Movie Review
-Shamama Khan
3rd year MBBS, Grant government medical college, Mumbai
“Nothing is going to save us. We’re breathing borrowed air”
Little did Stella know what weight these words of Will held until he communicated with her for one last time through the glass of her room. Broken and shattered with the failure of his therapy, he wished the best for Stella, a recipient of a new pair of lungs from a brain-dead road traffic accident victim and confessed all that he feels for her, just to bid her adieu and walk away before she could see and deal with his eventual death.
Five Feet Apart, a reflection of the lives of patients suffering from cystic fibrosis, will make your heart warm every time you watch it. Released in 2019, a Justin Baldoni movie, it takes you on a roller-coaster journey of giggles, strong emotions, multiple heartbreaks, all while making you pass through all the struggles, myths, facts, and lastly, touching upon the dire need of transplants in such patients.
The movie portrays the sheer need of awareness of organ transplantation by subtly portraying it through the tragedy that befell Stella, a 17-year-old girl, who juggled her OCD and cystic fibrosis. Will, on the other hand, is an oblivious, carefree and break-them-rules guy. Indeed, after transplantation, her misery comes to an end but Will’s detrimental regimen and lack of a pair of new lungs make him walk on an eggshell every day after waking up!
Yet another story on the lines of Five Feet Apart that will warm your heart is Nicholas’s Gift. This 1998 classic is based on a true event that led to an organ transplantation revolution in Italy and will throw millions of bitter-sweet moments at you. Starring Jamie Lee Curtis and Alan Bates, Nicholas’s Gift takes you back to the year 1994, where The Greens hung onto on a thin rope of chances of survival for their only son, Nicholas who was shot in the head by highway bandits while they were tripping on the outskirts of Italy.
Nicholas will not only intrigue you with his fascinations about Penelope, Greek mythology, the dead and the heaven but will also make sure you shed bucket loads to tears and keep a tissue-box at the ready. The story takes a U-turn when his parents take the arduous yet heart-rending decision of donating the organs of their brain-dead son but losing a hero to save seven lives!
To complete this circle of awareness, released in 2016 was the movie, Traffic. With eminent faces from the Bollywood industry such as Manoj Bajpayee, Divya Dutta and Jimmy Shergill, this remake of the 2011 Malayalam movie with the same name deals with the vagaries of destiny and throws light on the concept of gateway for the transport of the donated organ. This spell-binding movie borrows its roots from a true incident which took place after a television journalist met with a fatal accident leaving him on a ventilator and at the same time, a young girl who could only be saved if she got a transplant. This mission of transporting the organ is entrusted to a traffic constable who is looking forward to earn his stripes back!
Lastly, the awareness of such a cardinal concept is still undermined and I hope works of art like these pave way for smart and knowledgeable entertainment.
Happy watching!
