To
be human means to look for patterns, to repeat, repeat, repeat until we find a
sense of mastery, or at least a sense of comfort, in whatever it is we’re
doing. Performing a repetitive act eases our anxieties and ailments. Do it long
enough and you achieve a cooling sensation as a zen outlook overtakes you. It’s
quiet, it’s confident, it’s decent, it’s human.
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| Photo credit: Summer in the Forest/IMDb |
Repetitive
tasks take up much of the day at the various L’Arche facilities around the
world—there are 149 such communities in 37 countries. At L’Arche, people with
various developmental and physical disorders live in something similar to a
pre-industrial commune where economics and the desire for power are rendered
moot, says L’Arche head honcho Jean Vanier, the subject of Randall Wright’s
latest documentary, Summer in the Forest.
There
is a lot of pain on display in the documentary, both ongoing and remembered.
Patient-residents with speech troubles struggle to find the words to describe
their lives, others are tethered to motorized wheelchairs while their muscles
clench and contort them into unfathomably uncomfortable positions, still others
recall abuse at fascistic facilities that were open only a few decades ago, and
Jean himself reflects again and again on his time spent fighting the Nazis as a
13-year-old immigrant from Canada who signed up with the British
military out of a sense of duty. “Cows are just there, munching away, but we
humans are anguished,” Jean says.
But
neither Jean nor any of the countless people he’s housed over the decades
succumb to the anguish or wallow in it. “I’m living with people who are
fragile, but we’re all fragile, let’s face it,” Jean says. “But we’ve found
ways of hiding our fragility.”
So
they get to work. They gather around long cafeteria-style tables with art
supplies to weave trinkets and express themselves through their creations. They
do this together, where they are forced to learn more about each other,
to talk, to laugh, to comfort, to fall in love, to build a community worth
living in. They are not tucked away from society, for they take trips to town
squares and historical sites to shop and meet with local friends and family.
Jean, and Wright’s camera, never make the residents or the viewer feel that
these people are lesser in the way that our society has for so long. “The big
human problem is just to accept all people as they are,” Jean says.
Jean
and Wright amplify these folks’ personhood to craft a hopeful humanism that
comes to feel like you’re mainlining human decency with each passing second.
It’s exhilarating.
But
it’s also calming. Thanks to spending his teenage years seeing the worst that
humanity has to offer, Jean has understandably grown fixated on how people use
and abuse and pursue power, often with catastrophic results. At one point near
the film’s end, Jean speaks from a serene, sun-drenched park, like some modern
Plato, having made as much peace as he can with the trauma of his youth to
achieve a detached-but-loving viewpoint. In full paragraphs, his words become a
thesis for the work he does, while Wright cuts to Jean and L’Arche residents in
Bethlehem wandering the streets, meeting shop owners, telling locals that they
“have a kind face,” and smiling—lots of smiling.
“You
see, the wise and the powerful are up in their heads, whereas the ‘weaker’ are
in the dirt,” Jean says, his voice slipping between the accents of the three
countries he’s called home, Canada, England, and France. “The ‘weak’ lead us to
reality whereas the so-called wise and powerful lead us to ideologies. But for
peace, it’s to accept weakness. Weakness then becomes the transmission of a
cry, and the end of the cry is a coming together.”
And
so Jean comes together with his residents, and we, the audience, join them.
It’s a celebration, an engagement party for two residents, full of jokes,
friends playfully pushing friends into a pool, and lots and lots of commitment
to one another.
That
commitment is not necessarily inherent, although every person is imbued with
the desire to belong. It grows from familiarity, community building, and plenty
of facetime. It comes from repeating tasks together, locking eyes, and
understanding who the person sitting across from you truly is inside. It comes,
as Jean says, not from seeking power, but from seeking friendship.
Director:
Randall Wright
Available
in limited release now
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