QUICK AND DIRTY: LIVE FROM SAN SEBASTIAN

Fabrice Toussaint (Denis Podalydès) is an established philosopher and writer living in Paris. Doctors find a very small lesion in his abdomen during an IRM examination on a trip to Boston. It’s not entirely clear whether the tumour is malignant, and Fabrice opts for a check-up every six months instead of a biopsy. That happens just as his most famous novel The Scourge of the Seniors – about people in their twilight years – is being turned into a television programme. Fabrice asks his avuncular doctor friend Augustin Masset (Kad Merad) to join him at the palliative care unit, in a beautiful countryside estate. Augustin agrees, unaware that the philosopher isn’t just looking for inspiration for his creative undertakings: he is also seeking therapy for his overpowering anxieties.

This is a film with countless endings. Life comes to an end every five minutes or so we follow the final journey of various patients. An indignant 31-year-old woman screams, wails and insults doctors on her arrival because she wishes to have chemotherapy instead. A loving grandpa begs to see his pooch Hugo. A husband estranged from his wife and children asks to spend his final days with them. A yopung woman smirks ironically as she reveals to the nurse that her father is leaving €10 million behind, and no testament. Yet not all is doom and gloom. A mother has a “beautiful death” eating oyster and drinking her favourite white wine with her son at home. A gang of Harley-Davidson bikers put on a little motorcade display outside the hospital for a dying friend. And a gypsy family sings and dances for their frail matriarch, in a scene bursting with passion and devotion. The end of life is still an integral part of life, Fabrice is reliably informed.

Charlotte Rampling plays one of the sad patients, in a notably brief and unremarkable role.

Parallel for his newfound hospital routine, Fabrice has a loving wife and countless grandchildren, and a household exuding love. Plus he has to engage with the television executives responsible for the new show. Life, death and fiction join arms and dance, even if their moves aren’t entirely harmonious.

Augustin’s commitment to his job is genuinely humbling, as is his confession that as a junior doctor used to be terrified of people on the brink of death. He locks eyes with each of his terminal cancer patients, providing them with hard truths as well as comforting words. This is a movie about honesty and vulnerability. These characters – patient, doctor or philosopher – are subjected to their own physical and psychological limitations. And it is only through such recognition that they find redemption and the strength to forge ahead, to live life to the full, and to support the ones who need them the most (be that a relative or stranger on a hospital gown). We learn that non-white – such as Africans and gypsies – have a far more positive attitude towards death. Augustin accepts that palliative care is a highly profitable industry, and that often patients are better off at home.

Palliative care is indeed a strange medical field. In some ways, it’s an aberration. That’s because it focuses on death instead of healing. Augustin is well aware of this. So he offers his patients care instead of cure. Dignity instead of hope. A present instead of a future. Humanity instead of invasive medical procedures.

Ninety-one-year-old Greek filmmaker Konstantinos “Kostas” Gavras penned his own film, based on the book by the same title by Régis Debray and Claude Grange. It is a safe assumption that he is grappling with his own mortality and age-related vulnerabilities. Last Breath is a devastating viewing, but also a film infused with hope. The final denouement is both shocking and heartwarming. This is therapeutic cinema at its finest. It is capable of treating horribly metastasised fears and anxieties.

Last Breath just premiered in the Official Competition of the 72nd San Sebastian International Film Festival. This might be the end of Costa-Gavras’s career. Nevertheless, it’s still an integral part of it.