An illness in the family is not easy to cope with. In a recent film, Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s Our Friend, when husband Casey Affleck is unable to deal with his wife Dakota Johnson’s terminal illness, he takes the help of his best friend Jason Segel to help him out. The friend in need (indeed!) sets aside his entire life and career to be with the couple in their hour of distress.
In India, the best film I have seen on coping with an illness is Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Black (2005), where a wild untamable girl Michelle (the brilliant Ayesha Kapoor, wonder what happened to her) gives her parents (Dhritiman Chatterjee and Shernaz Patel) sleepless nights and traumatized days until salvation arrives in the form of a teacher and tamer (Amitabh Bachchan).
I once asked my very close friend Bhansali why Indian films use so much background music. Is it because they fear silences? Do they fear the fact that audiences, if not led into a scene by the music, would simply wander away?
Luzzu, a lyrical luminous Maltese film, suffers from no performance anxieties. To call it brave would be patronizing. To call it fearless would be stating the obvious. To call it a masterpiece would be close to the truth. It is a film that is not charmed by its own excellence. The first-time director Alex Camilleri’s deep and incisive exploration of the culture of fishery in Malta is buoyed by a purpose of purity that goes far beyond the call of duty.
Of course, a filmmaker must attempt to make cinema that reflects on life. Luzzu is that rarity which transcends the boundaries of cinema. The film talks to us in a language that is so authentic, we are not listening to what the characters are saying. We are listening to what they mean by their words.
Like Joachim Lafosse’s The Restless, Luzzu is about a nuclear family coping with an illness. This time, it is a little baby boy. Fisherman Jesmark (Jesmark Scicluna) and his wife Denise(Michela Farrugia) are told by the doctor that their newly-born baby suffers from a rare eating disorder that would require special care.
Special care means extra expenditure. With his hand-to-mouth existence, what is Jesmark supposed to do? Sell himself? Sell his body parts? Sell out to the crime syndicate of the fishing industry in Malta? As Jesmark opts for the last option, we see a man so desperate to protect his family that he would do anything.
Jesmark Scicluna’s fisherman’s act is so scarily real it is as though we are watching a meditative documentary on the fishing industry in Malta. The film is sparse, sinewy, deep, and layered, providing the thinking audience with a fertile food for thought.
It comes as no surprise to know that the actor playing Jesmark is not an actor but a real fisherman. Only the one staring into the abyss from the outside can fully understand what it means to be staring in the face of impoverishment.
His wife too is starkly played by Michela Farrugia. I have not seen the work of either actor earlier. But I would like to know if Scicluna can play a non-fisherman just as well. I am sure he can. It is not about whom he plays but how he plays it that makes this performance so self effacingly underscored by brilliance.
The breathtaking cinematography (by Léo Lefèvre) looks at the deceptively calm sea with the cautious wonderment of a man close to nature yet intimidated by its unpredictability. The rituals and routines of a fishing village are adeptly captured. The boat is seen as a sacred shrine to a divine vocation. When Jesmnark is forced to sell it, we know he will not survive the onslaught of despair that has clenched his family. He must bear the taunts of a wealthy mother-in-law. But he must not show his contempt for wealth. It is money that makes the world go around.
The Restless refers to the seriously disturbed protagonist of the film, Damien (Damien Bonnard). When we meet him, he is with his wife Leila (Leïla Bekhti) and his solemn little son Amine (Gabriel Merz Chammah) at the seaside. She is resting. It seems she needs it.
The little boy looks way too wary for his age. He is obviously familiar with his father’s mood swings. At a tender age, Amine has been forced to come to terms with his father’s erratic behaviour.
This is a film about unforeseen awakenings, as a family of three grapples with the mental illness of one of them. Unlike a physical ailment, a mental aberration is, by its very nature, hard to pinpoint, even harder to control. The Restless is one of those rare supremely subversive films that sucks us right into the family’s crisis.
Bipolar is not mentioned until almost two-thirds of the film is done. By then, we are way too much into Damien’s agitated sleepless, constantly extra-energised behaviour to not know that there is something seriously amiss. Initially, it seems Damien is merely temperamental and obsessive. But then director Joachim Lafosse sheds a trembling light on Damien’s wife and son, and, yes, father (Patrick Descamps). Their suffering, anxiety, and trauma as they watch Damien fall apart time after time is nerve-shattering in its brutal directness.
Stripped off cinematic vanity, The Restless tells it like it is: Straight and unvarnished. The feeling of being there in the room with Leila as she wrestles with her husband’s demons, her outbursts of indignant rage (“I don’t have a life; all I do all day is care for you”) make us uncomfortable in the way only the best works of art can.
The humanism of the narrative is never explored for emotional gratification. Unlike the overrated CODA, where the mute-deaf characters scream their protest through their seething silences, The Restless offers no solace of vented rage. There is no time for that.
Lafosse (if you have not seen his earlier films Private Property and After Love, you must) takes us from one crisis to another in this accursed yet affectionate family. We are given no pause to catch our breath: Damien’s family is not given that luxury. The fact that the actors playing Damien and Leila are so ravishingly raw and real takes The Restless from the realm of the remarkable to the summit of greatness.
To be fair, The Restless does not aim to be a great film. It aims for something far better, and far more difficult. It aims to be an honest film.
It shakes you to the core as the grief and anguish are laid out in front of us, naked. There is an emotional frankness in this film, denied to most dramas on dysfunctional families.
While the lead players Leïla Bekhti and Damien Bonnard are so persuasive, they leave us rattled to the core, the child who plays their son Gabriel Merz Chammah (he is the grandson of the great French actress Isabelle Huppert) is the one whom I wanted to protect from his father’s erratic mood swings the most.
But what do we protect the child from? His father is not violent. He adores his wife and child, and would not dream of hurting them. He hurts only himself. If only he knew how to stop the hurt he causes his loved ones in places where the wounds never show themselves.
Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.
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