THE SECRET LIFE OF WORDS (Isabel Coixet, Spain, 2005, 115 m.). THEME: POST TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER IN A WOMAN SURVIVOR OF BOSNIAN WAR. SPOILER ALERT! Isabel Coixet’s well crafted narrative screenplay interweaves two subtexts: an intriguing psychodrama about the long lasting wounds of war trauma and a convoluted, slowly building love story of two damaged people brought together by chance on an oil rig in the North Sea. Josef (Tim Robbins), an engineer on the pumping station, has been burned and temporarily blinded while trying in vain to save a coworker from a fiery suicide. Hanna (Sarah Polley), a social recluse who works as an assembly line factory worker in England, has more or less been forced by the HR department to take a month long holiday, to quell the animosity of her fellow workers, who resent her scrupulous punctuality and four year record of never having taken leave for illness or vacation.
A chance conversation in a tavern leads her to volunteer to serve as a nurse to Josef, aboard the oil rig. (Hanna had been trained in and practiced nursing for several years in the past.) The initial encounters between Hanna and Josef are spiced with unpredictable thrust and parry. Josef does the thrusting: mouthing off provocative sexualized comments to Hanna, like a guy coming on at a bar. She in turn remains all but mute; she won’t even tell her name at first. She is diffident toward the rest of the crew as well. Slowly over the next days she lowers her guard, begins to thaw with everyone. In time Hanna shares her story with Josef. Her origins in Sarajevo. Her detention along with other women by their own Bosnian troops, who held her captive for months and systematically raped and mutilated her and the others. She tells Josef that he’s just like those other men, harboring only a lascivious interest in women. She also tells him that a friend of hers was forced to kill her young daughter by shooting her through the vagina, though we suspect that the “friend” was Hanna herself.
This catharsis, possibly her first disclosure to someone other than her therapist (played by Julie Christie) seems to dissipate Hanna’s deep malaise. Josef discloses his own sources of remorse: his affair with a woman married to his closest friend, possibly the same man who had suicided aboard the rig, though we cannot be sure. Josef in time is medivaced for care in a hospital and Hanna returns to the factory. But in the end they find each other in a plausible reconnection that is tender and genuine but devoid of any sentimental pretensions.
A nice sidebar is provided: some glimpses of how men on the rig pass time. They improvise playground swings, play cards, make up song and dance performances, and a few engage in homoerotic encounters. The supporting cast of crew members is very good, led by the chef, Simon (Javier Cámara). All in all this bittersweet production offers a compelling view of the far reaches of the grotesque trauma of war. (In English) Grade: B+
A chance conversation in a tavern leads her to volunteer to serve as a nurse to Josef, aboard the oil rig. (Hanna had been trained in and practiced nursing for several years in the past.) The initial encounters between Hanna and Josef are spiced with unpredictable thrust and parry. Josef does the thrusting: mouthing off provocative sexualized comments to Hanna, like a guy coming on at a bar. She in turn remains all but mute; she won’t even tell her name at first. She is diffident toward the rest of the crew as well. Slowly over the next days she lowers her guard, begins to thaw with everyone. In time Hanna shares her story with Josef. Her origins in Sarajevo. Her detention along with other women by their own Bosnian troops, who held her captive for months and systematically raped and mutilated her and the others. She tells Josef that he’s just like those other men, harboring only a lascivious interest in women. She also tells him that a friend of hers was forced to kill her young daughter by shooting her through the vagina, though we suspect that the “friend” was Hanna herself.
This catharsis, possibly her first disclosure to someone other than her therapist (played by Julie Christie) seems to dissipate Hanna’s deep malaise. Josef discloses his own sources of remorse: his affair with a woman married to his closest friend, possibly the same man who had suicided aboard the rig, though we cannot be sure. Josef in time is medivaced for care in a hospital and Hanna returns to the factory. But in the end they find each other in a plausible reconnection that is tender and genuine but devoid of any sentimental pretensions.
A nice sidebar is provided: some glimpses of how men on the rig pass time. They improvise playground swings, play cards, make up song and dance performances, and a few engage in homoerotic encounters. The supporting cast of crew members is very good, led by the chef, Simon (Javier Cámara). All in all this bittersweet production offers a compelling view of the far reaches of the grotesque trauma of war. (In English) Grade: B+
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