Bethani Mosher | Always / 2022

falling in love again

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bethani Mosher (screenwriter and director) Always / 2022 [20 minutes]

Camden (Melany Smith) is in a serious car accident, rushed in on a gurney as a bloody victim in the first scenes of this film. In a couple of days, however, she reawakens from her comatose condition, now surrounded by her father (Tom Carney), mother (Rose Grade), and sister (Alex Papiccio). She has some aspects of “recent-event” amnesia, and cannot remember the accident, her own apartment, nor any other relationships she might have had in the recent past. The parents according tell her that they have hired a caretaker, Ella (Heaven Devera) to be with her full time.

      Ella, presumably filled-in by her parents, remembers her favorite foods and has a full knowledge of Camden’s apartment, caring for her, feeding her, and providing her company for the next several weeks.

     We watch as Camden begins to fall in love with Ella, while, not even sure of her own sexuality, being afraid to tell her and admit to the all-too common syndrome of falling in love with one’s doctor or nurse. She questions Ella about her own past relationships, the nurse only recounting that she had someone with whom she was very much in love, but the relationship became, “well, complicated.”

     Camden, however, does tell her sister about her growing feelings for the wonderful woman with whom she has now been living night and day.

     We now begin to suspect the truth, that in fact Ella was her fiancée before the accident, and has remained at Camden’s side performing as her nurse with the hopes that she might regain her memory and their relationship return to normal.

     We might have perceived this fact even earlier in the film if we had realize called that the Irving Berlin song “Always” was the tune that clairvoyant Madame Arcati used to call up the previous dead wife of the central male figure Charles in Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit (1945).*

      Now Camden’s sister Carina insists the time has come for Ella to tell Camden the truth, despite what the doctors had previously argued. But Ella is fearful that if she does so, Camden will be confused and angry for her having lied to her for so long.

      The truth, however, does come out when looking for her scissors, Camden opens a small box from where a picture of her and Ella falls out, the two of them embracing and very much in love.

     In order to maintain the narrative viewpoint of Camden, director Bethani Mosher has kept her audience in the dark as well, but now they know the truth, she intercedes several times with flashbacks, presenting us with another view of the day of the accident when Ella receives the terrible news of Camden’s loss of memory and yet another scene where they made their original vows while lying side by side in bed.

 

     Those “interruptions,” postponing Camden’s reaction about finding the photograph, break up the emotional thrust of the story, so that when the narrative finally returns to witness Camden’s sense of shock, along with her complete appreciation of Ella’s painful secret and her joy in the realization that her new love for Ella has made it seem as if she has fallen in love with her all over again, her feelings hardly register for us. We already know that is no other way that she might react. In short, by delaying the expected response, Mosher has even further erased any wonderment to Camden’s sudden discovery.

      An added coda, “six months later,” in which we discover Camden having suddenly regained her memory and is seen sharing that celebratory moment with Ella, again seems unnecessary. The very fact that she has fallen in love all over again with the same person establishes the fact that Ella is Camden’s true love and that their marriage should immediately proceed. Being told what we already have intuitively known, makes the ending seem almost meaningless and the film as a whole unnecessarily overlong.

     Perhaps if we had been let in on the truth of the situation from the very beginning, we might have shared far greater sympathy with the beautiful Ella and fully comprehended her frustrations as opposed to simply witnessing a love in process. To realize that the love Camden begins to feel for her caretaker was always there creates an ironical tension that might have given the film the full weight that Mosher obviously intended for this somewhat sad and wistful romantic comedy.

 

Los Angeles, August 14, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2023).

 

*A similar pattern of the dead returning in the body of another being tested for their abilities to remember their former lover occurs in Alexander Hall’s Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941), remade by Warren Beatty and Buck Henry as Heaven Can Wait (1978).