The tightly circumscribed world of John May (beautifully played with a gentle intensity by Eddie Marsan) is a grey, well-ordered and wholly predictable one in Uberto’s Pasolini’s latest film Still Life.
Employed by the council in the South London district of Kennington for 22 years to track down the often-ambivalent, and sometimes hostile, long lost relatives of ratepayers who have died alone, May’s job is a thankless one, situated deep within the bowels of an anonymous government building where he sits alone, carefully following up clues, no matter how obtuse, that will reunite, if only for the funeral, the dead and their estranged relatives.
A famously fastidious man, who takes the time to hang his coat just so, or move his seat out just far enough out from the desk to allow him to sit down (and who has already bought a plot of land in the local cemetery just in case), he is an anachronism in age of endless, ruthless efficiencies, taking whatever time is needed to find missing family members, holding off on disposing of the ashes of the nearly-anonymous dead for as long as possible in the hopes that his dedicated sleuthing on multiple open cases will bear some fruit.
Far from being a cold, disillusioned cog in the government machine, intent only on ticking boxes and closing cases, the softly-spoken man of few words, is heavily emotionally invested in the work he does, organising funerals even if it is simply he and the priest of whatever faith in question present, crafting flowery eulogies that he conjures up on the basis of carefully-collected trinkets, mementoes and photos from the homes of the deceased.
It’s clear from the care he takes with each case that these are no coldly abstract bureaucratic tasks he is engaged in – he cares about every single last one of these people, carefully filing their photos away in a large, voluminous blue photo album he keeps at home, almost as if he is impelled by a need to remember them even if no one else will.
And as you see him going about his singularly insular existence in his sparsely-decorated small grey London flat where dinner is always an uncooked tin of tuna, dry toast, tea and an apple (carefully peeled of course), and ironically titled CDs like “The Joy of Life” and “Magical Greece” line the shelves, you begin to appreciate why he cares so much.
He, like so many people in modern society where single-person households make up anywhere between 25-40% of dwellings, is one of the very people he is looking after in death, lost souls with no family or friends, a fact he doesn’t seem to explicitly acknowledge in the often-wordless scenes where Marsan’s enormously expressive eyes and facial expressions are effectively used in place of what would superfluous dialogue but which by his actions must weigh on his heart and mind.
While he is contact with a large range of people over the course of his day, his interactions are rote and always at a distance, working acquaintanceships rather than friendships, all denoted by the use of honorifics such as Mister and Ms., all only occurring because of the need to be in close proximity rather than the willingness to do so.
Even when he is let go by the cruelly casual council manager, who deems him surplus to requirements and too costly given his propensity for funerals and reuniting the dead and the living, something which is dismissed as unnecessary because “the dead aren’t here, they don’t care”, there is no sense that any of these people mattered to him or he to them in any meaningful fashion.
It is a telling symptom of our supposedly closer social-media saturated world that where people should be ever more connected, many are in fact ever more isolated, ever more alone, casualties of a world in where the socially challenged, whether by choice or fate, end up on the forgotten margins of society, remembered only by kindred lost souls by May.
It isn’t until he meets Kelly Stoke (Joanne Froggatt, Downton Abbey who is brilliant as the quietly sad dog lover May is drawn to), the long-estranged daughter of his final case, alcoholic Billy Stoke who died rather too close to home for May in the block of flats behind his own where he lay undiscovered for 40 days, that he begins slowly to come alive.
Kelly Stoke, like John May, is an isolated soul, with each drawn to the other by the shared, unspoken need to finally, meaningfully connect with another human being after lives lived in the shadow of events that drove them from the mainstream of society.
The blossoming friendship between the two, which in the spirit of many European movies which eschew the happily-ever-after predilections of standard Hollywood fare does not quite end up where you might expect it to, is a celebration of every person’s basic need to connect and matter to someone.
Still Life owes its richness and depth, its emotionally-affecting musings on the nature of community and connection to Marsan who, resident in every scene, brings a humanity to a man who could easily have been rendered as a joyless, socially-awkward caricature.
That he is a sympathetic man is testament to both Marsan’s gift for nuanced acting, and Pasolini’s deft direction which relies on small, touching moments to convey both May’s isolation and his unexpected slow freeing from its grip.
While the ending is a little over the top and too obvious after the admirable, affecting restraint of the rest of the film, Still Life is a gentle, poignant experience, a reminder that we should both cherish those we love, but remain on the look out for those without those nurturing bonds, people who might otherwise slip unnoticed into the oblivion of death where only the John Mays of the world care to go after them.