The opening of the
film is a celebration of life in its purest form. A number of teens
cycle and skateboard to get together in the dead hours of night, and
then they take a road-trip to ocean where they enjoy some
early-morning surfing. However, the title Heal the Living
reminds us that something sinister is about to happen, and so it does
when a dream-like shot of the road slowly converting into the ocean
ends in a crash. One of the teens, Simon (newcomer Gabin Verdet),
was careless enough not to have his seatbelt buckled so he ends up
brain-dead on a life support.
Soon enough his
parents (Emmanuelle Seigner and a rapper Kool Shen)
will have to face the harsh truth about their son being essentially
dead, laid out by head neurologist (Boulli Lanners), and a
dilemma suggested by organ donation consultant Thomas (Tahar
Rahim). The moment might not be right, it rarely is, but Simon is
an ideal candidate for donation: young, healthy and unfortunate
enough to have no chance of coming back to life. Simultaneously,
a musician named Claire (Canadian actress and Xavier
Dolan’s muse Anne Dorval) suffers from a
heart condition and can die any moment so
she moves into an apartment across the street from the hospital and
tries to say goodbye to her college-age sons (Finnegan Oldfield
and Théo Cholbi), as well as to her former lover (Alice
Taglioni).
The two stories in
two towns are connected by Simon’s heart and a number of medical
personnel, including transplantation specialists, middle-men from a
national service, doctors and nurses from Simon’s and Claire’s
narrative. It seems as a template for a “hyperlink” melodrama in
the style of Crash or some early Inarritu-style “life
is death and death is life” New Age truism or even an episode of a
doctor soap-opera, but the intentions of the director Katell
Quillévéré (Suzanne) could not be more different.
Adapting the book by Maylis De Kerangal together with her
co-writer, veteran Gilles Taurand (responsible for, among
others, Lea Seydoux vehicle Sister), Quillévéré aims
to show how a heart transplantation can be a complex process on both
levels, physical (it involves a number of highly trained staff, each
of them being their own person with their own troubles, and two
complicated procedures, here shown in naturalistic fashion) and
metaphysical (a life being transferred from person to person, a dead
person keeps living through the organs donated to another, unknown
person).
It works on both
levels thanks to commitment to details and measured approach to
emotionally charged material that keeps it from slipping into over
the top sentimentality. The details including the daily routine of
the doctors, where they sleep during the long hospital hours and what
they watch or listen to relax, a nurse new to the job (Monia
Chokri of A Taste of Ink) fantasizing about a hot
randez-vous in her alone time in elevator and the piano concerto,
just to name some, might be taken directly from the book, but
Quillévéré handles them with care and discretion. Every person in
the film seems deeply human and humane, even though the characters
seem to be more sketched than deep.
Quillévéré gets a
lot of help here from her regular collaborators editor Thomas
Marchand and DoP Tom Harari, making Heal the Living
smooth and lyrical experience (especially in the flashback scenes
about Simon courting his girlfriend Juliet that are full of life like
any young love is), while the piano-heavy score by Alexandre
Desplat is sometimes overwhelming and even a bit over the top.
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