‘The Last Breath’: San Sebastian Review

Dir. Costa-Gavras. France. 2024. 110 minutes

It’s hardly a shock {that a} movie about dying may come throughout as considerably lugubrious, however The Final Breath – a meditation on healthcare and mortality from veteran director Costa-Gavras – may maybe have breathed a bit of extra flippantly. Based mostly on a e-book by thinker Régis Debray and palliative care specialist Claude Grange, the movie dramatises a variety of questions on bodily vulnerability, dying and methods to confront the human situation; however from the beginning, it comes throughout extra like a soberly dramatised seminar than as an emotionally evolving fiction.

Extra like a soberly dramatised seminar than an emotionally evolving fiction

Denis Podalydès and Kad Merad, basically taking part in variations of Debray and Grange, provide considerate solidity on the head of an illustrious forged that features Angela Molina, Charlotte Rampling, Hiam Abbass and Karin Viard. However regardless of authoritative performances, the movie by no means actually comes alive. It might be thought-provoking in its content material, however is extra more likely to discover its area of interest as an academic device than as a cinematic proposition.

French display screen common Podalydès – as so usually, embodying the typical apprehensive man – performs eminent thinker Fabrice Toussaint, first seen having an MRI scan in Boston, with regarding outcomes. Again in France, he has one other examine, and meets Dr Augustin Masset (Merad), a specialist in palliative healthcare. Figuring out that Toussaint is fascinated about end-of-life questions – he has a e-book on the theme, about to be republished – Masset proposes giving him a tour of his hospital, letting him sit in on conferences and recounting assorted anecdotes about his expertise with most cancers sufferers and the imminence of dying. 

Among the many embedded tales are episodes involving a rich lady (Charlotte Rampling) decided to take management of her demise; a younger lady (Agathe Bonitzer) raging in opposition to her situation; and a affected person (Nouvelle Imprecise stalwart Alain Libolt, a peppery standout) and his spouse (Hiam Abbass), each in a state of livid denial. A very spectacular efficiency comes from Françoise Lebrun, additionally notable in one other latest death-musing drama, Gaspar Noé’s Vortex; right here she performs a reconciled affected person, who enjoys a dialog with Toussaint about totally different non secular variations of the afterlife.

A extra boisterous episode options Angela Molina as a lady who arrives in hospital together with her massive Romany household and accompanying jazz musicians. Merad – who not too long ago appeared in one other veteran director’s musing on mortality, Lastly by Claude Lelouch – contributes reassuringly bearlike gravitas because the pensive, ethically grounded medic.

Regardless of makes an attempt at dramatisation – generally vigorous, extra usually downright dogged – the movie comes off as an earnest talkathon, its dialogue spiked with philosophical and literary references (Houellebecq, Lacan, François Mauriac et al), to not point out theological allusions to notions like metempsychosis and palingenesis. One scene specifically, wherein Toussaint and a circle of media varieties talk about a potential TV programme on the theme, is very laborious, and the overemphasis on his standing as an immediately recognisable movie star thinker is a sporting mannerism. 

Costa-Gavras made his popularity as grasp of the political thriller with movies resembling Z and State Of Siege however, whereas he sustains a word of considerate seriousness all through, there’s little dramatic urgency right here. Nonetheless, the heavyweight content material in itself is more likely to immediate viewers to take a position on their very own most popular model of a ‘good dying’ – though most of us would in all probability favor to not exit accompanied by a twee youngsters’s music about snails.