Fading Away: Feel-Good Drama About Living With and After Losses

Francis Han and Yimiko’s 10-minute Fading Away is a drama about learning to live with new meanings. That task of course belongs to someone already set in their ways, who has already spent a lifetime learning things at least once. If learning did not inconvenience us so much, we would not go through so many convoluted routes to find convenience. 

Victor Harrington (George Ross Bridgman) needs assistance. When the care agency replaces Jenny (Madison Hodges) with Jack (Tanner Hodgson) over a damaged vinyl, Victor finds himself facing the chance to re-learn the topography of living.  

Irascible from the ignominies of diminished capacity, Mr Harrington is not one for easy befriending. It necessitates grace, which the film provides through a moment of such kindness between Jack and him that it seems to undo years of bitterness. Yet, this bitterness was never the sum of the character. The camerawork emphasises old loves from the beginning: an old framed photograph rests behind Mr Harrington of a young man who died in old age not long ago. The collection of vinyl records, books, plants, all speak to a painstakingly nurtured, well-worn domestic life underlined with warm lighting. How cruel then, to have one of its cornerstones irretrievably lost. This is what that vinyl means to Victor, a gift of love. 

Jack is an interesting concoction. He is a worker, subject to whatever whims and orders of the management move his fate. He wears a big smile and arms himself with a larger reserve of thought, effort, and patience. A throwaway line shows how these two exist in careful balance: after Mr Harrington opens up on the transcendent effect of the music (in a poignant performance from Bridgman), Jack may only offer up a bland Sounds like it means a lot to you. In eight words, the film contains the whole dilemma of good intentions and fundamental distance. 

Jack is well-intentioned, but he also confuses why what matters does when he brings in the wonders of streaming music to redeem the loss of Mr Harrington’s beloved record. Jack’s bluetooth speaker can only replicate the sound. The reassuring solidity of the physical object, the tangible reminder of love, the unyielding presence of something even when broken—they are gently dismissed. 

In the face of loss, it is a ghost Jack is asking Victor to content himself with. That is the incorporeal face of a new world for an old dog. Fading Away consoles its protagonist with the memory of the memory, but attaches with it a new one: the casual kindnesses of a near stranger. 

Watch Fading Away Short Film