Loin d'elle

This is a story about Alzheimer's Disease (AD), its effect on those who suffer from it, and, principally, the difficulties that it poses for relatives who see their loved one decay mentally before death. Julie Christie plays Fiona, a woman whose dementia progresses rather rapidly. Her husband, Grant, is dejected with their predicament as Fiona is moved to a specialized facility and within it between wards dealing with patients with differing levels of impairment.

The depiction of dementia through the character of Fiona and other patients around her is good but not excellent. From my, avowedly limited and not professional, experience with AD-afflicted close and distant relatives, numerous visits to a number of nursing homes -- from the fancy to the abject -- and long hours roaming the often depressing corridors of the wards observing the behavior of old folks whose minds had gone potty, I believe I picked inaccuracies in the behavior of Fiona and her fellow seniors that threw me off. It is not uncommon at the early stages of AD to think that the person may be pretending. Grant thinks that way too at first. I had to agree with him. I had trouble accepting an AD sufferer at the advanced stage of not recognizing a loved one of more than forty years still displaying a keen short-term memory capacity. Could it be that Fiona what exacting some kind of revenge on Grant past dalliances?

The depiction of nursing homes and the commentary about AD is accurate. Sarah Polley has clearly spent time visiting such places. From what I understand, she had to deal with her own mother's dementia for about five years. She has first hand experience. The only thing missing in the film, is the sometimes lackadaisical attention by bored staff you see in real life. But, who knows, Canadian senior care may be a lot better.

The story has an important additional element in the form of Marian, played superbly by Olivia Dukakis, whose husband has advanced AD. She illustrates the wrenching decisions that families face. Send the demented relative to an expensive nursing home and go broke doing so or keep the patient at home and live progressively more hellish days. That aspect of the disease jives perfectly with the shared experience of Grant and Marian as they deal with spouses that become unable to reciprocate the love they are given.

The patients at the nursing home are actors. Despite their best efforts, I found the depictions short of perfect. It is really difficult to ape exactly the tentative and struggling moves of a frail body or the glazed eyes of a lost soul who no longer can comprehend the world.

The aforementioned criticisms should be considered minor. Sarah Polley's first venture as a director shows she has what it takes. That is helped by a very good adaptation to the screen of Alice Munro's short story. Overall the casting is excellent.

Funded by the Ontario province at a cost short of C$5M and shot in that province. Don't miss it.

I remember the last time I saw my mother. I sat on the end of her bed, strumming guitar, and singing a song she used to sing to us as children. I hoped she might remember it. She would probably not, however, recognise her son. Or even speak. She had Alzheimer's.

After self-righteous 'disease of the week' movies such as Iris, it is maybe hard to imagine a riveting, nuanced love story of depth and imagination, one centred on loss of memory, but Away From Her succeeds in spades.

Fiona (Julie Christie) has been married to Grant for 44 years. They have reached a stage of lifetime love based on deep knowledge of each other and acceptance of past misdemeanours. Then Fiona's memory starts to fail. As her Alzheimer's begins to need 24hr care, she checks in to Meadowlake residential centre. There she not only forgets who her husband is, but develops an affection for another patient – an affection that holds all the tenderness she used to share with her (now onlooking) husband.

Says Producer Simone Urdl, "The role of Alzheimer's in the film is a metaphor for how memory plays out in a long term relationship: what we chose to remember, what we choose to forget." And our ability to recall things, as Oscar Wilde pointed out, is highly selective.

Secure in the knowledge that he has given his wife many years of happiness, Grant glosses over his unfaithfulness in their younger days. But Fiona's early memories stay longer, and come back to haunt him. To bring his wife joy now, he is driven to encourage her towards that which gives him most pain.

Away From Her takes us from frozen, luminescent mise-en-scene of the couple's secure existence in snow-drenched, rural Canada, to the hand-held cameras and uncertainty that hits in Meadowlake. Excerpts from Auden's Letters From Iceland are sprinkled into the script like shards of crystalline beauty. Julie Christie, for whom the lead role was written, exudes dynamic good looks and the vibrancy of a young woman, bathed in such warmth and passion of years. When she asks Grant to make love to her before leaving, there is an urgency and scintillating sexiness about her.

Away From Her sparkles as we watch Grant walk his emotional tight-rope. The movie is made with such surety that it comes as a shock to realise the director is a first time filmmaker in her twenties. Sarah Polley evokes Bergman, as she too touches "wordless secrets only the cinema can discover." This talented young woman is highly selective in her acting roles and now, behind the camera, impresses with her insight and intelligence.

My last conversation with my mother, before she was institutionalised, or I even realised what was happening, was a long distance phone call. After chatting happily for five minutes, she said, quite chirpily and very politely, "What's your name again?" Memory is not always a two-way process. Nor objective. But, like this film, it can be mesmerising, heart-wrenching, and a remarkably intimate vision.

Sarah Polley's directorial debut is an impressive one. Mostly, she was successful in picking great actors. Grant Anderson (Gordon Pinsent) is suffering as his wife Fiona (Julie Christie) slowly loses her memories. She has Alzheimer's disease and gets placed in a long term care facility.

The whole movie takes place on the face of Gordon Pinsent. His pain is evident every time she can't remember him. It is truly heartbreaking. Julie Christie delivers one of her greatest performances. She doesn't overact. The confusion isn't theatrical which could so easily taken as comical. It is a quiet suffering on the scraggly old face of Pinsent. The one out of step moment is the passing old man who comments that Grant's heart is breaking into a thousand pieces. It's too obvious and too on the nose.

There is something about veteran actors taking all their life experiences and putting it on the screen. It's something that can't be faked. And it can't be done with younger actors. We saw a man breaking right in front of us on the screen.

Julie Christie's combination of talent, beauty and brains has enthralled me over four decades. Nearly a decade ago, her Oscar nominated performance in "Afterglow" established that she was not a spent force while playing a gracefully aging wife of a handyman in the US. One thought that would be her best turn at geriatric impersonations.

Less than a decade later, Christie comes up with an even better performance of a woman coping with Alzheimer's disease in a debut directorial effort "Away from Her" of Canadian actress Sarah Polley. I saw the film today at the ongoing International Film Festival of Kerala, India, where Ms Christie, serving on the jury for the competition section, introduced her film thus: "It is immaterial whether you are rich or poor--we cannot predict what can happen to us. Enjoy the film with this thought." Ms Christie probably put in her best effort because the young director considers Ms Christie to be her "adoptive" mother, having worked together on three significant movie projects in five years. The film's subject brings memories of two similar films: Pierre Granier-Deferre' film "Le Chat" that won a Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival for both Jean Gabin and Simone Signoret in 1971 and Paul Mazursky's "Harry and Tonto" which won an Oscar for the lead actor Art Carney in 1974. This performance of Julie Christie ranks alongside those winners.

Today geriatric care is a growing problem. This film is a sensitive look at parting of married couples when one of them needs institutional care. Ms Polley's choice of the actor Gordon Pinsent is an intelligent one as the film relies on his narration and Mr Pinsent's deep voice provides the right measure of gravitas. Olympia Dukakis is another fine actor playing a lady who has "quit quitting". So is Michael Murphy doing a lengthy role without saying a word.

The strengths of the film are the subject, the direction, the performances and the seamless editing by the director's spouse. It is not a film that will attract young audiences who are insensitive. Yet the film has a evocative scene where a young teenager with several parts of her body pierced by rings is totally amazed by the devotion of the aging husband for his wife. So in a way the film reaches out to different age groups. Though it talks about sex, it can be safe family viewing material.

Chances are that most viewers will love the film if they are interested in films that are different from "the American films that get shown in multiplexes" to quote a character in the film. More importantly this film advertises the problem of Alzheimer's disease eloquently and artistically. It prepares you for future shocks.

Sarah Polley, still well under thirty, has taken one of my favourite Alice Monroe's stories and created magic with the script, casting and production of a remarkable and memorable film.

The effect is profound. You are watching actors at the peak of their craft, Julie Christie (playing Fiona Anderson), Gordon Pinsent (Grant Anderson) and Olympia Dukakis (Marian) and there is never a false move.

But beware, this is a movie for grown-ups and is reminiscent in some ways of "The Dead". Do we ever really know someone even though we have lived and breathed their air for over forty years? The tragedy and sometimes humour of Alzheimer's Disease is portrayed beautifully. The occasional lucid moments offering hope, only to be followed, often quickly, by the bafflement of the dementia.

But to focus solely on the still breathtakingly beautiful Julie and her brilliance in depicting a woman in the throes of the disease is to diminish the film as it is not only about that. It is about the secrets of the marriage, the incarceration of a loved one in a home, the despair and sometimes desperation of the spouse left operating in the outside 'real' world, the sometimes outrageous bondings of the inhabitants of the group home and the compromises reached by all.

There is much symbolism in the movie (the snow was particularly meaningful) and many wonderful, almost unnoticeable 'sidebits' - Olympia trying to pass off a store bought cookie as home-made for one - that bring this movie to wonderful heights. The attention to detail is amazing. I've visited these homes and this was real, down to the eccentric and often comically expletive-laden talk from the elderly inhabitants. Polley shows remarkable restraint in just allowing one of these eccentricities to run through the film when it might have been tempting to lay it on a little more thickly.

Though never sentimental and often humorous, the world through Grant's eyes is vividly portrayed and his anguish is palpable as he witnesses both the disintegration and re-invention of his beloved Fiona.

A heart-breaking, powerful and moving story brought beautifully to the screen. Bravo to all concerned. Oscar worthy.