A dog movie unleashes emotion in Marrakech

Festivals: Festival International Du Film De Marrakech

Liberated from the Oscar bait vying for her attention in New York, veteran film critic Thelma Adams lets go in the exotic darkness of a Moroccan movie palace

By Thelma Adams

MARRAKECH, MOROCCO — “Each person dies as best they can,” says Julian (Ricardo Darin) in the Spanish-language dramedy Truman, screened out of competition at the Festival International Du Film De Marrakech. Julian is a self-involved and straight-shooting stage actor riddled with cancer and reluctant to go another round with chemo. His best friend Tomas (Javier Camara) travels to Madrid from Montreal for a reluctant reunion. It will likely be their last.

In this Spanish-Argentinian co-production there will be tears and tenderness, shared memories and wine bottles, conflicts and revelations – and steamy sex. In Spanish director Cesc Gay’s seventh film, there is also a very large, soulful hound named Truman that Julian is seeking to surrender to a new and loving adoptive owner.

You and I know where this is going. And my movie critic companion wryly characterized Gay’s award-winning film as Beethoven if Charles Grodin’s character has terminal cancer. And yet, as I settled into my plush seat at Marrakech’s Palais, my lack of expectations liberated me – in contrast to the steady diet of Oscar bait (like Joy) that I’ve been viewing recently in New York.

Deep into Truman’s second act, long after I surrender to Argentinian actor Darin’s fair eyes, I begin to weep. I gulp for breath, wondering if I should snot into my Muslim-country modest long sleeves.

Is it a coincidence that I am watching the movie on what would have been my father’s 83rd birthday?

Deep into Truman’s second act, long after I surrender to Argentinian actor Darin’s fair eyes, I begin to weep. I gulp for breath, wondering if I should snot into my Muslim-country modest long sleeves.

Ah, my father: I loved that radical union leader who I resemble, the Brooklyn Jew who carried the weak misshapen child that I was, my protector. I could not save him from a glioblastoma, or a mediocre surgeon’s irresponsible hand. He has been dead twenty long years, never embracing the grandson that resembles him, the granddaughter that can charm the devil with her golden beauty.

In the darkness, surrounded by strangers, I realize this is exactly the movie I should see that day, in this place: Marrakech – almost a dream, with no real connections, no associations therefore simultaneously universal and exotic, a place far beyond my everyday defences.

I am not seeing the same film that the stranger beside me watches impatiently, unmoved. Is it a good film or a bad? As a critic, this should matter to me. Like the actor at its center, Julian, it has its faults and follies, and within its deeper truths: “Each person dies as best they can.”

In the darkness, surrounded by strangers, I realize this is exactly the movie I should see that day, in this place: Marrakech – almost a dream, with no real connections, no associations therefore simultaneously universal and exotic, a place far beyond my everyday defences.

Grief overwhelms me but the film is as much a conduit as an artwork. Each survivor copes with death as best they can. How many times must one learn to grieve?

Earlier in the day I exchanged emails with my mother, who mourns in conjunction with the calendar. I reach out on Dad’s birthday, their anniversary. From across a globe that has shrunk like a sun-shrivelled orange, Mom responded: “Personal emptiness aside, I’m pissed that he didn’t live to see a Brooklyn Jewish lefty running for president! He’d be atop the bandwagon.” So true.

Ricardo Darin

Unlike the movie’s handsome star, Dad did not die with honor or choice. The tumor came suddenly; the misplaced surgeon’s knife robbed him of his ability to speak or walk in his final months. It is an indignity that we do not discuss among the surviving women in our family. We each grieve in our own ways. I do not turn to my mother for comfort. She has none to give.

Instead, I sit in the dark, thousands of miles away, on my cushy theater seat, looking into the magnified eyes of an actor playing the role of a dying man, and find comfort in my tears. I can still be moved. I can still be surprised by movies, and the emotional moments they cause to rise up inside me unexpectedly.

I miss the wild Klezmer melody that was my father, his big hands and huge hugs. I miss his passion for demanding justice for the weak and the disenfranchised. He introduced me to movies – my first was How the West Was Won at the Cinerama Dome in Los Angeles — and what he loved best were vibrant foreign films, like Truman, filled with life – the works of Federico Fellini and Luchino Visconti and the Taviani Brothers.

Instead, I sit in the dark, thousands of miles away, on my cushy theater seat, looking into the magnified eyes of an actor playing the role of a dying man, and find comfort in my tears. I can still be moved. I can still be surprised by movies, and the emotional moments they cause to rise up inside me unexpectedly.

After returning to my luxurious and fortified hotel after Truman, I fell asleep to the sound of flute music in a minor mourning key. At dawn, I awoke refreshed to the muezzin, the call to prayer. I opened my Juliet balcony window overlooking a high wall and the road beyond. The first few mopeds tore through the darkness, unzipping the morning. Horses’ hooves clattered on cobblestones.

Under the new moon, standing at the window in my shift in the desert coolness, I recalled my dream. It unfolded with surprising clarity. I had not been watching a movie but acting a supporting part: adventure, friendships in adversity, cliffhanger rescues. In the dream, the production concluded in warm camaraderie and rueful partings. I gathered strewn puzzle pieces on set and stowed them in a worn cardboard box.

Leaning at the window attending the call to prayer, I realized that, for the star of that dream movie (OK, I confess, I conjured George Clooney who said my name so warmly and familiarly), that conclusion of filming was also a death. When production stops, the character surrenders to the editor. His clothes return to wardrobe. A production assistant shreds the prop papers of his cancer diagnosis alongside discarded script pages.

In the final take, the actor lingers. He raises the wrangled infant for a final kiss, wipes the child’s saliva from his cheek, fingers the hole in the acid-washed jeans he would never wear in real life and looks with love or pity or anger at the actress that has played his wife. As the camera pulls back, and he hands the infant to its handler, he lets the character pool at his feet, and dies a little death, as best he can.