THE GREAT BEAR MINUS TWO (1)
By Abdelfatteh Fakhfakh

Article in the magazine “Le Cinephile”, published by the Tunisian association for the promotion of film criticism.

Listening to the reality of madness and… letting it speak

“La Osa Mayor menos dos” is set in the psychiatric hospital in Leganés, province of Madrid, Spain, one of the centers where the Spanish psychiatric reform of 1987 was carried out.
It accompanies, in alternation, two groups of mental patients: one is a group of elderly patients, with an average age of 70, considerably incapacitated, heavily dependent, cared for in the hospital’s Residential Unit, where they are lodged, with no other therapeutic alternative; and a second group, fairly large, in supervised residence –in the hospital’s Rehabilitation Unit-, made up of younger patients, with an average age of 30 and whose possibilities of rehabilitation and reinsertion are greater. Their stay is, in principle, limited to six months, although some stay there longer.
David Reznak’s film is an unconventional film that doesn’t follow any format. It doesn’t take the easy road. It demands that the spectator make an effort to concentrate, to listen, to reflect. But, what happiness and what pleasure when the mechanism is activated and we “get into” the film.

Seeing yourself… recognizing yourself… accepting yourself

From the first scenes, the film gets straight to the point. After some informative still images which present the psychiatric institution (question of context) we find ourselves in the Residential Unit where, one by one, the patients are given their own photos and asked if they recognize themselves, if they think they are good looking and if they like their photos.
The reactions vary from one patient to another, they go from the most exultant happiness to complete indifference, and even the violent rejection of one’s own image. (“My God! I’m so ugly! I’ve got no teeth left.” says Virtilia). After a few words between the patients and the director, we next find them in the gym where, helped by their monitor, they carry out personalized physical exercises, each according to his own rhythm and capacities.
Next, in the Rehabilitation Unit, the director lets a young woman speak. She is “indignant”, she doesn’t understand why she’s there – she’s not the only one to make that kind of observation- and she reproaches her mother for having taken her there. She speeds up in a long monologue that, at first, is completely coherent, but whose discourse rapidly goes off the rails and “gets away from her”, she says one thing and then the opposite, she gets confused, her statements becomes “contradictory”, “incoherent”, “confused”, she realizes this and feels uncomfortable.

Just after, she gets her confidence back, sweeps away her discomfort with a wave of her hand, starts again with more force and announces, in an equally indignant tone, that she can’t stand others looking at her. She specifies that she doesn’t dare look anyone directly in the eye, just at the moment when, “paradoxically”, she is staring at the director, who points this out to her. She carries on talking, declaring her rejection of the hospital, of her “fellow” patients, whom she says she doesn’t like and who are “contagious”.
David Reznak announces his discourse through these initial sequences: “Allowing the persons being filmed -patients in a psychiatric hospital- to talk, speak, communicate what they want to communicate, and making them see themselves, recognize themselves, with the hope of easing their suffering in some way, helping them to live and allowing others (parents, friends relatives…) to listen to them better, to understand them better and communicate better with them.”

The documentary film… or, reality… reread and reinterpreted

The director shows, gradually, progressively, brush stroke by brush stroke, sequence by sequence, in a specific way, that it is possible to deal with mental illness cinematically in an open way without necessarily coming up against certain obstacles: mystification of mental illness, clichés and stereotypes, voyeurism, the search for sensationalism.
As regards the script, David Reznak prefers to rely more on direction than on a script as such. He advances without “a prioris”, “naively”, over the terrain without being too prepared, preferring to let reality speak, express itself, settling at times for filming what is offered to him, while he lies in wait; ready to catch any opportunity where beauty may show itself, without warning, without being invited, aware that the fact of recording reality doesn’t make a film.
The director knows that the documentary is, when all’s said and done, “rereading”, “reinterpretation” and subjectivity and that it isn’t enough to let the camera film what is there, what is happening, in reality, in front of him, in an indifferent way in order to get a documentary film. He also knows that this implies “a look” in order to follow a character, in order to place the camera in the right place, at the precise distance and, much later, during the editing, rewrite the film and make the necessary selections. Obliged, in appearance, to restore “crude reality”, the documentary nevertheless is still a cinematic work, which must achieve a poetic and metaphorical dimension.

Real people but each one gifted with his “story”

On another level, the spectator tends –in particular in a documentary film- to compare the screen with harsh reality, because the documentary shows real people and not characters, authentic situations and not situations previously written and conceived. But, all things considered, David Reznak’s film, a documentary film par excellence, encloses a narrative and tells various stories.
These stories are not “remote controlled”. They come up, in a natural, roundabout way, in the course of a conversation, an exchange… The stories are much more emotive because the “actors” who are “performing” them are none other than the flesh and blood people who are moving in front of us daily, whom we see in the gym or the restaurant, in the hospital patio, at a carnival party, during an excursion to the monastery or to Franco’s tomb, and who can be relaxed or nervous, chatty, exuberant, trapped by verbosity, or absent, silent and mute. Several of these stories could in turn be, each one separately, the subject for a fiction film, for a documentary: such is the case of that young concert musician (a horn player) who decides to go back to music after a long period of illness, or Carmen, a dancer since she was 14, who gave up dancing because of illness and who says she is “totally destroyed” by medication or even “sweet” “Isabel” who has the gift of communicating with some stars and who has “special” glasses gifted with a supernatural power.

Madness and its primitive force of revelation

The director was very interested in letting these men and women speak, he wanted to help them express themselves without forcing them, he has gone to them with a camera which he knows has a force, a camera that he has known how to “contain” and he has made them familiar with its presence.
Listening to those people, at times considerably prejudiced, he knew there was a risk of getting an “incoherent”, “disconnected” discourse, he was aware of that, and it was one of his “gambles”… Madness has a primitive force of revelation: it reveals that what is oneiric is real, that the tenuous surface of illusion is limitless. All reality is reabsorbed by the fantastic image… (we can read in the film’s synopsis).
When dealing with mental illness, cinema has an unusual opportunity to develop visions that would educate our look, that would relate it and give it unknown ways to exercise, to develop. David Reznak has tried to communicate to us, in his way, the vision of those who heard noises, voices (inaudible to us), who saw things (invisible to us) because they saw them from inside and which, for that reason, we couldn’t see by ourselves.
When “Isabel”, one of the patients, says she communicates with the sun and the moon, is isn’t an illusion, it isn’t a hallucination, it’s really true, the sun and the moon talk to her, truly, and they say things to her that she tells us immediately, as it’s happening, with an amazing “precision”.

The importance of establishing a relationship of trust with those who are being filmed

The director has voluntarily avoided any scene that shows the patients in a crisis situation. On the contrary, he has filmed them daily, with their moments of “truth”, their moments of depression, of sadness, of melancholy, of disorder, of non-communication, but also of rebellion and rage.
David Reznak has filmed the patients with great tact and respect. But here respect doesn’t mean hiding reality. The directory doesn’t “mystify”, just the opposite. Mental illness is made up of moments of passivity, of absence, and also of pain; of shouting, of “violence”, it is above all made up of sufferings, some visible at first sight, others internal and hard to see.
In the end, one gets the impression that the director hasn’t filmed patients but people who, it’s true, sometimes talk “in a strange way”, who at times have “unexpected” “strange” behavior , but whom we end up accepting just as they are, as the director invites us to do.
He has made sure to show us scenes “when nothing happens”, scenes of “ordinary life in a psychiatric hospital” –that we could compare mistakenly with a “report”- alternating them with scenes that are much more “personalized”, scenes in which we follow a group, a patient, from A to Z and in which the director tackles certain subjects such as parent-child relationships and their impact on mental illness, the painful memories of the Spanish civil war, the anguish of the passing of time and the feeling certain patients have of being in stalemate…
Here, the duration of the director’s takes is a way of capturing a face, a body, a word, a “journey”. David Reznak takes time to film, he never does things in a hurry or shoddily, and one guesses –from his work- that he must have spent a lot of time without filming.
We imagine him, more than once, coming up to a group, leaving the camera, positioning himself and, suddenly, the patients come up to him, they talk to him, they touch him, they get close to him, with a real physical proximity.
With or without the camera, proximity has been established in the relationship. The result has been that, with the camera, David Reznak has filmed at a person’s height, at a person’s distance, as if he had taken the framework of a conversation at a “permanent” reference.
It’s obvious that he has managed to put in parenthesis the cinema’s relationship with the people he is filming, as if he were only chatting and having an exchange with them. But, having said that, he knows that when one is filming one has a responsibility with regard to the image, the framing, the duration of the shots.
If the film is beautiful and rich, it is not only due to the interior scenes, the “intimist” scenes. There are also very beautiful exterior scenes, bright, sunlit scenes, with great panoramas and aerial views of countryside, of monuments, accompanying the group on excursions, and all that allows the film and the character to emerge from the shadow, get their breath back, get some fresh air, fill their lungs.

“La Osa Mayor menos dos” is David Reznak’s first feature length film. The filmmaker, whose shorts we haven’t seen (he’s made five) is promising. We consider this film one of the most interesting made in recent years about mental illness. It recalls recent French films (and others, perhaps Spanish?) inspired by the same spirit and which have gone on the same quest, that is: “To listen to the reality of “madness” and… to let it speak”, for until now cinema, whether fiction or documentary, has reduced “madness” to a pretext and has often used it much more to talk about something else than to really let it speak.

Abdelfatteh FAKHFAKH
Film critic, Tunisia May 2007

(1) “La Osa Mayor menos dos” (The Great Bear Minus Two), the title of the film, refers to the famous constellation of stars called The Great Bear which is made up of 7 stars, but has been reduced to 5 by one of the patients in the hospital.