Le Garagiste

A long drawn out inexorable purgatorial condition eats away at the fiesty Adrien (Normand D'Amour), Le Garagiste, his active life having been reduced to a series of strict and tedious rummagings, inexhaustible excretions, as he patiently awaits a new kidney.

Fatigue leads him to hire a young mechanic to work at his garage, fate having tricked him into engaging his only son, whom he didn't help raise but never forgot, suddenly communicating, in the language of a younger generation.

The phone rings after 5 years of silence to announce that a donor has been found.

But the new kidney doesn't jive, and after a lively respite, his routine hauntingly rematerializes.

Courage in the face of adversity waning, he's left psychologically paralyzed.

A sad film, a mournful investigation of intergenerational and marital misfires, the desperate longing to joyfully convalesce, the crushing mental instability of a far too embalmed lifestyle.

Entrenched.

Renée Beaulieu illustrates Adrien's despondency by repeatedly filming him back at the hospital, hooked up to the dialysis machine, antiseptic ubiquity.

I thought many scenes were cut too short and more could have been done with Adrien's relationship with his son Raphaël (Pierre-Yves Cardinal).

Whether or not Beaulieu meant for Le Garagiste to indirectly comment on the current national euthanasia debate is a point for consideration.

Raphaël doesn't have a life altering kidney for instance.

It seems to be suggesting that it's a positive thing, as Adrien's suffering becomes too much to bear.

I think euthanasia should be an option for chronically ill patients suffering intensely.

If God thinks they should continue to live a life of constant pain for years in order to die naturally, he or she could be more loving, don't you think?

Complicated issues bucolically narrativized, Le Garagiste coddles to question, while incrementally challenging stoic perseverance.

Cold and bleak, it subtly generates a wistful external dialogue, celebrating health by interrogating helplessness, that which could be, harrowingly dislocating.

Intouchables

Improvised confident agile productivity meets frustrated restrained routine continuity in the heartwarming new odd couple film, Intouchables, the two dimensions elastically forging an incorporeal amicable trust.

Or friendship. Friendship is another way of describing that which they forge.

Philippe (François Cluzet) is a wealthy aristocratic quadriplegic who requires the aid of a live-in attendant. Driss (Omar Sy) comes from the projects and only applied for the position to demonstrate to social assistance that he's looking for work.

It quickly becomes apparent that Driss's honest, easy going, cheeky camaraderie is precisely that for which Philippe has been searching, having grown tired of fawning, hesitant, by-the-book cookie cutters.     

And the result is mutually cathartic.

The mix of different attitudes regarding artistic modes of expression is invaluable.

Oddly enough, it seems that there are still a lot of people who don't mix the classical with the popular.

Which is just simply weird.

Illustrating the rewards of embracing alternative therapeutic methodologies in order to rediscover innocuously rebellious invigorating affects, Intouchables acrobatically and celestially displays its inclusive joie de vivre without losing its practical edge.

Worth checking out.