Heal the Living

The bit­ter real­i­ties, the crush­ing con­tra­dic­tions and the euphor­ic plea­sures of the human com­e­dy is a sub­ject that has dogged film­mak­ers since the youngest days of the medi­um. Many feel that the late, great French film­mak­er Jean Renoir most suc­cess­ful­ly tapped into this notion of human­ism, his poet­ic, dis­cur­sive films often trans­lat­ing as earthy obser­va­tion­al stud­ies of peo­ple hon­est­ly react­ing to their sur­round­ings and situations.

Katell Quillévéré’s superb Heal the Liv­ing harks back to this noble and tran­scen­dent form of screen sto­ry­telling. It sup­press­es the cin­e­mat­ic sta­ples of romance and melo­dra­ma and does away with dra­mat­ic coin­ci­dence and con­trivance to mine emo­tion from cold, rit­u­alised real­i­ty. Maylis De Kerangal’s source nov­el has been a huge sell­er in Europe, but Quillévéré has ingest­ed and processed the mate­r­i­al in such a visu­al­ly-dri­ven way that its lit­er­ary ori­gins are bare­ly noticeable.

A teenag­er ris­es ear­ly to go surf­ing, but on his way back home he is involved in a traf­fic acci­dent which leaves him brain dead. He lies on a hos­pi­tal bed like a slab of meat, a trib­al tat­too on his shoul­der the sign of a once-bois­ter­ous, out­go­ing char­ac­ter ren­dered null and void by sim­ple biol­o­gy. We bare­ly spend five min­utes with this guy and yet, through body lan­guage alone, the film con­veys a vivid sense of this soul about to be snatched from us. Then, the focus cool­ly shifts to the trea­sure buried with­in his chest – a fresh, healthy ticker.

The film method­i­cal­ly charts the jour­ney of that heart from one human being to anoth­er, brush­ing up against the lives of all those involved in facil­i­tat­ing its safe trans­port. Every­thing is stripped back to its pri­ma­ry func­tion, but no colour or detail is lost in the process. A har­row­ing ear­ly sequence sees Tahar Rahim’s doc­tor strug­gling to explain to the dead boy’s griev­ing par­ents that there are ways for his spirt to live on, if they would just wipe away their tears and glance over a few release forms.

Sign here now, because time is of the essence. The lucky recip­i­ent is Anne Dorval’s ail­ing Claire who treats the news of a trans­plant with sur­pris­ing cau­tion. In the short notice run-up to the pro­ce­dure, she decides to mourn­ful­ly make peace with her chil­dren rather than cel­e­brate ahead of time. Quillévéré del­i­cate­ly cap­tures all the tiny rip­ples that come from this sud­den and strange bod­i­ly trans­ac­tion. It prompts those con­cerned to con­sid­er the awful fragili­ty of their own existence.

Mean­while, two med­ical logis­tics offi­cers trade small talk while the fresh organ sits in an ice box at their feet, idly dis­con­nect­ed from the fact that the con­tin­u­a­tion of a human life depends on the care­ful com­ple­tion of their task. The var­i­ous strands nat­u­ral­ly segue into a celes­tial blue light of the oper­at­ing the­atre for the film’s extra­or­di­nary finale. Ten­sion is built through dura­tion rather than any tick­ing clock or snaking beads of sweat.

It’s a hymn to social care and those who ded­i­cate their work­ing days to do just as the title of the film says. This is a sto­ry of life hang­ing by a sin­gle gos­samer thread, but retooled as a rel­a­tive­ly smooth pro­duc­tion line which resets and repeats daily.