To Dust, written by Jason Begue and Shawn Snyder, directed by the latter - Nine out of 10

To Dust, written by Jason Begue and Shawn Snyder, directed by the latter

Nine out of 10

Love in the Time of Cholera is a Magnum opus by the Columbian Nobel Prize winner, fabulous author of One Hundred Years of Solitude – that the under signed has loved most of the novels by Gabriel Garcia Marquez – and Autumn of the Patriarch - http://realini.blogspot.com/2014/07/autumn-of-patriarch-by-gabriel-garcia.html …

To Dust might remind viewers of Love in the Time of Cholera because there is a very outré love story in the motion picture and alas, we are living in a time of a deadly disease, though Alhamdulillah this is much less catastrophic, that is spreading all over the world, has forced populations indoors and therefore in front of television sets to watch anything…even a couple of mad men that burry a pig, trespass on a field with…decomposing corpses – though the latter is actually arguable, for they do not exactly manage to enter, except for the head of Shmuel, who would be ecstatic almost about what he will have seen decaying there (!) – All in the name of a twisted love.

Geza Rohrig is the outstanding Hungarian actor that has helped massively the remarkable work of art Son of Saul winner of The Academy Award and The Golden Globe for Best Picture in a Foreign Language and many other trophies, and he has the leading role in To Dust, where he is Shmuel, a Hasidic cantor in upstate New York…a remarkable performance, though it might have gone a bit too far in the moments when the grieving cantor becomes aggressive, compensated nonetheless by the brilliant manner in which the mostly gentle, withdrawn, sad, tormented, even when agitated widower is manifesting during prayer and the quite frequent moments of jocularity…

The wife of the hero has died and commendably, well, up to a reasonable point, he is lamenting her passing and suffers a lot – we can see this so well on the face of Geza Rohrig who is Perfect when transmitting to the audience these deep emotions of pain – as he has done, again flawlessly, in the much more appreciated Son of Saul – but he is also exaggerating when he takes this trauma to a bizarre and ultimately funny level…

Shmuel has nightmares – and this obviously he can do nothing, perhaps not much is better said about – but apart from those obsessive images of death he sees when asleep, the most recent of which has the toe of his late wife’s foot falling off, when awake, the cantor keeps entertaining these morbid thoughts and furthermore, he works to enhance, prolong and then take them to an absurd zone, which will make this a tragic comedy.

He talks to the rabbi that wisely advices restraint – he reminds me of the Harvard Professor Tal Ben-Shahar, whose lectures are available on YouTube, and his story that has an unhappy man come for advice to another rabbi, who advises first to have the chicken, then the pig, finally the horse in the house, to the dismay of the farmer, who is anyway so elated when the adviser ultimately says that he should take all animals out of the house in the ultimate Gratitude Exercise, that teaches one to be grateful for what he or she has, since we never know when a pandemonium would strike…wait, we do know…it just did http://realini.blogspot.com/2017/07/positive-psychology-on-youtube-by.html

Shmuel is obsessed with the putrefaction of the corpse of his beloved and now expired spouse and instead of experiencing PTG – Post Traumatic Growth, which some stronger, more resilient humans can, after being placed in tough, dramatic position – he is almost taken down by PTSD – the more familiar Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and he resorts to some quite outlandish maneuvers to sooth his troubled mind, venturing to find about the state of the cadaver form a community college nearby, where he enters the class of professor Albert aka wonderful Matthew Broderick, who has had one of his best roles when he was so young, in the extraordinary Glory - http://realini.blogspot.com/2019/11/glory-based-on-books-by-peter-burchard.html

Albert proves to be just as bizarre, if not worse, considering that he has not had the maddening loss of a dear one to trouble his mind so much, but the fact that he smokes marijuana and probably experiments with various other intoxicants would explain to a large extent the cooperation in increasingly farfetched, ludicrous acts that are meant to bring solace to the widower, if we take the generous, kind angle and represent the manifestations of crazy men, if we have another perspective…on the other hand, so many tens of millions resonate with the Cantor in the White House, so what is there to wonder about when these two bury a pig…

’Very stable geniuses’

The biology professor is admittedly reluctant to help the one he calls ‘rabbi. Repeatedly, but after many messages and seeing that this is truly a suffering man, Albert decides to look at the case, scientifically and then show the video of the body of a piglet, which had been crushed by the mother, and then placed on the ground to decay, in the interest of science…the two debate on the matter of the parallel between this piglet and the corpse of the wife, and the details are different – one is just there on the earth and the other To Dust, as the tile puts it, buried in the Hasidic tradition, in a shroud, then a pine coffin with holes at the bottom to be in touch with the earth…

One amusing scene has the cantor enter a funeral parlor where he asks about the different coffins, this is before he resorts to the ‘expert’ Albert, and he puts all kinds of questions, increasingly suspicious and over the top to the man in the show room, asking about what happens to the body …the man says that ‘it is embalmed and then placed inside in ‘pristine’ condition, but as to what will have happened next, well, he has no idea, they never check on that…ending the conversation, after it is clear and stated that ‘there is going to be no sale’ with ‘look, I am just a salesman, the bodies disintegrate, right…I have no fucking idea on how that happens…words to that effect