Eterne: On the Aftermath of Being Left Behind

Eleanor Shannon’s 16-minute Eterne is a drama of the specific loneliness of being aged and alone. The heartbreak of losing the companion of years. The absolute silence. The acute awareness of being completely helpless in each facet of one’s life. The film imbues all this in its protagonist, a frail, recently widowed old man yet to lose the muscle memory of reaching for two mugs in the morning.

As grief does, John’s (Pat Mooney) past and present have no demarcation. They mix and tangle freely, bobbing in and out of each other’s ambit like playful animals without the obligation to care about the continuity of physical reality. As a result, Mary (Helena Bereen) is alive as often as she is not, which then means that John’s grief repeats itself until it has pushed him into crisis. It is a grim, heartbreaking thing to see someone’s loss consume them and leave so little room for its expression. For who would want to come near it, much less share in it? How could John convey the dimensions to anyone of a loss so endless that each time he forgets to remember Mary’s absence, the colour returns to his world?

Second to his heartbreak, the clearest presence in the writing is the condemnation of old age to irrelevance. It means that John has no one to grieve with, and it means that when Shannon’s granddaughter character, Hannah, enters the picture, her warmth can only be received under specific conditions. John reels himself in, arranges himself into the picture of amiability. Hannah, by design (and maybe against her will, because Shannon portrays her with an abundance of affection and availability) is limited to the distance of sympathy and support. That is, an outsider.

And yet what a crucial role. Profound feeling and mundane reality sometimes simply cannot be separated. Death would fall to him so easily without people to cook for John, clean the house, keep him participating in their lives, talk to him about his. Shannon, whether she knows it or however she sees it, is keeping John alive so John can keep Mary’s memory alive.

Eterne is a romance calling for greater community. It says without stating that the frail and the vulnerable have been failed by society. That the deepest of love dies as they die. Only Hannahs stand in the way for now.