I saw an incredible movie the other day, a film called Time To Leave, by the French director Francois Ozon. Quite a brilliant film.
It starts out with what seems ike a cliche: Romain, a successful and oh-so-cool fashion photographer, at the height of his powers, finds out that he has terminal cancer and that he'll be dead in about 3 months.
In the hands of a lesser director this could easily turn into a maudlin film, overmilking each scene for its emotional potential. But Ozon doesn't do that. He simply lets the story speak for itself, utilizing the utmost simplicity and spareness. Even music is very sparingly used. The result is a masterpiece of understated eloquence.
The main character, played with great intelligence by Melvil Poupaud, is in the beginning not terribly tuned in to life or to the creatures around him. As death approaches, he finds his compassion more and more, becomes more and more gentle, more and more appreciative of the life around him and the time left to him.
At the end he is on a beach and looks into the eyes of himself when he was just a child. And he smiles, a very warm smile—that's it. Then he lies down and as the other people on the beach pack up and go home he lies there alone as the sun sets. It's a beautiful and touching image.
As said before, all this would be a cliche in the hands of a lesser director. But the central theme of the movie, that the approach of death is a sublime teacher about life, is true in my experience.
The approach of death had a similar effect on both my Mom and Dad. My Dad had always been concerned about things like the length of my hair; he used to obsess about it. And he always found plenty of things to criticize about me.
Yet as death approached he seemed to wake up. "What does the length of one's hair matter?" he asked me one day. And he apologized for being so hard on me—things like that. And he became very supportive. In other words, he was very successfully separating the wheat from the chaff now, separating what was important from what was not.
The approach of death had an even greater effect on my Mom. She just became a fountain of love and compassion, so much so that my sister and I used to glance at each other as if to say, "Can you believe this?" But it was real. Mom had looked into the face of death and it had transformed her.
Other than silence, I can think of no greater teacher than the approach of death. It's almost like reality's little joke: A sincere contemplation of death brings a transformation of life.
The first bacteria were essentially immortal. Life's invention of death—and all the benefits that it brought to life, just one of which we have touched on here—must be ranked as one of life's greatest achievements.
—jim sloman, 10.4.06
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