AWAY FROM HER. Dir Sarah Polley. 2007

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Fiona and Grant have been married for 44 years. Filmed in Canada, the beautiful snowscapes, sunlight on snow, and red tinted sunsets, make a fitting backdrop to Julie Christie’s cool, elegant beauty.

She plays the wife of a retired University lecturer Grant, (Gordon Pinsent), who succumbs to the early onset of Alzheimer’s. At first it troubles her, then it intrigues her and she says she feels as though she is ‘disappearing.’

It is she who decides when it is time for her to go into a home, who instigates the process and, when they arrive, who determinedly checks herself in. She bravely comments that it will be like staying at an hotel. What other line can she take? Grant’s quietly desperate attempts to dissuade her only threaten her fortitude. She has to be strong for them both.

It is hard for her to say goodbye too, but it is so much harder for Grant to go home and be without her. It is always hardest to be the one left behind. The unkindest cut of all is that the home insists on a thirty day period of ‘cold turkey’ when the new inpatient may have no visitors. Grant visits her at the end of this time to discover that he is erased from her memory and, instead, she has formed a new attachment to another inmate.

The film focuses on her mental decline, with Alzheimer’s being compared to a house with the lights going off one by one, and on her resulting physical decline. Her ladylike poise degenerates into unkempt distraction. It is an excruciatingly painful focus on loss and loneliness and runs the risk of being too much to bear. There is no hope: there is only one way for her to go.

True love is selfless and it is Grant’s turn to think only of her happiness. It seems almost his opportunity for making amends and Polley’s film is testament to the depth of enduring, accepting love. Fine performances by Christie and Pinsent carry the unremitting misery with great sensitivity and intelligence.

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