Ray Pride

"There's no such thing as normal people."

And certainly not in Spanish director Isabel Coixet's English-language debut, a sweet and lyrical, luxuriantly hued confection about what legacy we might leave if we knew we were dying. In rain-soggy Vancouver, shot by cinematographer Jean-Claude Larrieu (with Coixet operating the camera) in a style beyond chill and damp into aquatic gloom, 23-year-old Ann (Sarah Polley, pale, tiny, fierce as breath) has been married since 17, has two sweet daughters, loves her underemployed husband (Scott Speedman), and works a night shift cleaning at a college. Beat-down mom Deborah Harry, hale yet defeated, bakes for a hotel on the same hours, lives in the house-trailer next door to Ann's.

Ann thinks she's pregnant again. That wouldn't be so bad. She goes to the doctor. He tells her he can never look a patient in the eye. As the doctor, Leonor Watling's odd, charming performance is so strange it seems everyday and normal. He tells her she has only a few weeks to live, offers her ginger candy. On her translucent features in close-up, her reaction to her death sentence is ur-Canadian, deadpan as heck: "Pretty far gone, eh?" And divinely lit--there is a single stripe of tear down her pallored cheek. Leaving, she hides her diagnosis from the start, looking for spurts of joy in her world of hurt.

Produced by Pedro Almodovar, "My Life Without Me" is both eccentric and heartening, as adventurous in its own way as Almodovar's own later work. Coixet's eye is trained. Her years as a director of commercials, as well as a handful of previous features, serve her well. There is a superb sense of place. Coixet makes the movie a confidently giddy daydream of quiet too-much-ness. There is a scene where Ann's husband holds her, she sings to him, almost a murmur, tousles his hair sideways, her long straight hair falling like the vertical curtain of colored beads behind them. The shot holds. It is heartbreakingly intimate.

She skips work. Sits in a café late one night. She takes out a spiral notebook with pink pages. Her daughters' bead bracelets graze the page. She makes a list of things to do before she dies. Her handwriting, a scrawl, a girl-woman's script, is superimposed, white against the bottom of the frame. There's a grouchy customer with a bad mustache (Mark Ruffalo). A grouchier waitress she borrows a pen from. There are misspellings. Ruffalo watches her, this tiny woman, this almost girl-child, making a to-do list. Laundry? "8. Make someone fall in love whith [sic] me."

Someone does: the gloomy wanderer played by Ruffalo. A flirtation ensues. There is a scene where she winds up with the bookish man and they are alone in his undecorated place--he hasn't refurnished since the wife and furniture left him--and he begins to read aloud from novelist John Berger's "To A Wedding," a transfixing paragraph about preparations for death. Polley slaps the paperback away with an abrupt lashing-out. She's calm then, sinks back into his arms, he instinctively holds her, but not too tightly. His joy in the prose is an abstraction, her reaction natural.

There is another entry on the list, another scene, leaving birthday wishes for her daughters for every year until they're 18. The imagining of what each of those years will hold, for one daughter from 4 to 18, the other from 6 to 18, are filled with love and tears. It is an absurd project, Ann at water's edge, in her car, night skyline part of the gleaming wet behind her, clutching a cassette recorder, murmuring years of love not to come. At first, the device is an annoyance, then, as it becomes more heartfelt, any thoughts of contrivance or of sentimentality pass, watching the wonder that is Polley's face as she inhabits this moment, these imaginings. In her own understated way, she's always a terrifically volatile performer, her face, large eyes, sly, smart smile indicating as much as the text of the script, yet here, with a less educated, less headstrong character, she remains one of the most compelling on-screen performers.

Ann, however, does get a handful of outbursts, the anger powering them beyond the understanding of those who hear them. "Without dreams, you can't fucking live!" she yells at one point. "And in the commercials? Everyone is so fucking happy!" Mocking that "happiness," Coixet later includes a strange, lovely fantasy ballet where Ann's shopping late at night, and everyone in the market begins to dance to the Muzak, a Caetano Veloso-like ballad. (Coixet says that inspiration came on the set, where things just seemed too dull, and she shot the scene without worrying whether its tone was too surreal for the rest of the picture.)

Ann met her husband at the last Nirvana concert. An ick-worthy line that works near the end of the movie goes, "You'll always be the guy who took his T-shirt off to wipe my tears away." There is an intermittent voiceover filled with naïve poeticizing as well: "You pray this will be the life without you."

Each moment when "My Life About Me" seemed precious, another moment would come along--some detail of décor or landscape, of performance or composition, and I allowed its charm to take hold. Precious? Aren't we all, inside our heads, warming by the fantasy of whom we love and who loves us?

"My Life Without Me" opens Friday.

(2003-10-16)

Also by Ray Pride

Tip of the Week
Mark Decena's Sundance-developed, San Francisco-set meditation on the nature of attraction is a smart, sexy gem, a love letter to love, San Francisco, and a stranger's eyes across a warm barroom
(2003-10-08)

Thrill kill
"Kill Bill Vol. I" zooms along with the conviction of the true believer, but also suggests the hermetic world view of the truly foolish
(2003-10-08)

An imperfect world
Clint Eastwood's mournful chamber tragedy, "Mystic River," adapted by Brian Helgeland from a novel by Dennis Lehane, is that rare American movie steeped in grief, without resorting to some sort of comic relief
(2003-10-08)

Chicago International Film Festival
Highlights of the film fest's second week
(2003-10-08)

Short Runs
(2003-10-08)

Short Runs
(2003-10-02)

Chicago International Film Festival
(2003-10-02)

Back in Black
(2003-10-02)

World and enough time
(2003-10-02)

Moaning Lisa
(2003-10-02)

Tip of the Week
(2003-10-01)

Tip of the Week
(2003-09-25)

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