ReviewBerlin 2020: The Roads Not Taken film review – Javier Bardem, Elle Fanning in time-shifting dementia drama
- Bardem plays a dementia sufferer in a story that explores trauma, mental illness and immigration, which also co-stars Salma Hayek and Laura Linney
- British director Sally Potter again offers a unique perspective on the human condition that includes some fine performances
3.5/5 stars
“Everything is open,” croaks Javier Bardem’s Leo at the very beginning of Sally Potter’s latest film The Roads Not Taken. This is one of the few coherent things that he says, at least for a while, in a story that explores trauma, mental illness and immigration, among other things.
Playing in competition at the Berlin Film Festival, with Elle Fanning, Salma Hayek and Laura Linney co-starring, this is arguably Potter’s starriest vehicle since The Man Who Cried with Johnny Depp and Cate Blanchett 20 years ago. But it’s unmistakably a film by Potter, the British director who has always offered a unique perspective on the human condition.
Here, Leo lies in the bed of his grotty apartment in New York in a near-catatonic state. His daughter Molly (Fanning) has come to help, initially by accompanying him to a dental appointment, but his condition – some form of frontotemporal dementia, we later discover – is such that she has little choice but to stay with him, despite a growing work crisis of her own.
Divorced from Molly’s embittered mother (Linney), Leo has been living in the US for 30 years, having crossed the border from Mexico. But as this hard-to-watch deterioration becomes more acute across the course of this brisk 85-minute film, he begins to hallucinate.