16/09/2024 - Spanish filmmaker Carlos Marques-Marcet's newest feature is a formally inventive exploration of perceptions of death, punctuated by music and modern dance sequences

In the opening, single-take shot of They Will Be Dust [+see also:
trailer
film profile], choral music surrounds a flailing elderly woman, who is cornered and pushed around by family members and paramedics, until they all seem to be engaged in a poetic modern dance. This sets the scene for Carlos Marques-Marcet’s latest feature, co-written by the director, Coral Cruz and Clara Roquet, which goes for broke in all its sincerity and quirkiness — and succeeds. The filmmaker’s drama, which is also part-operetta and filled with contemporary dance, world-premiered in Toronto's Platform section and also just secured the top prize in that strand, the 2024 TIFF Platform Award. The Spanish filmmaker broke onto the scene in 2014 with his debut feature Long Distance [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Carlos Marques-Marcet
film profile], which also opens with a single-take sequence.

The aforementioned elderly woman is the terminally ill Claudia (a versatile, spell-binding Ángela Molina), who lives with her longtime partner Flavio (Alfredo Castro) and their caring but deeply worried adult daughter, Violeta (Mònica Almirall). Under the guise of the couple’s wedding, Claudia and Flavio gather Violet and their other two adult children, Manuel (Alvan Prado) and Lea (Patricia Bargello), for one final hurrah, as they intend to travel to Switzerland to commit assisted suicide, together: Claudia, for her terminal illness, and Flavio, for his desire not to live without his beloved.

The mild-mannered surrealism of the film’s danced-slash-sung sequences is reminiscent of Chilean puppet film The Hyperboreans by Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña (premiered in the latest Cannes Directors' Fortnight), as both alienate to the point of evoking genuine curiosity through unique style and form. These sporadic moments manifest from Claudia’s perspective, often as she’s tossed into spaces filled with people but remains alone with her thoughts. With transfixing choreography by Marcos Morau and Le Veonal, the crowd performances bear a certain jerky, intentionally unstable quality to them, as if they were part of a large, un-oiled machine running slowly into the ground. However, they are still far and few between, with Marques-Marcet making them a surprise every time they emerge, with a lack of consistency becoming the greatest hindrance to their emotive power.

Out of recent films, it is hard not to think about a subplot in Elina Psykou’s Stray Bodies [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Elina Psykou
film profile], which tells of a woman with ALS who can no longer verbalise herself and seeks her idea of a dignified death through assisted suicide in Switzerland. But They Will Be Dust revels in its deadly honesty and an offhanded approach to passing away, confronting head-on and through a fictional lens many tacit social agreements around the unsparing idea of death. “Think of a playlist to die to,” cheerfully recommends Inger (Manuela Biedermann), the Swiss assisted suicide attendant.

The idea that death is inevitable by the film’s close is hardly a surprise; it’s through each character’s reaction to the concept that we learn far more. As Violeta pleads to no avail and grieves two deaths that have yet to occur, Claudia wholeheartedly embraces her demise and Flavio struggles with prematurely ending his life, his brain wrestling with his heart. Marques-Marcet’s latest effort intrigues through its very last frames and well into its credit sequence, the title a not-so-subtle allusion to the couple’s intended crematory state.

They Will Be Dust is a Spanish-Italian-Swiss co-production between Barcelona-based Lastor Media, Rome-based Kino Produzioni and Geneva-based Alina Film, with Latido Films steering international sales.