In contrast to Kurosawa’s Ikiru, a more socially-minded film about a man with a substantial number of years behind him, Isabel Coixet’s film stars Sarah Polley as clean-living 23-year-old Ann, wife to Don (Scott Speedman) and mother to two young daughters, who is given a few short months to live following a diagnosis of metastatic ovarian cancer. 

Ann’s reaction is more personal than that of her Japanese counterpart: her youth and the youth of her children make her all the more keenly aware of what her imminent death means, and she resolves to hide the truth from friends and family, and instead focus on what experiences she has missed out on to date and what she will miss from the decades she assumed she had left. To that end, top of her list is finding a replacement for herself as wife and mother, and to know love and sex with a man other than her husband, hitherto the only man in her life. Before she dies, she believes she has succeeded in both, thanks to new neighbour Ann (Leonor Watling) and lover Lee (Mark Ruffalo).  

Coixet’s film adroitly manages to avoid becoming a more traditional weepie in the style of Love Story (Arthur Hiller, 1970) or Beaches (Garry Marshall, 1988). While some of Ann’s behaviour may seem questionable, in the end it is the personal she prioritises, the happiness and wellbeing of those she will leave behind, making this her legacy. 

Notes by Kevin Coyne.

Screening as part of our season This Mortal Coil.