In ‘Dormant Beauty,’ a coma victim divides a nation

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Marco Bellocchio’s “Dormant Beauty” weaves multiple poetic stories around an unseen real-life character – Eluana Englaro, an Italian car-crash victim who fell into a persistent vegetative state in early 1992. Like Terry Schiavo in the U.S., while lying unconscious in the hospital, she ignited debates between people who thought she should be fed and those who believed she should be allowed to die. Englaro had said, before the accident, that she wouldn’t want to exist in a coma. After 17 years, Englaro’s father won the legal right to order his daughter’s feeding stopped. That’s when this film begins.

 

Partisans from either side who seek solace from “Dormant Beauty” should look elsewhere. Seekers after truth and beauty should check it out. While dramatizing arguments over death, Bellocchio, an enfant terrible turned old master, captures what’s ineffably moving about life.

 

Twinned stories about another father and daughter comprise the vibrant core of this brave movie. Toni Servillo plays a senator who cannot support Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s demand for Englaro’s continued treatment. Alba Rohrwacher plays his grown daughter, a militant believer in preserving any vestige of life. At the center of their disagreement are clashing memories of their wife and mother’s death. While he ponders whether he can remain a senator without losing his self-respect, she travels to Englaro’s provincial nursing home for prayer and protest.

 

The third story introduces the film’s most devout character, a grand actress played by Isabelle Huppert and listed in the credits only as “Divina Madre.” She has given up her career and (in effect) her husband and son to talk to and pray for her own comatose daughter. She turns the nuns who nurse her daughter into a chanting chorus.

 

In the fourth story, set in a Rome hospital, a doctor (played by Bellocchio’s son, Pier Giorgio Bellocchio) becomes a guardian angel to a vicious, suicidal addict (Maya Sansa). Though this junkie spends a lot of time asleep, her story is less directly connected to the Englaro case – except when another doctor take bets on how long Englaro will survive.

 

As each tale unfolds, Bellocchio pulls you in with the power of the performances and his infinitely suggestive imagery. He’s capable of searing, pitiless naturalism. Two minutes in a hospital tells you everything you need to know about the distrust and chaos that permeate even non-political life these days: A desperate son and daughter accuse the good doctor of wanting to kill their mother, and a middle-aged man tears through an open ward searching for a loved one, not realizing he’s gotten the hospital’s name wrong. Meanwhile, outside the nursing home, Bellocchio’s depiction of the picket lines vividly renders the kind of crisis in which shouting and sloganeering drown out rational argument.

 

Yet individuals manage to carve out pockets of sanity. The senator’s daughter experiences love at first sight with a man on the other picket line. (Sadly, he must care for a bipolar brother so rabidly pro-euthanasia that he tries to curtail their growing bond.) The doctor demands that the addict be treated with respect, and she actually gleans something about spirituality and resilience from his dedication to what he calls “simple humanity.”

 

The film pits their honest passion against the stylized desperation of the actress’ religious theater and the decadent hollowness of Berlusconi’s political theater. The most brilliant scenes unfold in Berlusconi’s party headquarters, envisioned as a shadowy antique building with an elaborate Roman bath. In an extraordinary shot, Berlusconi’s supporters pose against a screen for a photographer while he’s projecting a campaign film. The Italian flag ripples over them; so does the prime minister’s image. Later, the conscience-stricken senator consults with the party’s resident psychiatrist (Roberto Herlitzka). The shrink confesses that he puts his colleagues on antidepressants because they feel important only if they’re asked to be on television.

 

This effortlessly iconoclastic movie pillories partisanship and orthodoxy without succumbing to despair. It leaves you with hope because of its belief that love is an infinite and renewable resource. “Love changes our way of seeing things,” says the senator’s daughter. So do movies as original and lyrical as “Dormant Beauty.”