ACHE
The secret life of Isabel Coixet's words review taken from Lella Ravasi Bellocchio, The golden eyes, again. Cinema in the analysis room, Moretti & Vitali, 2008, p. 101-106
An oil rig in the middle of the sea. An accident. An injured man, Josef, badly burned in the accident, he lost his sight temporarily. A young nurse, Hanna, a foreigner, has a device
acoustic; when he wants to isolate himself from the world he turns off the switch. Two lives marked in the body by one possible incommunicability. He doesn't see her. She only feels it if she wants to. But the story is much more complex, and from the very beginning
....we enter into her mystery: we see her as a factory worker, closed to the world, without friends, a life defended by....feelings; in the canteen she eats alone - plain rice, chicken breast, apple - always the same no taste; when
....the aseptic vacuum awaits her home, guaranteed by soaps carefully stacked next to the sink. A phobic, like that appears. There is a small child's voice that speaks, at the beginning of the film: it accompanies it, it tells the care of the imagination that the girl has of her, her thinking, with a red dungaree and a blue sweater, long hair, short hair, as if she were a lost daughter, or an unborn daughter, a part of her sunk. And the little girl's voice says
«there there are so few things: silence and words ... at the bottom of the sea ».
Forced on a vacation, alone in a hotel on a cold and windy ocean, Hanna overhears one of them
burned person who needs treatment; is proposed. Better than being alone with her ghosts. On oil rig comes into contact with Josef, with his provocative anger, his injuries, the darkness of his eyes. His way of being next to him is professionally perfect, but he asks for a presence that she cannot give him;
..... he has need to forgive, not just to heal. Hanna has the same need. Distance, we will know later, is the only defense possible from the horror she suffered, from the illness of being alive that remained on her. In the beginning her healing,
....the approach to life passes through food: there is a cook on earth-no earth which is the oil platform; when
.....kitchen listens to the music of the country from which the recipe comes,
«I cook for myself, for don't go crazy, ”he says. Thus a plate of gnocchi with tomato was born inspired by a song by Paolo Conte.
Josef she asks: "What do you like?", and to her answer "chicken, white rice, apple" he tells her with strange sweetness "what
what's wrong? What are you so afraid of? " And she, almost stealthily, begins to taste the gnocchi from the plate of him.
It is the beginning of a change: from the emptiness of non-sense, of non-taste, from the silence of those who are the bearer of unspeakable wounds,
to a possible word, simple, in the intimacy that is created between them in the land of pain, of which they are both prisoners.
It is attention to the injured body that heals him and heals her. What happens with all this suffering? The two learn to accepting each other's silences, they learn that it is possible not to get hurt, that shame and pity can too cure. The emotion of those in the darkness of the room is sober, guided by the truth of the images.
In the microcosm that is life on the oil rig there is a normal sample in its bizarre: in addition to the
a cook, a few sailors, a scholar of the ocean who measures the strength of the waves, and as a hobby checks mussels,
...a tame wild goose that walks like mistress, a swing on which to let oneself be rocked. The world is
somewhere else. Being distant, a point of light in the ocean, guarantees the secret life of words.
Hanna touches Josef, gently washes him, massages him, allows his body to let go of the gentle touch
of her taking care of him, like a mother does with a child. Pass from the body, from his blind eyes that imagine her, from smelling it. Only at the end, when they are about to separate, when he will be transported to the mainland in a hospital, when he tells her the shame of having taken the woman away from a friend (whose suicide is at the origin
accident of him throwing himself into the fire in vain to save him), when she is sure they will have no future words between them, Hanna tells him her story.
Bursts with the grace of her story as a girl, from the light memory of laughter with her best friend, bursts
without giving us time to think, tragedy enters the scene: the war in Bosnia, the hotel where Hanna and her friend - who they left nursing school to go home for a short trip - they are brought. They arrived at
a few kilometers from home; the soldiers - the ones who speak their language first, and then the blue helmets - are the men of evil, and they, the girls, beautiful, laughing, spoils of war, bodies to pass through. The tortures. The violence. The friend
dead. The unspeakable of evil. The secret life of words finds the way in the intimacy of the care of a wounded man's body to say. From the many books, from the many stories read, from the much - and little - known of those years, from that war so close and
...thus forgotten, the mystery of how to survive in a woman's body resurfaces, in the shame of being at
world, you yes and others no, in the indelible dirty war on me that leaves the traces of sperm and blood, which no soap will ever wash away.
It is the meeting then, the embrace, that restores tears and innocence to woman and man. Hanna leaves, even if he does yells his name, far away on the helicopter that takes him away. She goes back to her work in the factory, to her soaps.
But man he must look for her: he knows that it is the encounter with her that will save both of them. It is up to him to repair. Start on path of research meeting the person whose trace he finds in her notebook; is Hanna's psychoanalyst, la
woman who knows about Hanna and the others; he knows the stories contained in the files of the association that takes care of the treatment
of women who have suffered horror. The analyst does not encourage him, he suggests the possible failure of an encounter with a woman so wounded, but it does not prevent him from meeting. And he goes on.
We will see him in the last part of the film, we will follow with him the simple and very hard steps of face to face with damage of war in Hanna's body and psyche, as well as other violated women. And when she tells him she is afraid that one day he might begin to cry, and that these tears would never stop, enough to flood him space, to fill a room, to make them both drown, he (who had confessed to her the secret of being a sailor who can't swim since his father threw him into the sea as a child and nearly drowned him)
he just answers "I'll learn to swim."
The words between them are simple, simple and essential. Finally life begins again. Hanna is in a house, normal, yes makes a cup of tea, her children are in the garden. We listen to the voice of the little girl at the beginning: return to say hello, maybe forever, Hanna and "the little brothers". John Berger, in the notes to the films, reports the sentence, which touches and cares, of one Vietnamese writer Le i Thi Diem Thuy: "Let the word be humble, let it be known that the world is not started with words, but with two bodies close to each other, one crying and the other singing ».
Rarely a movie transports to the places of torment, of the loss of war, of the work of mourning, of reparation, with so much intense and sober emotion without giving in to any form of sentimentality. They rarely care with the humility of physical emotions that enter our lives beyond words. It is "the secret life of words" then to take care of us: it is the saying that does not end in the saying, which remains secret in the lives, illuminated and in shadow, in the parts of us,
...wounds, which agree to return to live, secretly, not in peace but in respite, as in these verses taken from a text entitled Western Peace Nights. They are verses written watching war on television and the image is that of a Bosnian woman, caught in a moment of the absurd daily:
He ran to a shelter, protected his head.
It belonged to a tired image
no different from any woman
that the rain surprises.
I didn't mean the war
but of the truce
meditate on space and therefore on details
the hand that tests the wall, the candle lit for a moment
and - outside - the shining leaves.
Again an enclosure with thorns confused with other thorns
thorns of earth that burn the heels.
That which lies between the weight of the first
and the precipitate of then:
this I call a truce
measure that makes fear measure
meter that does not protect.
The plain is needed for a respite like the train
a dream of the horizon
with trees raised to the sky
only spears, single sentinels.
ANTONELLA ANED
ACHE
The power of evil is great, but the power of pain is greater. Only pain is stronger than evil: the only one
hope of eradicating evil is entrusted to pain, which, however painful and tearing its work is, is the energy
hidden in the world, the only one capable of facing any destructive tendency and of overcoming the lethal effects of evil.
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