Wednesday, September 13, 2017

TIFF 2017: Breathe

Q&A after Breathe with Director Andy Serkis, Actors Claire Foy and Andrew Garfield,
Producer Jonathan Cavendish and his mother Diana

Andy Serkis moves from actor/motion capture performer to director in Breathe, the inspiring true life love story starring Andrew Garfield as Robin Cavendish and Claire Foy as his wife Diana. Robin is a tea broker and Claire a pretty, rich girl, who meet, fall in love, and then head off to pursue his business in Kenya, where he is stricken with polio. It's the late 1950s, and the fate of those paralyzed by polio is to lie in a bed with a respirator or iron lung in a hospital ward with no hope of ever leaving. Robin wants to die, and for Diana to leave him and move on with her life, but she refuses him on both counts and stands by him, including when he asks to leave the hospital. Doing so is unheard of, and the hospital administrator tries to stop them, but the next thing we know Robin is home with Diana and their baby Jonathan.

They accept the higher risk of caring for him and monitoring his respirator 24/7 (which does not go entirely smoothly), and Robin's quality of life immediately improves a little. It takes a huge jump for the better when his friend assembles a wheelchair that can accommodate the respirator and a battery to run it for a few hours, and then a van that can accommodate the chair.  Now Robin can venture out of the house, and even out of the country. It helps that they have some money to fund all of this!

The most touching part of the film is that Robin Cavendish didn't stop at enjoying his own freedom from institutionalization; he fought to deliver it to others with his condition, first by getting more wheelchairs with respirators made and showing that the risks he had taken in leaving the hospital were reasonable ones, and later by showing other doctors what was possible, and starting to change minds about how the profoundly disabled could be integrated into regular life.

I remember something startling I saw one day when I was a student at Berkeley in the early 1980s. I was walking across campus when I saw a stretcher rolling rapidly along the ground, apparently out of control. I assumed some ambulance had lost control of its patient and was shocked at seeing this poor helpless invalid headed for what was obviously a crash somewhere. Then I noticed that the stretcher was not out of control at all; it was being driven by its occupant! This was a student on their way to class! I had seen people in wheelchairs many times of course, but never someone confined to a stretcher out on their own navigating the world. That person was one of the beneficiaries of the determination of Robin and Diana Cavendish to change how the disabled can live.

After the film, there was a Q&A with Andy Serkis and the two lead actors. They were joined by producer Jonathan Cavendish - Robin & Diana's son - who had long wanted to tell his parents' story. Someone asked him what his mother thought of the film, at which point he brought her out on stage as well!

After seeing 6 films so far in this year's festival, this is the second one that moved me greatly; interestingly both this one and The Upside are based on true stories of men who could not themselves move.

TIFF 2017 Overview

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