The Great Movies III

he old woman has just come from attending a funeral and knows her own is not far in the future. She is speaking with the young nurse who visits her daily. The actress, Sheila Florance, could be describing herself. She is bone thin, her arms like sticks, her face deeply lined. She was once a great beauty, but now what she has left is character.

Paul Cox's A Woman's Tale (1991) tells the honest, brave, and profoundly touching story of the last days of a seventy-eight-yearold woman named Martha (Florance), who lives with her memories and treasured possessions in a few rooms in a Melbourne rental complex and defiantly guards her independence. She knows she is dying and has shrugged off the last course of cancer treatment. She is in pain, but doesn't complain, and spends her days taking care of others: Billy, her senile neighbor, surrounded by his memories of the war; Miss Inchley, a sweet old lady as innocent as Martha is knowing; and even, in a way, her nurse, Anna (Gosia Dobrowolska).

The movie looks calmly and with love at the fact that life ends. It provides not one of those sentimental Hollywood deaths, poetic and composed, but a portrait of a woman who faces her decline with fierce pride. Florance herself was dying when the movie was made, knew it, and died a few days after winning an Australian Academy Award as best actress in 1991.

She was a grande dame of the Australian theater, a friend of Paul Cox's since the 1970s, and the film plays like her final testament-not least since some of Martha's memories are actually her own. She describes an aerial dogfight during the Battle of Britain, and it becomes immediate for us: the lumbering German bombers, the little Spitfires appearing out of nowhere, the noise! the noise! of the roaring engines and the guns and the explosions, and the shreds of airplane and body parts raining down on those below.

Martha is very ill, but gets around. She helps poor Billy (Norman Kaye), who is forever locking himself out of his room or wetting his pajamas. She is a good companion for Miss Inchley, who is ninety, taking her for walks in the park, where they chat with Martha's friend, the local prostitute. ("Do you know what a whore is, Miss Inchley?""Isn't that a rude word?" "Yes, it is.") Martha's nights are sleepless, and she passes them with her cigarettes and her cat, Sam, listening to talk radio. When a suicidal sixteen-year-old girl phones in, Martha calls to speak with her, to tell her how much there is to live for.

Martha's son, Jonathan (Chris Haywood), cares for her, but is very busy and has a wife who has long since fallen out with Martha. Jonathan thinks his mother would be better off in a nursing home. "Do you know how hard we work to keep these people out of homes?" asks the nurse Anna. She fights for Martha's independence because she respects it; she loves the old woman and has become like her daughter. Martha, in turn, lets Anna use her bedroom for an affair the nurse is having with a married man. "I'm going to die in this bed," she says, "and I want you to love in it."

Billy has a daughter, who never visits him. "We saw him at Christmas," the daughter tells Martha. "That was the one day we didn't see him," Martha replies tartly. She is a woman of power and confidence, a woman who insists on her dignity when the world wants her to give up and admit she is sick and go off somewhere convenient to die.

What a feisty defense she makes of her cigarettes in a no-smoking restaurant! She hides the worst of her pain from everyone, but we see her wracked with agonizing spells of coughing. In a scene of extraordinary courage, Cox and Florance show us Martha naked in her bath, her body pitifully gaunt, her mouth that must once have been so sensuous, now without lipstick, an anguished slash in a wrinkled face.

Her memories are of the war, when she was in Britain. "In Bristol," she tells Anna, "my ten-month-old baby was killed. A German dropped a bomb, and her lungs exploded." There is a nightmare in which she wanders in a wood, and restless dreams of falling water. She visits a waterfall with Miss Inchley and observes how the water seems to pause for a moment at the precipice, before disintegrating into exploding, falling drops, only to reassemble at the bottom as if nothing had happened. Is that what happens when we die? A Woman's Tale is too realistic and tactful to make such a greeting-card statement; it allows us to conclude what we will about Martha and her story.

The performance by Dobrowolska is essential to the film's impact. We see that she is efficient, a good visiting nurse, but that isn't the point. The point is that she loves and admires Martha and will fight for her, and Dobrowolska brings a natural, unforced sweetness and tenderness to the role. "How I envy your youth!" Martha says, and Anna smiles and says, "I'm not that young." Ah, but she is, and Martha tells her, "Life is so beautiful. Keep love alive."