubt that he cares deeply for the peo­ple he looks after. But does he care too much? When a com­plaint is made by the fam­i­ly of a stroke vic­tim about David’s uncom­fort­ably close rela­tion­ship with him, Fran­co and Roth refuse to give us any clues about where the truth lies. Is David a per­vert? Is he just lone­ly? Has he been mis­judged? The waters are mud­died by his unde­ni­ably odd behav­iour out­side of his patients’ homes, when he adopts aspects of their life sto­ries for his own, and by the slow drip-feed­ing of dark rev­e­la­tions from his past.

Franco’s will­ing­ness to push this sense of ambi­gu­i­ty is admirable and Roth’s qui­et­ly mes­meris­ing per­for­mance, which is devel­oped through sub­tle body lan­guage rather than dia­logue, keeps us hooked, want­i­ng to know more. Franco’s style is clin­i­cal and detached, but he achieves a real sense of inti­ma­cy here, and as we watch David wash­ing, cloth­ing, lift­ing or sim­ply being a com­pan­ion to his ail­ing patients, we get a very real sense of the com­pas­sion and patience these duties require, not to men­tion the enor­mous emo­tion­al and phys­i­cal strain involved.

At its best, Chron­ic is a remark­able por­trait of the spe­cial rela­tion­ship that exists between those who are look­ing death in the face and the peo­ple respon­si­ble for mak­ing their final days as com­fort­able as pos­si­ble. Fran­co is helped enor­mous­ly in this regard by the three very dif­fer­ent, but equal­ly out­stand­ing con­tri­bu­tions made by Rachel Pick­up, Michael Cristofer and Robin Bartlett as David’s patients.

The film’s frank approach to the real­i­ties of dying marks it as a work of con­sid­er­able matu­ri­ty and intel­li­gence, even if it grows a lit­tle less com­pelling in the final third as David’s rela­tion­ship with a woman dying of can­cer starts to take a turn for the obvi­ous. How­ev­er, noth­ing can pre­pare you for the way Fran­co ends the film; a bewil­der­ing act of self-sab­o­tage that is so mis­judged and so jar­ring­ly out-of-step with what came before, it under­mines all of the film’s good work up to that point, ensur­ing that the end­ing will be the only thing dazed audi­ence mem­bers will be talk­ing about as they leave the cinema.

It’s a slap in the face for view­ers who have invest­ed in this sto­ry, and it’s a betray­al of these actors, whose painful­ly authen­tic work deserves to be the main top­ic of dis­cus­sion rather than a young director’s glib shock tactics.