*Warning. This review will make sense if you have already seen the film. Otherwise, you will leave this page knowing more or less much of its plot and my interpretation of it. I leave it to your discretion.*
This year, the film The Secret Life of Words celebrates its 10th anniversary. For a person like me, who measures her life with films (and coffee spoons) this seems to be a lot. And it’s been five years since I first saw this film too. Some films just ricochet and do not leave any mark on the surface of your psyche. Some films stay longer as perfect guilty pleasures, always conveniently the same, whenever you revisit them. And then there are the films that form the foundation for who we are, unbeknownst to their creators, they create tiny earthquakes in our inner universes and inspire us whenever we watch them again & again. And that’s the difference between a cosy guilty pleasure film that remains unchanged for better and for worse like some kind of stock character which will tell you the very same thing you expect from them every single time. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen this film already but I guess the break between the last two times has been considerable enough for me to see so many new things so I will be out with them and move on. Till the next time, as it seems to be my personal equivalent of Don Quixote, multifaceted and embedding so many texts, intertexts and subtexts.
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| One should never... give a book as a present to someone who spends too much time alone. |
I remember the first time I watched it, I liked that it had a happy-ending. I’m a die-hard fan of period drama (and Jane Eyre particularly, but I’ll talk about her some other time, even though I can see some allusions in this film as well. Or maybe I see Jane everywhere. Who knows) and the craving for some cathartic experiences that come only after watching a good tragedy has not been known to me yet in its full power, beauty and force. So yes, on this shallow level it was enough for me. That and Tom Waits’ All the World is Green. And so I am watching this film again and it strikes me that there is no happy ending in this film. In the most general conventional sense, a happy-ending is when two heroes wind up together after some adventures and problems thrown at them by the world and the society. And here we have some two completely damaged people who can try to be together but might never know whether it will work out or not, because as Hanna says, her tears might fill up the room and they’ll both drown. Much is lost. Joseph might be (and of course is) more responsible for his own misfortunes and his suffering lies in knowing that and feeling enormous guilt for it, and “learning to live with the dead” as he puts it so gracefully.
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| Hanna (Sarah Polley) and Joseph (Tim Robbins) |
Hannah has her own ghosts (we can even literally hear one of them, the creepy-voiced girl she imagines) and her own old self, killed by the suffering that almost destroyed her soul and body. She now feels survivor’s guilt, living in her own tiny world, “killing time before time kills her”. The deafness helps her. She states that when she does not want to listen to something, she simply switches her hearing aid off and boom! She is in an isolated silent island surrounded by noise, conversations,chit-chats, conventionalities and politeness that cannot reach her. And who could blame her. And this particular isolation sends her off to the fatal meeting with Joseph. People are afraid of those who are silent. Because in silence (and this is the first of things I gathered from the film about it) every word possible. By uttering a word you destroy the silence and limit all of its capacity to some particular words. That's why I have a technique I call Schrodinger's technique. Whenever someone pisses me off, I ignore it. This might seem I surrender and maybe I do. But I also do not give a definite answer and leave the meanings of my silence limitless.
Anyways, so she’s been working for four years in some plant making, I don’t know what, ropes? I never really get it but that’s not the point. So she’s a good worker but her anti-socialness makes her seem like a ticking bomb so she is sent off to some sea-side holiday. She’s always alone to the extent it seems so tragic, seeing a little figure moving around like a frightened animal with nothing but a ghost of a never-born daughter to talk to and her counselor whom she calls but does not talk to just to clock out at the end of the day that she’s still alive. She seemingly hates the idea of prolonged vacation because idle time makes her to face her demons which does not seem to be a tempting opportunity. So when at the Chinese restaurant she overhears a guy complaining on the phone that he has to find a nurse on a short notice, we have a sweet twist of fate, because like in some dramatic films, where someone’s choking/having a heart attack/ stab wound and people shout “is there a doctor on the plane/at the restaurant/mini golf course, she just simply offers her services because as it turns out, she used to be a nurse once. And looking after some guy is a more promising perspective than staring at the hotel wall with no place to hide from yourself.
So here we have a burn victim on the oil rig who must be taken care of before he can be moved back to the land.
Joseph is this injured bedridden man who’s temporarily lost his sight and contains a solid collection of burns and some broken bones. Because there was an accident and he tried to save his friend. He didn’t. But he is something different than a hero. His condition is rather a purge by fire sort of thing (that’s one of the things it has in common with Jane Eyre) because as we later find out, the man was his best friend who threw himself into fire intentionally. Because Joseph betrayed him with his wife.
And here they meet, Joseph wakes up to find a nurse instead of the doctor and attacks her with trite nonsense as if all he’s got is only a bloody splinter or a sprained ankle. The power balance is completely in Hanna’s favour. She is in charge, there’s no need to follow social conventions and there are not many people around. She does not tell him anything besides asking some health-related questions and here we get a glimpse into the real condition of Joseph when he asks, “Why you won't you tell me your name?” and he seems vulnerable because Hanna refuses to serve as a distraction and play along. Then with the irony understandable (at that time) only to him, he asks Hanna whether her name is by any chance Cora. Well of course it isn’t, it’s Hanna, but she agrees being called that. The dichotomous nature of the life on the oil rig and the secret lying behind the tragedy that has struck this place starts Hanna’s awakening. The snippets of information that reaches her from other members, the telephone message on the phone and the death of the man tells one story but the persistent silence of Joseph about these matters means that he is at the centre of it all. She knows more than Joseph thinks she does and she uses this information to find out his side of the story without being intrusive. He doesn’t want to speak about it. But he does not lie about it either. This creates trust, and Hanna starts to enjoy herself maybe because she knows that this sort of intimacy is short-lived; his condition does not get any better and he’ll have to be removed from the rig soon. So just before his removal, she opens to him in a-night-before-execution manner baring all the secrets and describing all her demons so vividly that even temporarily blind Joseph is able to see their colours. So here we have a wonderfully written climatic monologue crafted by Coixet and delivered by Sarah Polley with stunning authenticity. It reveals that Hanna is the survivor/victim of the Balkan Wars. She suffered monstrous atrocities and somehow survived and carried herself through the day with all joie de vivre drained from her, struggling to stay alive day after day. And so after all these years, she selected Joseph as her confidant. Coixet devices the film perfectly. For most of the film we can only speculate what tragedy hit Hanna, seeing the full extent of its impact and which finally explodes in so much heart-breaking sorrow you are eventually relieved that she had it all out. And here we have a bit of didactics which overexplains everything that we have already seen and is completely redundant. We don’t have to see thousands of video tapes holding accounts of tragedies that people survived. We see Hanna and her sparrow-like fragility can say more than a dialogue about genocides that no ones remember but the survivors. Anyways, Ms. Coixet probably had her own agenda or lack of trust in her audience, but other than that, the ending was very satisfying, to say the least.
We get that Hanna has some feelings for Joseph but I guess she does not also want to be needed as a nurse but rather as a woman so she puts the intimacy that ignited between them thorough the test, trying to find out will it survive the transplantation from the isolated oil rig greenhouse to the mainland. What is more Hanna listened to the message on Joseph’s phone so many times she knows it by heart so there's another matter she leaves him to settle besides fighting his own demons. But… In a manner worthy of Amelie Poulain herself, she leaves him enough clues to find her again… if he wants. And needless to say he does. And now Joseph can take care of her. Which he also does. And thus we learn about pain, tragedy, sorrow and hope.
