Loin d'elle

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.

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.

A loving husband can do little except watch his wife spiral away, as she succumbs to dementia in an all too familiar story portrayed with sensitivity and respect.

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.

I'm not usually one to watch films dealing with diseases of any type – believing them to be maudlin, manipulative and even somewhat morbid – much less mental illness, but since this is expected to earn Julie Christie another Oscar (which would probably make it the longest gap between the first and second win), I decided to check it out in time for the upcoming awards ceremony.

Christie's character has been struck with the debilitating Alzheimer's Disease but, thankfully, she – or, more precisely, writer-director Polley (a likable actress in her own right, though not appearing here herself) – doesn't bemoan her fate; rather, she accepts it with grace and even treats the condition with mild humor (which is the way these things should be approached but, I guess, one has to really be going through them himself to really know). Incidentally, I find extremely silly and unwarranted the recent warning by some hysterical group when, in her acceptance speech at the SAG awards, Christie joked that if she forgot the name of anyone it's because she was still in character!

The film is undeniably moving as we see the aging heroine degenerating to the point that she can't even recognize her own devoted husband (Gordon Pinsent) and even attaches herself to a fellow patient (Michael Murphy) at the clinic to which she's eventually admitted. Ironically, considering the accolades showered upon Christie, I feel that it's Pinsent who's the real protagonist here: quietly despairing yet brave in coping with the heartbreaking situation (unsurprisingly, he strikes up a friendship with Murphy's own wife – played by Olympia Dukakis). On the other hand, the viewpoint of the younger generation (obligatory in our zealously-PC world) is present here – though in a somewhat idealistic manner, if you ask me – via a teenager who chats with Pinsent during one of his visits to the clinic (and, in a deleted sequence, is revealed to be a neighbor of Dukakis and occasionally takes care of Murphy for her).

Actually, this isn't the kind of film one would expect an emerging young director to make – particularly since it has aspirations of being a Bergman-like chamber drama which, while fairly compelling and austere (aided with respect to the latter by the snowy Canadian setting), clearly lacks the necessary depth which a master craftsman would otherwise bring to such material.