"The Sessions"

Last night we went to see The Sessions, a wonderful independent film about a man in an iron long. Helen Hunt plays a sex surrogate in a performance that should win the Oscar. The particular showing I witnessed was especially dramatic. There is a climactic scene in which the character played by John Hawkes is all alone at home, lying in his iron lung listening to a baseball game when suddenly there is a power failure in his neighborhood. It not only stops the broadcast of the game but also the iron lung, without which he cannot survive long. At just that moment in the theater--the Cape Cinema in Dennis--the screen went black and all the lights in the theater went off. I thought it was the most dramatically shocking ending to a film I had ever seen. I expected to credits to begin to roll soon.

But, as it turned out, there was a brief power failure at the theater that just happened to coincide with the power failure in the film. Nobody in the theater knew what to make of it. After a few minutes people began talking about it. Finally someone from the management came out and apologized and said they would attempt to reset the digital computer and fast-forward it to the right place and show us the last 10 minutes of the film. It took 15 or 20 minutes to get the film going again, and then we saw the real ending, which was quite good, although it seemed a little conventional, compared with the previous "ending."

I think the film is very beautiful. It depicts kindness, compassion and love with great sensitivity. The subject is sex, and the film shows full frontal nudity, but it is done with such dignity and grace that it very tasteful.