Beware spoilers...

1.
En therapie (In Therapy)
2021, Eric Toledano and Olivier Nakache

A very popular French adaptation of an Israeli precursor (BeTipul), En therapie is an unusual series. In 35 short (25-minute) episodes, we follow the sessions of Dr Philippe Dayan, a French psychotherapist. (The terminology surrounding this profession is complicated, I discover. "Psychotherapist" is the umbrella term that covers all professionals trained to help people with emotional problems. Philippe is colloquially referred to throughout as the "psy".)

We meet five of his patients, plus Esther, his supervisor. Peripherally, we also meet various family members (including Philippe's, who are far from modelling balance and domestic harmony).

The series is set in 2015, just after the gun attacks and suicide bombings in Paris that killed 130 people, and injured hundreds more (the trial started just the other day). The terrible violence directly affected only two of the patients (the policeman and the surgeon, for both of whom the trauma of the attacks awakens deeper hurts). But the changed mood of Paris takes its toll on Philippe, and it has created an edgier world for the other patients too, even though they might not be conscious of that.


A beautiful region that has known its share of trauma: Poso, Sulawesi, Indonesia, 2013





En therapie is highly verbal (learning the lines must have been hell), very intense, and very cerebral (we are not spared a lot of names of psychoanalysts and discussion of their theories).

It was certainly thought-provoking. My problem, though, was that I didn't really like most of the characters...

Young Camille, yeah, she was OK. A young woman from a broken home, who has had to look elsewhere for love and reassurance, and has not always found the right places. (Sexual exploitation by older men is a theme that emerges several times, as is the theme of parental loss -- through the death, depression, or desertion of a mother or father.)

The psy himself you start by liking, and empathizing with. He's a great example of how this process works. He listens. He pays attention. He points out to people the things they've said, and the connections they've made but are maybe not conscious of. He absorbs their emotion, rather than reacting to it. But his bizarre slide off the rails at the end, as he pursues his former patient, Ariane, just makes him look pathetic (as -- to give him his due -- he realizes). I find it hard to empathize with older men's fantasies, and this one is just downright unethical.

Esther, the supervisor, is cold and isolated. You really wonder, though, why she keeps putting up with Philippe, given his constant hostility... Ariane, the surgeon, comes across as wounded, but manipulative, insensitive, and not particularly likeable. Damien and Leonora are the world's most impossible couple (and by the close, when they've decided to divorce, you imagine their unfortunate child sitting on some psychotherapist's couch in years to come).

The most intriguing character, by a country mile, is Adel. His repressed memories of a massacre in Algeria that he survived as a child stir to life again after his police intervention unit has to respond to the Bataclan attacks. He has lived his whole life in the shadow of his father's guilt and emotional unavailability, and at first he seems hell bent -- I guess we all are -- on repeating the same parental mistakes. Later, he takes a different tack. But by choosing a different path from his father, he also chooses not to survive. The series is worth watching for Adel alone (fantastically well acted by Reda Kateb).







I wonder how many people the series has discouraged from becoming psychotherapists...  All Philippe's insight into how humans work has neither made him a happy man, nor given him the keys to sustaining a functioning family. And how much "success" does he meet with? Camille, certainly. Ariane, maybe (though despite him rather than because of him). The other patients -- well, their cases end in death and divorce. He himself -- we don't know, but it's not looking great. At least he's going to carry on talking to Esther, God help her...

On the whole, En therapie was received with approval by practising psychotherapists, and one quite detailed analysis (by Christine Chiquet, the president of the Ethics Commission of the French Federation of Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis) makes particularly interesting reading.

Chiquet feels the series is definitely worth watching. It's informative; it illustrates that psychotherapists have problems too, and don't necessarily get everything right; and it introduces us to the idea of supervision, which is an integral part of the profession.

However, she argues, the supervision element doesn't seem that credible. Philippe's breaches of ethics are treated too complacently, given that the whole point of supervision is to protect clients... And there's way too much baggage between these two (they have known each other in a variety of different roles in the past) to make this a viable supervisory relationship.

Chiquet (along with others) also comments that psychotherapists don't normally have to suck up quite such an enormous amount of hostility from their patients: "You already have to be doing very well (or very badly) to dare to get angry with your shrink!" And, again as others have pointed out, the whole process of therapy takes much, much longer than is depicted in a drama that inevitably has to telescope events.

Despite its inevitable concessions to narrative, it was a reflective and grown-up series, and as always after these psychologically probing stories, I came away wondering how any of us survive, when it's just so freaking tough to be a human being...





2.
1982
2019, Oualid Mouaness

This movie portrays traumatic events at one remove -- through the eyes of the pupils and teachers of an anglophone private school in Beirut during the summer of 1982.

The depiction draws heavily on the director's own experience. He was 10 in 1982.

It's hard for those of us privileged to have not lived through war to imagine how it must have been -- one minute you're doing your exams, and thinking about the summer holidays, and wondering how to tell your little friend that you love her, and the next your world is being encroached upon by bombs and fighter jets, and you're both heading home on the bus, while she worries about the safety of her family over in West Beirut.

Nadine Labaki, who plays teacher Yasmine, also remembers being evacuated from school at that time, "not knowing which bus to take, getting lost and not knowing where my sister was. I saw many of my teachers go through that same panic of not really knowing how to deal with the situation."

We learn about Lebanon's divisions through this little prism. Yasmine's brother's decision to join the Christian militia in the south puts her at odds with her boyfriend/colleague. And even if little Wissam manages to confess his love for Joanna, their location on opposite sides of the Green Line is going to make things difficult to say the least.

As Jared Mobarak points out, things will only get worse: "The dramatic layers of what we know is coming ... color every single action with as much danger as melancholy, since Mouaness has literally placed us at a point in time where Lebanon irrevocably changes. Those who were friends, lovers, and co-workers find themselves saying goodbye for what might be the last time."

Appropriately, then, there's a looming quality to this movie. We keep seeing tree-tops and skies. Then there are birds in the blue space. Then jets. Jay Weissberg praises the sound design, which "does much to create a potent sense of impending calamity as the blasts come nearer and the sense of dread takes on a tangible aural component". As the sound of explosions becomes more frequent, we hear talk of people fleeing. There is growing panic. We expect something to drop on the school or hit the bus. The pigeons that, unusually, had started to frequent the school gradually come closer, until finally they're walking the corridors now deserted by the human beings.







Yet Oualid Mouaness maintains that this is "a hopeful film".  It's hard to feel that hope. We know what happened. We know about the massacres just a few months later. And, as he tells us later in the interview, a significant number of schools were destroyed during this period, and they never came back. He specifically links the disruption of education with the slide into radicalization in the region. For the film-maker himself, the events of that day changed everything, and were the reason he and his family left the country.  He admits to having been scarred by this pivotal moment.

For all these reasons, "the film’s insistence that love wins ultimately falls flat".

But it's true that the story he tells celebrates the way humans try to survive despite the harshness that periodically engulfs our world. No-one personifies that better than Miss Leila, the rock-solid administrator whose task it is to organize transport to get the children home. What is powerful and moving here is the human attempt to keep going, to hold back chaos and terror by managing things well, and staying calm and decent.

Equally, Mouaness succeeds in depicting friction and fragmentation without victimizing or judging: "This was something that the Lebanese don't talk about in their films. They are scared to talk about it because they're avoiding politicizing things. My goal was to look for an honest and human way to show people and their own logic without disrespecting or undermining that logic."

Which is surely an honourable objective.







3.
Glory
2016, Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov

This is a Bulgarian movie, and the individual experience of trauma it depicts takes the form of humiliation, abandonment, and violence.

Tzanko is a railway linesman. His only companions in what seems to be a very simple life are his rabbits. One day he finds a sizeable sum of money dumped beside the railway line, and because he's honest and good-hearted, he reports this to the authorities. His colleagues (who are less scrupulous, and whose illicit fuel-siphoning activities we have already witnessed) make fun of him, but he feels he's done the right thing.

Which might all have been unproblematic, had Julia (the utterly selfish, utterly cynical PR director for the transport minister) not taken it upon herself to exploit the story as a bit of a distraction from the corruption allegations that are swirling around the ministry.  

She sends her team to interview Tzanko. He has a severe speech impediment, it turns out, so the exchange is not the crystalline sound-bite that Julia envisages. And when you see these shallow young spin-merchants openly laughing at the fragments of sound that are all Tzanko has been able to produce for the microphone, well, you just hate them. You know instantly and absolutely whose side you're on in all this.

Julia fudges the film clip by using a voice-over, and moves on to the next part of the spin: a little ceremony in which the minister thanks Tzanko, and presents him with a wristwatch. It's markedly inferior to his current timepiece (brand-name "Glory"), which he lovingly adjusts every morning. What is worse is that in order to provide the requisite footage (generous minister handing over reward watch), he has to surrender Glory to Julia, who promptly loses it. Completely unfamiliar with the superficiality of staged spin events, Tzanko tries to tell the minister about the stolen fuel. Predictably, his unavoidably halting words fall on purposefully deaf ears.







Julia is totally wrapped up in her glittering career, and also distracted by her ongoing fertility treatment (in which she actually seems fairly uninvested). She therefore has no patience with or comprehension of Tzanko's determination to recover his old watch, which was a present from his late father. She commands her underlings to do a thorough search, and when this turns up nothing, to provide a substitute. But of course the new Glory is conspicuously lacking the engraved inscription that made the original so personal and precious.

Enter another cynical manipulator, in the shape of Kiril, an investigative reporter. Keen to use Tzanko's fuel theft information as a rod with which to beat the ministry, he invites him onto his show. Kiril is completely uninterested in the watch, of course (which is the linesman's motivation for appearing at all), but he succeeds in getting Tzanko's fuel theft accusations, plus his testimony to the minister's failure to listen to him, publicly out on the airwaves. You wince, because you know this is going to come back to bite him.

Now Julia has to "fix" this too. Planted evidence lands Tzanko in a police lock-up, and he's allowed out only when he has been blackmailed into recording an apology to the minister.

The watch finally turns up, but by the time Julia delivers it, Tzanko has been well and truly done over by the fuel theft perpetrators...

The end is chilling and heart-breaking. You see Tzanko reach for the heavy tool he uses to tap the railway joints, you hear an intake of breath -- and then you're out in the car with Julia's long-suffering husband, who is playing jolly music as he waits for a return that we think is unlikely to happen.

As Glenn Kenny puts it, it's the ultimate "feel-bad movie".

It has lingered with me, this one. Utterly and painfully memorable.