Generic hybridity and ageing discontents: a balance between comedy and drama in Vivir dos veces

When taking into consideration the production of European films about ageing in the twenty-first century, one of the potential avenues for exploration is the engagement of films with genre. How are films with ageing characters or that deal with themes on ageing articulated through genre? Which are the most common genres and how are some of the more common themes dealt with in each of them? The question becomes especially prevalent when genre hybridity comes into play and organises the ageing themes in some of the relevant films for AGE-C to consider.

The example of the Spanish film Vivir dos veces/Live twice, love once (Maria Ripoll, 2019) illustrates some of the issues that arise from a closer genre study. Vivir dos veces deals with the topic of dementia, as retired university professor Emilio (Óscar Martínez) gets diagnosed with Alzheimer’s at the beginning of the film. Somewhat estranged from his daughter Julia (Inma Cuesta) and granddaughter Blanca (Mafalda Carbonell), despite their best efforts, Emilio starts getting closer to them as the illness progresses. Emilio realises that, before losing his memories, he would like to speak one last time with his youth love, Margarita (Isabel Requena), whom he has loved all his life but has not seen in fifty years. Julia and Blanca help Emilio in his search, while the episodes of cognitive deterioration get increasingly more intense. Ultimately, Emilio and Margarita reunite in the same retirement home where, unburdened by the memories of an entire life, they can start a new relationship together.

Vivir dos veces is interesting to analyse from the perspective of genre and ageing because it constitutes a generic hybrid. The first part of the film, in which Emilio is conscious of his condition but still self-aware, functions as a comedy. Emilio is a proud and grumpy man who refuses to have a television or a mobile phone and spends his time reading and resolving mathematical problems. The comedy derives from Emilio’s grumpiness towards his family and the medical system, from the intergenerational relationship that is established between him and his granddaughter and, while the symptoms of the dementia are mild, from the situations derived from Emilio’s forgetfulness. However, after the turning point of meeting Margarita and realising that she is suffering from dementia too, Emilio’s illness advances inexorably and the film cannot keep the appearance of a comedy anymore, turning for its last fifteen minutes into a realistic drama that focuses on the day to day of dementia and the politics of care within the family, until the final, romantic conclusion.

How to understand the film, then, as a comedy or as a drama? It can be useful to resort to Jacques Derrida’s understanding of the “law of genre” as a “law of impurity”. That is, no single narrative belongs purely to just one genre, but is rather criss-crossed by a variety of them that may appear hierarchically, or not. In The Secret Life of Romantic Comedy, Celestino Deleyto elaborates on the Derridean idea of impurity to propose that the study of genre should not be undertaken top-down, by assigning films to genres, but bottom-up, by analysing how films engage with specific conventions of different genres that coexist and add up to conform a film’s meaning. Such approach enables for flexibility and a more discrete understanding of the different linguistic elements that are combined to create signification in film.

As applied to Vivir dos veces, this approach conveys crucial questions for AGE-C to explore. While the symptoms of Alzheimer’s are mild and Emilio’s identity remains fairly constant, the film develops a familiar array of comedic conventions: the grumpy old man, his encounter with new technologies and a granddaughter that is equally headstrong, or the unexpected situations that his occasional forgetfulness can create. However, once the illness becomes irreversible, the film flips to conventions and aesthetics of the drama, utilising several strategies. For instance, the comedic refusal of Emilio to watch TV or handle a mobile phone becomes dramatic montage sequences in which he only seems to be entertained by basic humour on television. Another example of drama through montage sequence occurs when Julia is trying to feed Emilio throughout a period of time, and the scene of supper gets repeated with Emilio alternatively refusing to eat, behaving like a child or being unresponsive.

The question, then appears: what are the limits of comedy and drama when it comes to portraying dementia, or other day-to-day realities of the ageing process? How is meaning about ageing conveyed through the conventions of genre, and how is that flexibility used to create more or less complex takes on ageing? How to approach these issues from the European perspective of the AGE-C project?

Written by: Luis Freijo

Image credit: Vivir dos veces, 2019. Spain: Filmax.

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