Death: A Love Story

Video cameras are a commonplace in the delivery room. At the deathbed is another story. Life's final passage has never been considered a Kodak moment, but faced with the prospect of terminal liver cancer, Mel Howard, chairman of Boston University's Film Program, and wife Michelle Le Brun, an actress, producer and theater director, decided to record the experience on the screen. They wanted not just to make sense of their own trauma but to restore dignity and awe to this most terrifying, private, and debased transition. The result, the 64-minute documentary Death: A Love Story, is harrowing and exhilarating, with occasional lapses into glib new-agey bromides.

Underlying the home-movie glimpses of the frustrations and the chaos, of the hope and despair of their ongoing struggles with impersonal conventional therapy and alternative treatments -- should they do chemotherapy and a liver transplant? psychic healing and herbs? -- is the palpable growth of their faith in life and their own love. As Howard's body shrinks with the disease, his spirit rises to a shamanistic stature, and though the inevitable end is not shown with the graphic intensity of Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist (Le Brun shuts off the camera but records their last dialogue), it is in some ways more eloquent. For a medium maligned for its tawdriness in dealing with human intimacy and extremity, Death: A Love Story should win new respect.

-- Peter Keough