Eish! Chronic is chronic! Like the heading here. There’s no other word to describe it.
Of course it’s meant in two ways. Chronic illnesses. And chronic, the concept. The film is by Michel Franco and stars Tim Roth who is brilliant.
Roth – who stars in TV series Lie To Me – and who I’ve interviewed before in London (he loves Birkenstocks and was buying a thousand pairs) – plays a male nurse who tends to terminally ill patients. Patients whose own families seldom visit them or call. Seldom can look at them or touch. The horror of witnessing their loved one dying too much to bear. Or the burden of having to look after them, too much hassle. Either way the dying are alone…and Roth is patient and caring. Perhaps too caring?
The film is fantastic – we’re never certain whether certain crimes have been committed or whether they are misunderstandings…as if we really were there. So our own judgment is called into the film.
Some of the scenes – washing a dying woman for instance – are just a little terminally long!
But other than that the movie asks genuine questions about who we are as a society, as a family member, as a friend. And what lines can and cannot be crossed.
And it wraps up in a most unexpected way. A different message altogether. But a strong one nonetheless.