While Ponette focuses on the experiences of an individual child trying to come to terms with a loss whose meaning she is trying to grasp, the incomprehensible grief suffered in The Sweet Hereafter is that of a community that loses 14 of its children in a school bus crash. Their pain and desire to see someone held accountable for these deaths leaves them easy prey for lawyer Mitchell Stephens (Ian Holm), who comes to the small town to initiate a class action lawsuit that will see the bereaved financially compensated. At the same time, Stephens is struggling with his relationship with his daughter, who is endangering her own life with her high-risk activities. 

The strength of Atom Egoyan’s film is this interplay between the individual and communal loss, given additional resonance by his appropriation of the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Despite their shared experience, their grief has, as Tolstoy would have it, made each unhappy family unhappy in its own way. How each copes with the aftermath is unique to them as they strive to recall, reshape, and retain memories that once seemed trivial but are now imbued with significance. In their own way, these adults are struggling just as much as Ponette to impose order and meaning on their tragedies. 

As with a number of films in this season, one of the primary themes here is how the living integrate their absent loved ones into their continuing lives. It is an experience common to us all that should bind us closer. Watching this human drama play out in the snowy wastes of Canada, we cannot help but think of Joyce’s incomparable short story as we see “the snow falling through the universe and falling, like the descent of their end, upon all the living and the dead.”

Notes by Kevin Coyne.

Screening as part of our season This Mortal Coil.