Immersed in parental pain

Marc Forster, director of last week's Monster's Ball, shot this earlier film, his first on digital video. In style and content, it's not an easy ride. It often looks and sounds awful - grainy, fuzzy, ill-focused, full of collateral noise. No way a clear-cut narrative. Yet rough looks suit a tough subject: cot deaths, or, as the US calls this still mysterious phenomenon, "Sudden Infant Death Syndrome" (SIDS).

Once Angie and her husband, comfortably off Californians, lose their baby to the disease, we are immersed without mercy in the husband's helplessness, his wife's depression, her denial that the dead child is hers, her rejection of friends, condolences, her discovery that "normal" mothers shun such "afflicted" ones lest they somehow incur their infliction, and her eventual abandonment to loneliness and hopelessness.

Its sincerity is irreproachable; yet, for me, Angie's ordeal has unsettling intimations of masochism - self-blame feeding emotional selftorture. By feeling its way so exclusively to the broken heart of a mother, the film ignores most of the resources for pulling her out of despondency - why not have another child, for instance?

In the Third World, an infant's birth or death elicits much less attention or grief than in countries of the West that invest each event with so much emotion. Nothing is easier to make - or take - than life. All the same, for those equal to it, Everything Put Together confronts its medical and emotional conundrum with all honesty - and much pain, too.

Everything Put Together
Cert: NC