Decision to Rot

 

I watched Sebastian Silva's Rotting in the Sun primarily because the preview image on Mubi showed Silva (who plays himself in the movie) reading E.M. Cioran's The Trouble With Being Born, which I had read last year. In fact, perversely, I had bought the book to read with some money I had been given for my birthday. Cioran was a Romanian philosopher of the pessimist school, perhaps most famous for his aphorism that 'it is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.' We see Silva reading the book in the film's opening scene, and we also see him googling effective and painless suicide methods on his mobile phone, so I found myself expecting his arc to be one of those movies where a suicidal protagonist gradually discovers the will to live again. Sort of like It's A Wonderful Life, but with more cocks and ketamine. 

In fact, the film does not go down that road. I'm not going to say much more about the plot, because it depends to a great degree on a sudden, utterly unexpected event which sends the story off in a very different direction, but it is not a finding-a-reason-to-live movie, and I respect that a lot. 

Set in Mexico City, Rotting is a bilingual movie which makes bilingualism part of its plot - we see several scenes in which Jonathan Firstman, a gay influencer who also plays a version of himself in the film, has to talk with Silva's housekeeper, Vero (Catalina Saavedra) via the medium of the translation software on his mobile phone. This detail of the plot reminded me of Park Chan-Wook's Decision to Leave, in which Park Hae-il and Tang Wei's Korean cop and Chinese murder suspect have to do the same thing, and in which the presence or absence of a mobile phone plays a key role in the plot - a plot which, like Rotting in the Sun, revolves around suicide. 

I watched Decision to Leave again earlier this week, having first seen it around this time last year. It's another film I think about a lot. The final sequence is genuinely heartbreaking, almost operatically so (again, I'm trying not to give a lot of the plot away, because Decision, like Rotting, has a big twist roughly halfway through which drastically changes things), and it gets a lot of its power from the way the story leading up to that point asks a lot of questions about why we live, what we live for, and what we do when what we live for is suddenly taken away. Do you make a dramatic exit or plod on as a shadow of what you used to be, nodding along meekly as others suggest daily sunbathing sessions or softshell turtle extract, but knowing deep down that you're just Xing days off a calendar? Some shots at the end of Rotting in the Sun suggest that film's characters, too, are going to have to discover their own answer to that question. As, I suppose, are we all.