Just as she was about to break free, he fell ill again. He had a stroke. Sensing her imminent departure, his heart retaliated the only way it could. She had no choice; she cared for him. She stayed. I watched her ferry him in and out of treatment. I didn’t know whether to feel sorry for her or feel hopeful for them. I struggled to decipher this kind of weathered, withered love. She was ready to leave him while he was alive, but wasn’t willing to watch him die. Theirs was a conflicted 30-year companionship. Every decision, every sweeping statement, from here on had to be accompanied by a “forever”.
]I was too young to understand, though, what it is that kept this lady, my mother, from leaving her husband, my father, on a hospital bed. It was more than selflessness and a young son. It had to be.
Unlike Isabel Coixet’s French-language short, Bastille , one of 18 films from the 2006 anthology Paris, je t’aime , there was no third person involved. A man (Sergio Castellito), primed to leave his long-time wife (Miranda Richardson) at the café they first met, is jolted by her teary meltdown. He hasn’t even told her yet that he has stopped loving her for someone else. Only moments ago, he had been bitterly examining all her little idiosyncrasies (“ that humming while she cooks dumplings”) that annoyed him.
She hands him an ominous-looking letter, the contents of which render his detachment inconsequential. She has terminal leukemia. She will die. And if he continues with his original plan, she will die alone.
He leaves everything and everyone, and in her final months, becomes her husband again. At one point, as the man embraces her and her once-infuriating tics, the narrator solemnly declares: “By acting like a man in love, he became a man in love again.”
How ironic, I wondered, that death would mend a lifeless marriage. How strange, I wondered, that crippling vulnerability would trigger a wave of unifying strength.
Which is why, I choose to paint my own backstory for retired psychology professor Shiv Kumar (Naseeruddin Shah, in Anu Menon’s Waiting, 2015). We see him spend eons of silence with his comatose wife (Suhasini Maniratnam) in a hospital room. Contrary to his gentle, unconditional face, there are perhaps hints of a stormy past when he admits to her — hoping she is both listening and unconscious — that he had once cheated on her. At this point, things feel a little mended. He has rediscovered their lost years without her. They momentarily feel, and look, like a couple again, coming to terms with an imperfect life together.
I observed my mother go about those few years. Nothing was mended or triggered. She seemed to operate more on the emotional wavelength of Damien (Sagamore Stevenin, in Belgian filmmaker Olivier Masset-Depasse’s Cages, 2006), a pub-owner frustrated with the painfully slow rehabilitation of his partner, Eve (a hypnotic Anne Coesens).
Eve, an emergency medical practitioner, has developed a speech impediment — a stutter — psychological side-effect of a traumatic car accident. From encouraging her to complete her sentences, he now begs her to begin her words. The security of having him beside her, he feels, is the culprit. “I can’t recall a time I didn’t love you,” he had once told her breathlessly, as they made passionate love on a grassy hill overlooking the ocean.
Now, she finds herself pulling his hog-tied, drugged body up the same slope. She has held him hostage in their bedroom, very literally, “forcing” him to love her again, “willing” him to rediscover his feelings. She doesn’t want him to give up on her. Eve may seem unhinged, but she simply can’t get over the fact that he would abandon her in this afflicted condition. He owes her, at the very least, a full recovery before he moves on.
An intensely cinematic take on the figurative conflict of nursing a sick partner, Cages revels in the youngness of its protagonists and their relationship. If they were older, the urge to break away would be drowned out by guilt and sympathy. Despite her pathetic desperation — she even ties him to the bed, straddles him spread-eagled and naked, threatening impregnation to “cure” them — Damien decides to see their destiny through. He sticks with Eve, finding the courage to pretend for her. Only he can heal her.
Unlike Sergio, his act remains an act, a white lie to respect their irreparable truth. And unlike Sergio’s wife, Eve can be fixed. The spark is long gone; what’s left is one final climb up the torrid hill of closure. Because he knows that repairing Eve will free them. It could, maybe, help her recall a time she didn’t love him.
Often, love can be immortalised by the fear of mortality; it can be preserved only if it disappears at the right moment. This moment is explored relentlessly by Iranian master Asghar Farhadi in his latest, The Salesman , 2016. Emad (Shahab Hosseini), a professional stage actor, mourns the assassinated spirit of his actress wife, Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti), after an assailant attacks her in their new flat. Understandably, she isn’t the same anymore. She is haunted by the night. She is now dependent on Emad, even as their marriage’s foundation was concretised by independence in a conservative society.
Emad’s rage is born out of love and longing for what they once were, rather than what she has become. His obsession for justice turns vengeful, exposing a side to his wife she had never seen before. It’s almost like he has accepted there is no way back for her, and he wants to punish whoever is responsible for taking away his “real wife”. How ironic, I wondered, that territorial affection could become the blunt wedge that drives them apart.
These were, however, merely wishful cathartic scenarios I had imagined for my own parents. There were to be no extreme reactions. No confessions, deliberate hostage-holding and meltdowns. My mother wasn’t Sergio, Shiv or Emad; she was tired. My father had internalised shades of Sergio’s wife, Shiv’s wife, Eve and Rana at various stages; but he got tired too. Wanting someone to live, I concluded, is different from wanting to live with them.
She may not have been able to recall a time they weren’t together, which, in this case, wasn’t a dizzying epiphany of romantic longevity. For, very often, a young couple’s badge of honour is perhaps an adult couple’s greatest tragedy.
There would be no healing, but he got better. She eventually got what she needed. But to say she “left” would be doing disservice to their immeasurable equation. Because today, as she comes to terms with a serious blood ailment, and interminable days around hospitals and pharmacies, one man stands — or rather, sits — by her side. Apparently, there was no question of my father not participating in her recuperation. And as soon as she gets better, he will go away. As always.
They are not in it to recapture things anymore. Staying apart is also their way of existing for, but without, one another. It isn’t marriage anymore, or responsibility, or humanity or debt, or any of those intangible heightened bonds. It’s an unspoken equation, inexplicable for those who don’t believe in shades of grey. A shriveled, grudging, uncoupled kind of love: a love that means never having to say goodbye.
The writer is a freelance film critic, writer and habitual solo traveller
