Experiencing loss

I recently listened to a wonderful talk by the poet Malcolm Guite in which he explores these lines from A Midsummer Night’s Dream: ‘The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling / doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven / as imagination bodies forth the form of things unknown.’

Shakespeare is calling our attention to the way the artistic imagination can give shape and form to things ‘unknown’, so that earth and heaven, the temporal and eternal, matter and meaning, are connected. These words were rolling around my mind as I watched two films which explore the experience of loss from the inside out.

The Father

Anthony Hopkins won an Oscar for best actor, playing Anthony in Florian Zeller’s The Father. The film starts with Anthony greeting his daughter Anne (Olivia Coleman) as she arrives at his central London flat announcing she has bought a chicken for dinner. But a few minutes later, like a horror version of Groundhog Day, the same scene repeats, but with a woman Anthony doesn’t recognise (Olivia Williams) claiming to be Anne.

This is dementia experienced from the inside out and, like Anthony, we are forced throughout the film to piece together who is who and what is happening, as time, space and identity collapse in his fractured memory. Paintings disappear, objects rearrange themselves and, when Anthony is committed to a nursing home, the rooms and corridors are in the same configuration as his London apartment, leading us to wonder whether all that we have witnessed has taken place in the fractured geography of Anthony’s mind rather than in real time and space.

The Father gives us a heartbreaking subjective experience of dementia that cuts to the quick. When Anthony asks his nurse ‘Who are you?’, followed by ‘And who am I?’, there is a pause before Hopkins breaks down in tears like a six-year-old experiencing the disorientation of his first day at boarding school. ‘I want my mother’, he wails.

Yet it is also a very British middle-class experience of suffering. Despite Anthony’s material comfort there is an emotional poverty. His daughter Anne is intent on not letting her neat life be disrupted by her father’s condition, and the dementia itself, although tainting every scene like an invisible gas, is never actually named. The Father is a truly excellent, almost flawless piece of cinema, and Hopkins’ performance a masterpiece. But, in Shakespeare’s terms, the poet’s eye remains firmly fixed on earth. There is no glance upwards to any meaning beyond the pain of loss.

Sound of Metal

The British actor Riz Ahmed could equally have won best actor for his performance as punk-metal drummer Ruben Stone in Darius Marder’s Sound of Metal. The film opens to a topless Ruben smashing the life out of his drum kit while his lover and co-performer Lou (Olivia Cooke) screams inarticulate rage into a microphone. With the words ‘Please kill me’ tattooed across his chest, Ruben is a man with a painful past and Ahmed is brilliant in the role, full of restless energy and anger that simmers just below the surface of his beautifully sensitive eyes. When Ruben’s hearing suddenly vanishes before a concert, his anger spills out and Lou checks him into a community for deaf addicts run by a pastor, Joe (Paul Rici), a grizzled veteran who lost his hearing in Vietnam. Ruben wants back the life he has lost and is intent on finding the money to pay for cochlear implants so that he can rejoin Lou and start touring again. But in his relationship with Joe we are introduced to another perspective on loss which lifts our frenzied glance from earth to heaven.

As Joe explains to Ruben: ‘Here, we are looking for a solution to this’ – he points to his head, ‘not this’ – pointing to his ears. Joe invites Ruben to sit in a room where nothing needs to be accomplished other than to sit, and ‘when you can’t sit, I want you to write and to keep writing until you can sit again’. It is an invitation to move from inarticulate rage to articulate silence, and as Ruben finds community amongst the deaf people he also discovers through sign-language the words that give shape and form to the ‘unknown’ things within himself.

Sound of Metal does an excellent job of taking us within the world of Ruben’s loss, not just with Ahmed’s wonderful acting, but also the film’s sound engineering, which moves between Ruben’s confused muffled hearing and an auditory hyper-reality where every drop of coffee poured into a mug is heard with crystal clarity. It is not as totally consistent a film as The Father, but there is a profound movement to Sound of Metal. I won’t spoil how the film ends, as Ruben battles between his desire to return to ‘normal’ and to Lou, or to find a different meaning through his loss. But suffice it to say I sat in silence as the credits rolled – not the silence of mere loss, but one in which something deeper had been ‘bodied forth’. As Joe says to Ruben: ‘Have you had any moments of stillness? The world is a damned cruel place, but for me those moments, that place, that’s the kingdom of God. And that place will never abandon you.’

The Father (12A, 96 mins) in cinemas. Sound of Metal (15, 120 mins) streaming on Amazon.