Subtitles:

English, none

Extras:

Director Katell Quillévéré (‘Love Like Poison’) follows a human heart through an organ transplant – beginning with the donor, Simon (Gabin Verdet), a dreamy bleached-hair teenage surfer killed in an accident. When the hospital calls his house at the crack of dawn, Simon’s mum (Emmanuelle Seigner) groggily answers the phone, oblivious that her life is about to shatter into a thousand pieces.

‘Heal the Living’ is one of those films you watch gripped to what’s happening in the spaces between words. At the hospital, the doctor who tells Simon’s parents that their son is brain dead is all kindness and humanity. But when he walks out of the room, leaving them raw with grief, he checks his watch, gets a beeper message – he’s off to the next emergency. That must be what it’s like to deal with life and death every day.

There are moments of hypnotic beauty, small gestures of comfort documented with an omniscient kindly distance, a dawdling angelic remove. Slowly, steadily, the circumstances of a single life-saving operation are constructed.

Startling and unflinching, this is a film that documents tiny kindnesses amongst the visceral and technical in a way that demonstrates an almost perfect simultaneity of compassion and craft such that it nearly defies description. Strong performances from its cast turn a seemingly slight set of events into something that is gripping.

Katell Quillévéré's direction is assured, equally adept in depictions of twilight surfing expeditions, of tense surgical explorations, in and among alleyways and apartments, theatres musical and operating. She shares writing credits with De Kerangal and veteran writer (and previous collaborator) Gilles Tuarand.

Gary Tooze

July 10th, 2017