(2004; Mar Adentro, Spanish) A quadriplegic for over 28 years, following a diving accident on August 23rd, 1968, when he snapped his neck on the sea floor, Ramón Sampedro (Javier Bardem) wants the right to die with dignity. Through the efforts of Gené (Clara Segura), an activist for people suffering from hopeless conditions to have the freedom to choose life or death, and two pro-bono attorneys, Julia (Belén Rueda), who has a degenerative disease, and Marc, who marries Gené during the course of events, Ramón courts the courts with his petition for suicide in order to be rid of "psychological pain."

In Galicia his sister-in-law Manuela (Mabel Ribera) has been chief caretaker of his needs, but her husband, Javier (Celso Bugallo), Ramón's older brother, resentful of their being slaves to the valetudinarian, adamantly opposes his brother's desire for euthanasia: "It's not right … I won't allow it" in this house. Young Javier (Tamar Novas), Ramón teenage nephew, grapples with and gradually approaches an appreciation for his uncle's wish to extinguish the crippled remnants of himself.

After seeing Ramón making his plea on TV, a woman from nearby Boiro, Rosa (Lola Dueńas), a single mother working in a canning factory with two children, bicycles over "to make you feel like living." To Rosa and others Ramón asks that they "respect my wishes … don't judge."

Intrigued with the theme of death in his movies, director Alejandro Amenábar - who co-wrote and co-produced the film, based on a true story, as well as composed the music - shares with his subject a hunch that there is nothing before birth and nothing after death for us; his moving portrait depicts the emotional attachments of three women to a man who has rejected love because he cannot participate in its physical expression.

Reluctant to revisit his past - "I should have died back then" - he nonetheless tells Julia, who is preparing his case, that he remained conscious in the water (the sweet death of drowning), experiencing his life flashing before him (juxtaposed with her looking at photographs from his youth); Manuela shares with her Ramón's poetry. With concentration, Ramón can imagine himself leaping through the window to fly down to the beach and sea, where he finds Julia strolling on the sand. She suggests publishing the poems in a book to communicate his plea for mercy.

After Julia faints entering Ramón's room from fear of what may happen to herself, she confesses to Gené her terror of being reduced to Ramón's state; the suicide advocate says: "Don't decide out of fear."

A quadriplegic Catholic priest, who expressed on television suspicion that Ramón's family had withheld affection from him (an accusation Manuela takes very personally), accepts an invitation to meet personally with Ramón, though his wheelchair cannot be transported upstairs to Ramón's bedroom and Ramón refuses to be brought downstairs; after employing a young man, running up and down the stairs to communicate their argument piecemeal, Ramón shouts his replies to the priest who bellows back: Life, unlike personal property, belongs to God, avers the priest; but like heretics of old, whom the Church burned at the stake, Ramón says he's being burned alive.

Having lost her job at the factory, ill-treated by men, Rosa, falling in love with the gentle invalid, spends more time helping with caring for Ramón (though Manuela refuses to relinquish her responsibilities), saying she's willing to do anything for him; but when the court in Barcelona rejects Ramón's petition for euthanasia on a technicality, she cannot consent to his fiercest desire.

Making the argument that without his personal testimony in court the case will lack the emotional appeal needed to overcome the legal hurdles, Marc and Gené convince Ramón to get into a wheelchair, which previously he had declined doing because it represented "a false hope."

She who loves him - "a love pure and shared" - will be willing to help him die, not hold him back. Julia proposes a double suicide to take place upon the date of the publication of his book, Letters from Hell. After 28 years and more than four months of "institutional negligence," Ramón stares into a camera to explain why he has taken matters to this extreme - a glass of potassium cyanide with a straw at his bedside, has been placed there by the hands of many friends, not any one of whom will be entirely complicit in his death.

Unlike the physicist Stephen Hawking, who at the other end of the spectrum has persevered with his disabilities, using his brilliant mind to explore the cosmos, Ramón Sampedro freely and courageously chose to dive back into the sea of oblivion.

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Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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