San Sebastian 2006

"Forever":
Celebration of Life and Art
By Ramiro Cristóbal

Yoshino Kimura, a young Japanese girl taking piano lessons in Paris, visits Frédéric Chopin's grave in the Parisian Père Lachaise cemetery. Communication, respect, admiration and love for the Polish composer who died two and a half centuries ago, are some of the incentives of her recently undertaken musical career. Some time later, we see Kimura giving her first concert in public.

Thus begins and ends the film Forever, directed by Dutch filmmaker Heddy Honigmann, a deliberate editing resource that symbolises the deeper meaning of the picture: the fertility of art and the triumph of love and life over death.

In the capital of France, in the Père Lachaise cemetery, dotting romantic paths and small, quiet squares, we find the graves of some of the greatest artists of all times. Modigliani and Proust, Chopin and Meliès, Simone Signoret and Yves Montand, María Callas and Edith Piaf, Ingres and Jim Morrison, are a few of the many dwellers resting there forever.

They are never alone, people go there from all over the world taking their flowers and their feelings to follow their steps from far and near. Filmmaker Honigman shows us two blind men who visit the grave of their admired Simone Signoret almost daily, a woman who frequently cleans the tombs of Modigliani and Apollinaire and who has reached, over the years, a deep understanding with them, a historian who believes the women in Ingres' paintings are alive and keeping her company, a sketcher who has based his work on the life and works of Proust and who also visits his tomb frequently, an Iranian singer who works as a taxi driver and is a frequent guest in the last dwelling of Persian poet Sadegh Hedayat, whose stanzas he turns into songs.

With them, other anonymous men and women who visit their loved ones, some long dead. The mystery of human love that can prevail in time over the end of life is there, present in all of them.

It is true that, formally speaking, Forever is a documentary, yet its cinematographic language surpasses many fiction films, and so does its — shall we say — artistic mission. If the main object of a good film is to tell us a relevant story, to provoke emotions and transmit original ideas using images, we find ourselves before a film that fulfils these requirements faultlessly, simply and with tenderness, using the testimony of people who are here and of people who continue to speak to us through the work they've left behind.

It is hard, also, to imagine a film as deeply optimistic as this. The confirmation of the fact that a human being is not an individual, not even a community, but rather the sum of all those who existed in the past and exist in the present, is an antidote against the pessimism of death and a true option to immortality of which, in this case, we all participate. It is surprising that a film about a cemetery should end up being a celebration of life, but that's what the magic of intelligent cinema is all about, believing that culture and art are the motors of existence.

Ramiro Cristóbal
© FIPRESCI 2006

Ramiro Cristóbal works as a reviewer for the weekly publication Cambio 16. He is also the author of several books about French, Spanish and Argentine cinema.

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