Michel Franco/ 2015/ France Mexico/ 89 Minutes
Available on DVD Mon 11 Apr 2016
Film, like any mode of artistic expression, is a medium that uses artifice in order to reach an approximation of truth. Death; our understanding of it, fear of it, and our fortitude or otherwise in the face of it, has been portrayed on film countless times. It is, after all, one of the very few universal experiences. Very rarely however, has the process of dying been treated with such coolly dispassionate rigour, and uncomfortable, disturbing realism as in Michel Franco’s Chronic.
Tim Roth plays a care nurse who provides palliative or hospice care in his patients’ own homes. We see him dutifully wash, dress and manoeuver his charges with clinical, uncomplaining efficiency. These scenes are depicted with a shocking frankness. The human body is laid bare in all its imperfections: an emaciated AIDS sufferer; an old man poleaxed by a stroke; a grandmother whose cancer has metastasised too quickly for treatment. All are treated with the same courtesy by David; and the same anthropological curiosity by Franco’s camera.
This is a film that asks too much of its audience for it to become anything other than a brave curio. There is no musical score to provide an emotional cue, and the narrative unfolds in long, static takes with sparse dialogue, making the scenes of the failing human body that much harder to take. It is the antithesis of the melodrama one expects with such subject matter. Roth is incredible in a role where almost all feelings are internalised. There are hints of his past, and why his devotion to his charges feels like it’s probing beyond professional propriety, but they are expressed through minute bodily movements and brief visual cues. It demands repeated viewings, yet perhaps its biggest failure is that, like Michael Haneke’s Amour, there will be few who would want to see this twice. Chronic is almost too successful in its approach. Somehow the atmosphere feels too tightly wound despite its quietness, like one turn of the rack away from a wrenched limb.
Sometimes getting a handle on the emotional core of the film feels like scrabbling at a sheer wall for purchase. Even a hot topic like assisted suicide is dealt with almost tangentially, with the sheer minimum of fuss. Perhaps this tells us Franco’s stance on the issue. Death is raw, naked and undignified – why should we have to suffer until the bitter end? The film concludes with one moment of shocking, sudden emotional impact which will divide opinion. Some will see it as a cop out; a cheap sucker punch. This is entirely understandable, but it could equally be seen as a blackly ironic, bleakly poetic finale for a film so steeped in the lengthy, ugly process of a slow death.