Coming back from overseas recently, I was
watching a movie from the in-flight entertainment menu. Not so unusual? Well it
is for me – I generally settle for that picture of the plane inching across the
map. I’m not such a fan of wearing headphones or of scrabbling around trying to
find them or plug them in, and I can pick up the general gist of most films
from what I see people watching in the row in front.
This time, however, there was something a
lot of people seemed to have chosen on the flight from Helsinki to Hong Kong,
and I thought I’d have a look, but when I tried to activate it myself it kept
being interrupted by Finnair commercials trying to sell you perfume – and then
the screen would go black and you had to start again. Frustrating.
However, on the Cathay Pacific flight out
of Hong Kong, there it was again. To get round the headphone problem, I chose
to watch a version dubbed into German (not available on Finnair, which is the
ultimate in low-budget operations), and this allowed me the option of English
subtitles. The actors were speaking English anyway, so this meant the subtitles
were synchronized with their lips, and the whole effect was quite naturalistic.
The film was called ‘Me before you’. I
hadn’t heard of it, but it turned out to be a new release this year, and one of
the few choices that weren’t either violent action movies or cartoons for
children. The story opens with an introduction to Louisa Clark, one of that
class of people technically known as a manic pixie dream girl – a dizzy
twenty-something who can’t hold down a job but has very expressive eyebrows and
a heart the size of a watermelon, judging by the way she parcels up an uneaten
sandwich for an old lady in the cafe where she works (just prior to being
sacked again).
Off she sets to the employment agency. The
family need the money: Dad has lost his job after the firm he worked for was
asset-stripped by greedy corporate raiders, and Louisa’s sister is a single mum
whose dreams of university depend on someone else looking after her child.
Turns out the only job available is at the
local castle (local castle? where is this place?), where lives a 'wealthy young
banker’, quadriplegic after colliding with a motorbike, and needing a carer.
There’s an interview with the young man’s mother, a Helen Mirren lookalike, in
the course of which Louisa’s too-tight borrowed skirt splits up the side. This underlines
to the audience what a quirky lovable character she is. Then she is taken to
meet Will, as the young man is called (I was thinking of him as James, but none
of the names made much impression on me).
Will/James is cold; he tells Louisa
(‘Clark’ as he calls her) to keep quiet and out of his way; he silently sneers
at her dress sense.
Needless to say, the inevitable happens.
Will is captivated by never having met an airhead before – he introduces her to
films with subtitles and to classical music, while she discovers that he used
to be a daredevil extreme skier, base jumper, diver, etc, and realises how much
he has lost. She organises outings, most of which don’t quite come off as
planned; that makes her appear more lovable still to a man not used to
bumbling, and accustomed to having everything just so. Attending the wedding of
Will’s ex-girlfriend, who left him after the accident for his ex-best friend,
draws them even closer together.
Will meets Louisa’s family; he organises a
job on the estate for her father; he makes her a birthday present of a pair of
tights like ones she loved as a little girl (we suspect he’s had them specially
woven). Everything seems to be shaping for a happy ending.
At this point Louisa discovers that James,
or Will as he is called in the film, has a long-standing plan to travel to
Switzerland for an assisted suicide. She is devastated. Her ever-expressive
eyebrows bunch up like a pair of loopy caterpillars. She resolves to show him
that life can still be worthwhile – which means whisking him off to a tropical
resort on an open-ended budget provided by his parents (I thought it was the
Maldives, but it turned out it was supposed to be Mauritius, though the film
was shot in Madeira or Majorca or some other place beginning with the letters
Ma-). You’d think that lying back with a cocktail and watching Louisa
scuba-dive would be enough for anyone.
But it’s all no use. As he explains, if he
can’t do the things he loves, like ride motorbikes and deep-sea dive or
whatever, life really has nothing to offer. That most people get over these
urges when they reach a certain age seems to be lost sight of – and there
doesn’t seem any reason why he couldn’t have continued to be a successful
banker, wheelchair-bound or not, and gratified his adrenalin addiction that
way.
However, nothing will suit but killing
himself. Grief-stricken Louisa wants nothing to do with it, but persuaded in
the nick of time that true love means always letting someone have their own
way, she’s there by his side at the last.
A weepy, or what? Perhaps I’ve got a heart of
stone, but if I wept, it was for another reason. There’s a name for the
philosophy that you know what is right for you and everyone else must respect
it. It’s called Satanism, and there’s a lot of it around – the Disney film Frozen, such a hit with little girls, runs
along the same lines.
Only a couple of weeks before I’d been in
the chapel where John Donne was rector – the man who reminded us that we are
all members of the one body. ‘No man is an island, complete in himself,’ he
wrote. ‘We are all continents, all a part of the main’ – and we don’t live
just, or even, to please ourselves. If Donne had scripted the film, somehow I
think it would have turned out differently.
