I watched a really interesting French movie a few nights ago titled Fragments of Antonin. Completed in 2006 and nominated for a Cesar Award for Best New Work, the film is set toward the end of WWI, and opens with a French soldier at a hospital for nervous cases. He suffers severe shell-shock, constant tremors, and repeats the same obsessive actions over and over again in association with the only words he speaks- the names of five people.
As the doctors attempt to unravel the mysteries of his mind and how the war produced such incredible physical effects on a man who was not outwardly injured, we learn the stories behind each of the five names through flashbacks. They all relate to his experiences in the war, and through each flashback the tension rises as we wonder which person and which incident finally pushed Antonin over the edge from war survivor to wreck.
The movie was well put together and full of fascinating detail. One of the scariest parts was the opening credits, in which real footage of French soldiers suffering shell-shock was played. I was stunned to see what the doctors did in trying to understand the phenomenon- they exposed the patients to stimuli like whistles, explosions and officers shouting commands to see what kind of reaction would result. It's just a reminder of how little was understood about the human mind and the impact of war before the world was forced to deal with the aftermath of the Great War on so many.
Excerpt from Between the Lines
A memory wavered into his mind, shimmery as heat rising off the road in summer.
He was six years old, and he’d been in Stonehaven no more than a week. He was hollow and lonely, confused. He missed the bustle of Melbourne. He missed the other kids on his street, the whole gang of them and their scampy games. He was stuck out in the bush, all of a sudden, with nobody but Lionel for company. Lionel had spent the first day ignoring him completely, and the last few beating the stuffing out of him whenever he got the chance. So that day, he’d wandered out to the back garden, if it could even be called that- just a scrubbed, flat expanse of hot red dirt with a veil of tangled trees and shrubs behind it.
The bush.
On impulse, he’d taken a couple of steps toward it, bare feet burning on the hot ground. The air was filled with the lemony scent of eucalyptus and the fresh tang of the distant sea. He'd filled his lungs and the two steps had turned into six, then ten, then before he knew it he was running headlong toward the wall of whispering green and brown, pushing all his mother’s warnings about snakes and savages from his head. He barrelled between the first spicy-scented leaves and, to his surprise, popped out on a sort of beaten down track, hidden from view of the house. After a moment’s pause to wonder how many strokes of the belt he’d get for this, he set off down the track toward the most interesting noise he’d heard so far- the babbling giggle of flowing water, and laced in with it, the high, clear notes of a girl’s voice, singing.
He stepped off the track with his heart hammering in his chest, suddenly terrified as he caught side of the wide river bank and the rolling mass of glassy green water.
She was standing there, all right- a girl not much taller than him, skinny as a rake, skin the golden brown of tree bark lit by sun. A cascade of golden curls rolled over her shoulders to skim at her waist, tendrils flicking out here and there as she drew back her arm and lobbed a big rock into the water.
He watched it go, traced the arc with his eyes until it hit the water with a loud splash and was swallowed. She was singing, still, her voice high and clear. She was wearing a white dress that finished at her knees and puffed into short sleeves at her shoulders. He looked down at himself, his grey shorts and jumper coated in jam, dirt and everything else he’d been busy with that morning. He stared at her back with suspicion. She was pristine. The only dirty bit of her was her feet, bare as his.
If it hadn’t been for those feet, he might have thought she was an angel. Or a ghost.
Thursday, July 3, 2008
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