BEFORE WE GO

The departure tactfully hinted at in the title is the final one. A woman and two men share a weighty piece of knowledge: their death is imminent. Before immobility becomes inevitable, they choose to move again, feel again, share again. At La Monnaie opera house in Brussels, backstage or on the sumptuous stage, in a place dedicated to art and to the transcendence of pain, this woman and those men meet musicians, choreographers, dancers, and with them they move, listen, and try to delicately seize the day, however fleeting it might be. Jorge Leon engages in a high-risk venture: he means to intertwine the brutality of pain and demise with the very things that stubbornly withstand them. It is a dance of death —as clearly alluded at some point in the film— only the other way around: indeed, the still-living, assisted and reinforced by art, earn their dignity by facing not death but the terror it entails. Art and our finiteness have rarely been connected in such a finely observed, modest and moving way. (JPR) Jorge Léon