Catherine Deneuve delivers the ultimate drama.
Emmanuelle Bercot dramatizes the Kubler-Ross five stages of grief in the emotionally full drama Peaceful. She’s not being ironic; fact is, the film’s original French title De son vivant translates as “In His Lifetime,” referring to Benjamin Boltanski (Benoît Magimel), a Parisian acting teacher who struggles with a terminal diagnosis and must contemplate his life choices. Bercot traces Benjamin’s longtime selfishness — the arrogance that impelled his egotistic career instructing others while leaving him with only an attentive, already-grieving mother, Crystal (Catherine Deneuve), and estranged from his son, Léandre (Oscar Morgan), who grew up on the other side of the world, in Australia.
Benjamin represents how contemporary secular sophistication faces down mortality. Bercot surrounds him with French rationalism in the form of a philosophical doctor (played by the actual New York oncologist Gabriel A. Sara) whose team of terminal-ward caregivers hold meetings where they vent their own feelings about death and empathy. These angels of mercy are a socially diverse group whose methods of survival are contrasted with Benjamin’s also ethnically varied acting students.
Bercot overlaps scenes of Benjamin, Crystal, and Léandre with sequences in which caregivers express their ultimate feelings about being human. Bercot is socially aware, but also artful. As in her 2015 family-court drama Standing Tall, Bercot’s humanism transcends the social-justice politics that ruin so many American filmmakers. Her fascination with Gabriel A. Sara (playing the oncologist Dr. Eddé) emphasizes truthfulness in compassion and mutual trust between the living and the dying. Dr. Eddé revises the Kubler-Ross method, counseling the suffering Benjamin about five necessary confessions that go beyond stages of grief: “Forgive me,” “I forgive you,” “I love you,” “Thank you,” and “Goodbye.”
De son vivant, as I prefer to call it, is the best film about love and grief since Patrice Chéreau’s 2004 masterpiece, Son Frère.
Bercot’s facile visual style is not as sensual or tactile as Chéreau’s, who endowed the brothers played by Bruno Todeschini and Éric Caravaca with an unforgettably physical, sculptural presence. But when Benjamin discusses “presence” with his acting students, the exchange of emotional honesty (similar to that of Benjamin’s blood relations) recalls Chéreau’s sensitivity.
Magimel’s broken prow makes him look as if he boxes with the world, ravaged yet noble. His wounded tenderness complicates what Dr. Eddé calls “feelings of rage and injustice.” Deneuve’s worried mother represents all suffering, caring love. These are not sloppy, mawkish performances, and Bercot blesses their restraint with a pietà that is the year’s visual epiphany.
We had to read Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” in school whether or not we were prepared for it. But Tolstoy’s hard acceptance of life and death clearly informed Bercot (the rapprochement between Benjamin and his son echoes the famous novella). This not exactly spiritual film — save for that pietà — conveys Tolstoy’s intellectual rigor, as in this powerful excerpt from the short story:
He wept over his helplessness, over his terrible loneliness, over the cruelty of people, over the cruelty of God, over the absence of God. . . . It was revealed to him that his life had not been what it ought, but that it could still be rectified.
Bercot rectifies the ways that modern secularism copes with grief. De son vivant validates Bercot’s social realism (and her penchant for TV-style imagery) through surprising group singalongs by hospital workers that transcend secularism: “Bye, Bye Love,” the Club Nouveau version of “Lean on Me,” “Rhapsody in Blue,” and “Nothing Compares to You” are not cute emotional accents but gesture toward the divine. These music choices correspond with Bercot’s Shakespeare references (a student performs at Benjamin’s bedside, and Cécile de France as a star-crossed nurse briefly becomes Juliet to his Romeo). Relating folk culture to death and transfiguration, Bercot transcends the triviality of most contemporary filmmaking.
De son vivant becomes overwhelming when an elderly Jewish patient sharing Benjamin’s room awakens to “Go Down, Moses.” He substantiates the spiritual’s historical biblical legacy so that we relate its salvific meaning to Benjamin’s agon. If only Tolstoy had heard “Go Down, Moses,” the slave song about release and liberation might have heightened his sense of redemption, as it does in Bercot’s intellectualized requiem.
