Echo of You review – expressive documentary hears from grieving life partners
The Marvel bromide about 'What is grief, if not love persevering?' comes to mind watching this metaphysically charged Danish documentary in which nine senior citizens discuss their departed life partners. Director Zara Zerny works hard in defining the miracle of lifelong companionship, and the ineffable essence of that significant other which persists after death. So much so that, in one final, oddly encouraging section, some of the interviewees here suggest that their loved one still watches over them, Patrick Swayze-style.
Awkward beginnings and lovestruck thunderclaps: it's all here. Finn-Erik recalls his first sighting of Kirsten as a 17-year-old with ballet-dancer grace. Ove was rescued from a hotel-room orgy with multiple Norwegians by strapping six-footer Bent, who tells him: 'You're coming home with me.' Then there's Elly, the trauma of whose first violent marriage 'vanished like the dew before the sun' when she met her new partner Aksel. In Zerny's intimate interviewing environment, nothing is off the table: sex and infidelity, domestic bliss and disaffection, partnerships that outlast passion, the pain of outlasting your partner.
No surprises that long-term cohabitation requires compromise and even the odd lucky break. Circus performer Flemming admits that he and his partner in life and acrobatics, Birgit, only stayed together due to being offered a plum contract just as their relationship was floundering (they later performed together for Cirque du Soleil in their 70s). As for the question of whether these unions constitute 'the one', philosophical differences arise. 'I couldn't know that. I just decided he was. I assumed I was right,' says Inger, for the free-will camp. In Ove's book, higher forces are at work. 'We're not placed on Earth at random. And who we meet isn't random either.'
Zerny and cinematographer Jacob Sofussen shoot the interviews and adjoining segments with a lucid compassion; their closeups make beautiful parchment out of wrinkled skin. Leaning out towards the mystery of other people and the other side, Zerny occasionally overreaches in her expressionism: the shots of the interviewees 'dancing' their memories feel a bit am-drammy. The most effective tactics are the simplest, such as the initial sequence that, asking the interviewees to cover their eyes and recount their first thoughts of their paramours, makes these veterans of the heart into dreaming infants again. This is an important film filled with contemplative purpose.
Echo of You is on True Story from 23 May
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