The main character Helen (charming Vicki Crips) is seriously ill. She herself interprets her diagnosis as “idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis”; where “idiopathic” means doctors don’t understand how to treat it. In simple terms: Helen will suffocate and die in the near future from lack of oxygen. There is a ghostly chance to fight for your life – waiting for a donor lung transplant, but the transplant doesn’t guarantee salvation.
Helen decides to fill her lungs with air in her own way: she meets a mysterious Norwegian man on the Internet hiding behind the alias Mister. He too is ill, lives by the fjords and, like Helen, is looking for his own way of dying. Having found a soul mate, Helen takes off and goes to Norway. There are unknowns ahead, but at least one of his own choosing and not prescribed by doctors.
The drama “More Than Never” is mistakenly referred to as the last drama in the career of Gaspard Ulliel, who died tragically in early 2022. In fact, this is his penultimate painting, but no less burned with tragic fatalism. Hero Ulliel Mathieu is Ellen’s husband and an example of an ideal wife. Compassionate and gentle, he protects his wife, does not let her get lost in his fate.
But Helen’s attempts to quench her thirst for life become more painful each time. As soon as Helen enters the room, infrequent meetings with friends break into a general mournful silence. And Mathieu’s desire to be constantly near her partner turns into a suffocating hug: Helen has no room to breathe in this over-caring.
This isn’t the first time director Emily Atef has mentioned the finitude of human existence. She previously made a movie about a woman who no longer exists (“Three Days with Romy Schneider”) and a woman who kills others (“Killing Eve”). However “More than Ever” seems to be the most piercing portrait of life destined to face death.
“The living cannot understand the dead,” Mister says in one of his secret conversations with Helen. This is exactly why Mathieu fails to understand that what separates him from his separated wife is not an external but an internal distance. The heroine Vicky Crips has already passed this milestone and has spent the priceless last days of her life refusing to make fruitless attempts to hold on to him.
Helen is much more interested in looking at the mountains and the waves of water, listening to the rustle of leaves and breathing the rest of the available air with a full chest. She wants to save herself from sympathetic looks and her husband from embarking on this terrible road with her.
Vicki Crips last year “Corsage” already tried to make a deal with life and escaped from the latter not literally, but allegorically. The Bavarian heroine Elizaveta did not fit into the strict framework of the noble life of the middle of the 19th century and, tired of fighting, decided on fraud – instead she released a stuntman, whose face was hidden by a dark shawl. . In the movie Atef, the hero Krips refuses to hide, but his escape seems no less poetic – even without the help of a stuntman.
“More than Never” is a calm and beautiful funeral film that sees Helen on her last journey. The film slows the flow of life and provides an almost intimate atmosphere for conversation: for those who no longer have anyone to talk to and those who are ready to listen.
The ancient Egyptian “Book of the Dead”, describing rituals of separation from life, describes the Egyptian belief that after death, before that, a person’s entire soul is torn apart. But if, with the help of correctly performed rituals, all its parts could be preserved, the soul of the deceased, freed from his body shell and endowed with magic, continued to exist in the form of Ah – pure air.
Atef’s painting brings Helen to this opportunity to breathe for the last time, she does not regret her choice and does not allow the living to dictate her desire to die. The movie raises many philosophical and ethical questions that, of course, do not have a single correct answer. But strangely enough, after the story about the acute lack of vital oxygen, the person breathes more easily and calmly than usual.