When words collide…

There’s a point in Isabel Coixet’s 2005 film The Secret Life of Words when a character asserts that everything is essentially an accident. It’s a fascinating statement from a story that features suicide, genocide and the act of voluntarily detaching from the world.

The statement makes you appreciate the idea that everything we do in life, from the very best to the most horrible, is not what we intended or imagined we would do because it’s not the situation we intended or imagined ourselves being in.

And for victims of unspeakable trauma, the fact that they survived is an accident as well. It’s perhaps the most difficult accident to process.

Coixet is a Spanish director, but the film takes place in Ireland and stars American actor Tim Robbins and Canadian actress Sarah Polley, who plays a Yugoslavian woman.

The Secret Life of Words screens next week as part of the Holocaust and Genocide Studies Project, a series sponsored by the Portland Center for Public Humanities.

Words is not a typical film about genocide, if there can even be such a thing. It’s primarily the story of two characters, and it paints a compelling portrait of what it means to be a survivor.

Polley plays Hanna, a partially deaf factory worker who is asked to take a vacation because her co-workers complain about her lack of social skills. On her holiday, she meets Robbins’ character, Josef, an oil rig worker who was badly burned and is temporarily blind.

She offers to become his nurse, probably because she can’t stand to be alone with nothing to do. Although Hanna reveals next to nothing about herself, it’s immediately clear she has been through something profound.

The scenes between Hanna and Josef are at first very stunted and uncomfortable: She refuses to tell him anything about herself, not even her real name, and even though she is helping with his bedpan and cleaning his entire body, he’s OK with making awkward sexual advances.

The subtle sexual undercurrent in the film feels much different than in many films—it’s realistic and unpleasant, even though Josef becomes more likable. There’s a decidedly unromantic feel to the relationship between them, and this movie is normally considered a love story, which I mean as a compliment.

The Secret Life of Words is slow, and in some ways it’s very odd. There’s an otherworldly child’s voice narrating portions of Hanna’s story that kind of reminded me of the cat’s voice in Miranda July’s The Future, and the identity of this voice isn’t explained.

Hanna begins to slowly come out of her shell while caring for Josef on the oil rig, and the big reveal of her horrific past during the Balkan Wars is delivered with stunning eloquence by the always amazing Polley.

But the idea of constructing a viable romance between the two characters sometimes seems bizarre. It takes so long to fully understand Hanna’s story that there’s not enough time left to understand her transformation—which is too bad, because both actors are great in their complex roles.

Following next week’s screening at the Oregon Holocaust Resource Center, Portland State professor Gregory Goekjian will lead a discussion on the film.

“The Secret Life of Words deals with the isolation and shame of a survivor and the ways in which words can both torment and heal, even in their inadequacy to represent certain experiences,” Goekjian said in an email. “This is not unlike the word ‘genocide’ itself, with its ‘clean’ scientific etymology that both exposes and masks the slaughter, massacre, rape, violation and inhumanity it signifies.

“The film brings together two victims of very different catastrophes: one personal, individual and explicable, and the other genocidal,” Goekjian said. “Their confrontation and interaction lead to the possibility of at least a partial understanding and even healing.”

The series of films presented by the Holocaust and Genocide Studies Project committee were chosen because they present these subjects in an unusual light, and The Secret Life of Words certainly qualifies. Julie
Christie, in a cameo role as Hanna’s counselor, remarks at the end how many Hannas there are.

But the film tells an incredibly small and intimate tale of one woman instead of many. Isn’t that the best way to understand immense atrocities? Aren’t we drawn to the personal stories of people whose lives we could easily have lived ourselves?

By comparing and contrasting Hanna’s history to that of Josef, who suffered an individual tragedy, The Secret Life of Words manages to show that all tragedies are individual, and you’d be hard-pressed to find an accident without lifelong consequences.