Well, it looks like I’ve gotten back to watching the weird stuff. You have to wonder what the folks in Montreal at Travelling were smoking when they came up with these scripts.
Actually, this one was a bit different. No, really. It was. I didn’t expect something like this. It was almost as good as this.
Our hero in this short film is a nurse (Mani Soleymanlou) that we see as he helps patients in and out of wheelchairs. And surprisingly, he doesn’t even screw up. I don’t know why I expected that. As he helps one twitching patient (Alexandre Vallerand), he joins the hospital bed with another so the patient gets to lie next to his girlfriend, who happens to be another patient (Maxime D. Pomerleau). After that, the nurse stares out the window with another patient in a wheelchair while the two patients have awkward hospital sex. Okay, I guess I saw that coming. But when two individuals are too disabled to get it on properly, they just have to make do with what they’ve got.
Nurse Mani continues his job in what is called the intimacy room helping the couple stay close together. Mani doesn’t feel comfortable doing one particular task for the two, and already the seriousness gets less toned down already.
There’s not much else to say. It’s pretty basic from there, the story starts out serious then gets kind of romantic then gets kind of silly, then gets heartwarming. The long pan at the end shows what hospitals should really be like nowadays. The camera work, lighting, and entire arrangement in everything was incredible, and despite the awkwardness, the story worked really well. It’s not often you see something as touching as this. Of course, I don’t know if hospitals would allow this, but it’d be nice if they did.