Express At Berlinale: All of us will die one day, but what if we could live forever?

Express At Berlinale: All of us will die one day, but what if we could live forever?

Does death come as the end? And how final is that end? Poets and philosophers are not the only ones who have rhapsodised over the cyclical nature of all existence: if you are born, then one day, you will die.

Medical science has taken giant strides in being able to save lives, and is pushing boundaries in this field with each passing day. But no one yet has found a way to prevent the cessation of life.

The ‘what if’ question — what if we could live forever– is one that has seen countless iterations, but it’s been strictly rhetorical. But in movies, everything is possible, and this business of stayin’ alive is the central theme of ‘Another End’, an Italian film of intrigue and simmering power starring Gael Garcia Bernal, Renate Reinsve and Berenice Bejo.

The film, directed by Piero Messina, is set in the near future, where a technological leap manages to place the memories of a dead person in a living body. Bernal plays a man who is unable to come to terms with the loss of his wife in an accident. His sister ( Bejo), who works with the organisation which ‘matches’ the dead person with a living body, ensures that the consciousness of the wife is ‘placed’ within the limber body of Reinsve.

The film is futuristic only to the extent of having this kind of technology available to those who desperately need it ; in every other respect, it belongs to the earth as we know it. Grieving humans, especially those whose loved ones die in an accident which they feel responsible for, always feel that they never had the time to say the things they would have, if they had known such a thing would happen.

Bernal is first-rate as the partner left behind, his attempt at taking his own life thwarted. The ethical and moral dilemmas that this kind of ‘extension’ is apparent not just in his confusion while dealing with a woman who remembers the things that his wife did — they even snap at each other in familiar ways– but in the way he refuses to let go.

Reinsve, who is having quite a Berlinale (she also stars in another Competition title ‘A Different Man’) and Bejo triangulate Bernal effectively: the former dealing with her own grief of a lost child while lending her body as a host, the latter stuck in a difficult place in trying to overcompensate a lost sibling. Bejo’s job at the organisation involves ‘matching’ and ‘allocating’, and when her brother demands ‘some more time’, she cannot help but break rules. She also knows that having access to these ‘simulations’ may feel like a fresh chance, but nothing is forever, and those left behind have to finally learn to cope with loss.

Reinsve is equally luminous in her other Competition title ‘A Different Man’, which forces us to confront our complex feelings towards disfigurement. She plays a struggling playwright, and is the neighbour of aspiring actor Edward (Sebastian Stan) who undergoes a radical procedure to ‘fix’ his face. When an actual disfigured man (Adam Pearson) gets the part Edward was ‘born to play’, questions arise : when the movies get ‘normal’ actors to play disfigured ones with the aid of prosthetics, isn’t it unfair to those who live with it? For the record, Pearson does a better job, but he would, wouldn’t he?

And can we all be like Reinsve’s blithe character, who doesn’t appear to be at all bothered by the face of her neighbour, a face he can’t wait to get rid of? Beauty does indeed lie in the eyes of the beholder.

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