CPH:DOX: Long Live Love
CINANDO“Cancer” has to be one of the scariest words in the English language. The six letters hold powerful meaning, a weight oftentimes comparable to that of “death” itself. But it isn’t dreadful in the same way as the final, inevitable destination of every human being. Cancer is filled with uncertainty, like a curse that threatens to return even mere moments after it has arrived. Long Live Love is, in one of its many sides, not only a documentary about living with such a curse, but also the truth about being born with it.
Danish director Sine Skibsholt’s second feature documentary follows teenager Rosemarie, a young woman eager to experience the typical teenage life of partying, dating and starting classes at a school where the label of cancer doesn’t hover above her head – something that has since her birth. Despite her illness, or perhaps because of it, she exudes a feistiness that translates visually into the segments of her coming-of-age story, complete with flashes from her diary, scrapbook, childhood pictures and social media videos, stitched together by quick, videoclip-style editing. Giant letters divide the film into chapter-like scenes, named by topic: “Birthday”, “Wedding Day”, “Hospital Day”, “Rude Day” and so on, announcing the corresponding shifts in mood. They are quite impactful when they happen.
The film also follows Rosemarie’s mother, who continuously and visibly struggles with her daughter’s condition, regularly having a hard time getting out of bed. It’s at those times that Long Live Love also showcases what cancer can do to families; a sickness physical in nature for its patients, spreads and transforms to afflict the spirits of their loved ones. The fear-riddled relationship of mother and daughter creates a rift between them, and it’s their working around it that makes the heart of the film, sometimes through fun bickering – the kind that makes Saoirse Ronan and Laurie Metcalf look like amateurs – but mostly through conversations of raw, disarming honesty.
That Skibsholt’s camera is there to witness such moments of pure vulnerability is a documentarian’s achievement. It’s there on “Bad Day”, when a shaved-headed, bedridden Rosemarie cries, “why do I have to live like this?” while her mother has to witness her pain. It’s also there when, during a bedroom conversation, the teenager matter-of-factly confronts her parent’s refusal to open up and connect. “I’m the reason you’re depressed, so it does concern me,” she explains when her mother attempts to wiggle her way out of the conversation.
These arguments are shot under a naturalistic light that aims for visual realism, but they brush with mundaneness when they drag on even a little bit longer after their profound truths have made their impact. Like Rosemarie’s scrapbook, however, Long Live Love is made from cut-outs of life itself. Her hair slowly grows back throughout the film, as does the hope of ordinary life after another painful battle with cancer. And that is a beautiful revelation.