The essential situation -- the struggle of an eightyish cancer sufferer to maintain control of her own life through the final days of her terminal illness -- seems more novelish than movie-ish in its unrushed, uncontrived, unplotty circumstantiation of a particular way of life. But the conjuring-up of a highly sensuous world (lots of rich blues, a very lived-in apartment, an acute sensitivity to water -- whether in the bathtub or in the public park) is something that movies can do better than any other medium, and something that this movie does well enough to make life seem dearly worth holding onto. It can stand to be mentioned unblushingly in the same sentence with such brink-of-death movies as Tokyo Story, Umberto D., I Never Sang for My Father, among others -- but not so many others as to form a sentence of anything like Faulknerian length. Because the movie was written and directed by the Australian-based Holland-born Paul Cox (Lonely Hearts, Man of Flowers, My First Wife), there is a generous sprinkling of quirks -- a pet canary named Jesus, an over-cheery pair of daisy earrings on a chattery companion -- but never an inundation of them: just enough to avoid the circumspect and diplomatic generality that so easily descends into sentimentality. We know from the publicity about the movie that the lead actress, Sheila Florance, soon the late Sheila Florance, was herself dying of cancer throughout the filming, and that some of the material is autobiographical. We don't know this from anything in the movie, and we don't have to know which bits of it are autobiographical. One of the ways in which the illusion of a fictional world is held intact is by the absolute authority the actress brings to the part. With Norman Kaye and Gosia Dobrowolska. (1992) — Duncan Shepherd
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