Since the advent of cinema, people have been drawn to the screen by the promise of intimacy: the facial close-up, an overwhelming experience for early movie audiences, allowed them far inside the personal space of a stranger. Mainstream movies tend to celebrate intimacy—that quiet moment with a child or lover that redeems the stress and strain of being an astronaut or a hostage negotiator. But intimacy can also be a terrible burden. In Daniel & Ana (2009), the debut feature of Mexican writer-director Michel Franco, a college student and her younger brother are kidnapped, driven to a deserted house, and forced to copulate for a sex tape. They survive the ordeal, but it leaves them frightened and ashamed, saddled with greater knowledge of each other than any siblings should have.
Dave may be inserting himself into his patients’ lives, but he’s only filling the breach between them and their family members, some of whom can’t handle the nasty details of physical decay and some of whom just don’t care. When Sarah is visited by her sister, brother-in-law, and nieces, the children are bored and can’t want to leave; ushered out at last, they wave casually at their exhausted aunt, whom they’ll never see again. John (Michael Cristofer), the stroke victim who becomes Dave’s next patient, barks at family members but bonds with his new nurse, who lets him watch porn on a laptop and indulges his salacious train of thought. At one point, when Dave has finished bathing John, the old man’s grown son walks in on them and turns away at the sight of his father’s genitals. Later, after John’s respiration has taken a turn for the worse, his daughter interrupts another private moment between the two men, when John has burst into tears and Dave has enfolded him in an embrace. Franco doesn’t reveal what the daughter whispers in John’s ear to comfort him, but from the stricken expression on his face, you can tell her words have had the opposite effect.
Directed by Michel Franco
