In The Secret Life of Words, one of the best films you’ve never heard of, Spanish director Isabel Coixet, guides Tim Robbins and Canadian actor, Sarah Polley, in roles of a life time, to an exploration of human suffering and human redemption quite unlike anything I have ever seen. Without a frame of bomb blasts, bayonet thrusts or corpse strewn fields The Secret Life of Words brings us one of the truest, most powerful –because most personal– indictments of war ever done on film. And under nearly impossible circumstances — most of it shot at a hospital bed where Josef (Robbins), his flesh burned, an arm fractured and blinded by seared cataracts, is nursed by a strange, morose, nearly speechless young woman Hannah (Polley) who, when she speaks, is clearly a foreigner and doubly an object of mystery and puzzlement. To bring the setting even further from the mass chaos of war, this bed is on an oil rig in the Irish sea with only 5 other people aboard, the rest having been evacuated following the disastrous oil fire which injured Josef and, as we learn, killed his once best friend.
The film begins so oddly and continues long enough oddly that one, especially watching in a home setting, is tempted to get distracted, turn to other things, write it off. It pays back enormously to follow through, let the puzzlement float until the trajectory begins to be seen. The quirkiness of the beginning, which continues throughout, is the disarming normalcy through which great depths are visited. Hannah works in an enormous, loud, plastics plant, not specifically sited, though somewhere in Europe. She is an outsider, by her accent, her hearing aid assisted deafness — which she keeps off as she desires– her somber, depressive demeanor. Her non-attentive dress and make up, except for strange amounts of bar soap, one of many object-metaphors in Coixet’s lexicon, add to her public signing of wishing, completely, to be left alone.
Early in the film she is called in by her manager who says, despite Hannah’s fears, that she is such a perfect worker the company wouldn’t think of firing her. She must, however, to ease the concerns of her colleagues and the trades-unions, take some time off, so as not to imply that workers need only work. She clearly doesn’t know what to do or where to go and winds up in a hotel room as plain as her own lodgings — far from the palm trees and beaches suggested by her manager. Still at a loss as to how to “vacation” she overhears of a need for a burn-trauma nurse and volunteers for the duration of her holiday. She is trained, she tells the doctor, and has seen terrible things. She is helicoptered out to the oil rig where she takes over full time care of Josef; the doctor departs (“Give me a call in case of trouble”) and leaves her with Josef and the 5 other crewmen.
Josef can’t see through his clouded corneas. He is painfully burned on his face, shoulders and much of his body which we never see below the blankets. Yet in his pain, barely able to keep up his patter as she changes his bandages and applies compresses to the burns, he is irrepressible. It’s unclear if he is meant to be a brougish Irishman –Robbins keeps his American accent –yet there is much of the roguish, suggestive bawdiness of an irrepressible story-teller and a man who has not known no from too many women. To her silence, and our vision of her dour, withdrawn face, he keeps it up, at first a bit to our discomfort. But he is never mean, never leering; he nudges but does not press. He has a bantering ease and preternatural cheerfulness in the face of great pain, and as we learn as he begins to reveal his secrets, great sorrow. Coixet, having drawn us in finally, and at some risk of loosing us, keeps pulling us into the story, and into the two stories Josef and Hannah are telling. Josef begins to draw her out, and finally, telling a great secret makes her laugh at last in its seeming silliness. Subsequently the secret shared becomes the powerful closing emotional peg of the movie. Odd little bits of information appear and are left to float, puzzlingly, even irritatingly for some, until the context appears later and the aha! comes. There is a scene in which the engaging Spanish cook brings and feeds another wonderful dish to Josef. The two begin verbally tussling over Hannah’s attractions when Simon (Javier Cámara) skewers Josef with “…since when could a single and unattached woman hold your attention?”‘ and Josef orders him out of the room, to the puzzlement of some reviewers. (What is the point of this bad temper? Why is Josef such a jerk? How could she like him?) Too bad. It’s another of the tiny, key moments, in which Josef’s partially self-induced pain is set up as a counter to Hannah’s entirely other-induced trauma. It is excellent work by a thoughtful and talented director. She is sure handed with other metaphors –of deafness and hearing aid as a response to the enormous cruelties of those she had trusted in, of swimming and fear of sea-monsters, of the importance of oysters…
Hannah remains quiet and withdrawn for a great long while. We begin to dread a Bergmanesque film with splashes of contemporary silliness, but Josef persists. He tells her stories of his life and through them, his fears. He keeps prodding her, playfully –“no fair, I tell you all and you tell me nothing,”– until finally, as we are witnessing, she is drawn out of the enormous shell of mistrust and desperate self-protection and trusts him enough to tell her story. In one of the most wrenching, compelling monologues I have ever witnessed in a movie, aided by a stunning piece of erotic jujitsu, almost all of it delivered sitting in a chair beside his bed, Hannah tells of her experience as a young woman of Dubrovnik, Croatia, at the hands of her “own soldiers.” She, and her best friend, both twenty years old were kidnapped and kept with 16 others in a “rape house,” during the entirely horrific and promptly forgotten, if ever known by many, Balkan (Yugoslav) Wars. Her story, delivered with every feature of her face and voice, is as if we are actually sitting near a very dear friend and hearing for the first time something that happened to her and which though we might have known, we didn’t, and which she has kept from us, unable to allow the memories to surface to be shared with others. Her voice and presence of re-lived anguish is doubled in power by the dialog of touch as Josef, still blind, begins to take in what she is telling him, his blind eyes starting in the disbelief of his own scarred face. It is an amazing ten minutes of film.
Prior to her revelation, Hannah had called the doctor and told him Josef should be taken off the oil rig; he was not healing fast enough. And so the helicopter comes. They leave, tightly holding hands until he is put in the ambulance in Ireland, expecting her to stay with him. She disappears. We see her return to her factory job and her silent, withdrawn existence. Josef recovers and leaves the hospital where he is handed Hanna’s backpack, which she had left, stuffed with personal items from his room including unopened letters from the lover we had noticed floating in the background. The final keys to the story click into place. The door is fully open.
In the weakest part of the film Josef tracks down a Copenhagen therapist, played by Julie Christie, and tries to get her to reveal Hannah’s location and biography to him. The scenes with Inge, based on real life Inge Genefke, founder of the The International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims, are too didactic for the tone and the elliptically allowed discoveries of the rest of the film. She takes Josef through a vast warehouse with shelves of accounts of others raped and brutalized, tortured and murdered in the Balkan — and presumably other– wars and speaks to him directly what we suppose are Coixet’s driving reasons for making the film. We cannot let these atrocities be forgotten. We must find, and heal, and through testimony not allow to be repeated such cruelties. Who can disagree with her? Yet for me the point was already being powerfully made. A quiet walk through the memoirs, with Josef picking up and putting down tape, and videos and diaries, with Inge saying their names, their suffering, their origins and mortal state would have continued the understated power of the film set up between the two main characters. In the closing credits Coixet thanks Peter Berger, the compelling British/French writer, for “helping her to see.” Perhaps the urgency of what she has seen, and wants more of us to share, over rode her artistic sense and instead of letting us discover quietly and personally, simply had to shout: sit up and listen!
Josef goes on to track Hannah down at the factory gate. He wants to be with her and she with him. She rejects him. She cannot go with him, she says because one day, she won’t know when, she will begin to cry and cry and cry until the whole room fills with her tears and they will both drown. We have already heard of Josef’s terrible fear of water and of drowning and as she begins to walk away again he calls out to her with his sweet, brave, hopeful — and, still Josef, quirky, line — “I can learn to swim.” It is a powerful moment, and yet understated –as it should be. Robbins is just simply terrific as a man whose sunny, jocular optimism has been reborn in the certain, real sadness and cruelty of life, both his and hers. It is a great role to which he does great justice. Hannah overcomes her muting, well founded, fear and walks to him. They touch, and embrace. The film comes to a swift close depicting them as married, with children, and yet the tiny, injured, terrified girl within her, whose voice we have head mysteriously throughout the film, still speaking from time to time, as it would in any of us. There are no permanently happy endings in life, only the eternal possibility of hope and human connection triumphing over evil, loneliness and despair.
Coixet has succeeded in doing what Tony Judt reminds us in his book Reappraisals: Reflections of the Forgotten Twentieth Century, that Primo Levi, Arthur Koestler, Manes Sperber and other Holocaust writers came to believe: Language is the only possible answer to human extremism and cruelty. Without language we have nothing. We must speak. We must not forget.
“The importance of language — that we can communicate and that we must communicate, that language is vital to humanity and the deprivation of language is the first step to the destruction of a man– was enforced within the camp (words were replaced by blows — “that was how we knew we were no longer men”); but it can be applied outside. Judt, 57
And Coixet reminds us it is not just the Shoah we must not forget, unique of course in human history, but not as unique was some have come to believe. By remembering, and knowing, by use of words we begin to heal, to reconnect, make life in hope and life-giving possible for those who are, and are still to come.