Review: ‘The Very Last Day’ is an outstanding achievement
Note: Spoilers afoot ⏤ and plot and real-life details could be triggering for some viewers/readers
Working through trauma is a lifelong process. You must shackle your demons, confront, scrutinize, manage, and cope ⏤ and later toss them back into the lake of fire. If you’re lucky, you have art by and through which you can further filter out parts of yourself and, perhaps, see things in a clearer, more objective light. Filmmaker Cédric Jouarie journeys through the past and his own sexual assault to find greater meaning, redemption, and hope in the rubble of his youth. His debut feature film, The Very Last Day, now up for rental and purchase on Amazon Prime, rearranges specific tragic details to give the fictional narrative more care, heart, and weight.
The Taiwanese picture stars Lawrence Ong as Raymond ⏤ a world-famous, bestselling author, known for exploiting personal tragedies in many of his novels ⏤ and Wei-Yi Lin as Melanie, a victimized young woman whose pain feeds a bottomless hunger for revenge. When Raymond releases his latest book, the aptly-titled The Very Cold Summer, in which he subconsciously retells a long-forgotten assault, Melanie poses as an obsessive fan, stalks his home for an autograph, and later seduces him into a vengeful web.
Jouarie stitches together the past and present in artful, hyper-stylized vignettes. He switches between Raymond’s volatile home life ⏤ his daughter Cynthia (Meng-Hsueh Lee) adores him, and his wife Viola (Heng-Yin Chou) resents him ⏤ and Melanie’s horrendous upbringing for the first hour. It’s a bold, unexpected move to contextualize their lives; rather than nosediving into the unnerving second half much sooner, he allows you to observe each puzzle piece before it’s consumed in flames. The onscreen story directly correlates to Jouarie’s own emergence through and out of dark psychological depths.
As he writes in an official statement: “I was sexually assaulted by my best friend’s stepfather when I was a teenager. The man was a mentor and a friend (or so I thought). He was also a respectable novelist, while I, on the other end, was just a boy from the projects, raised by my single mother. After the facts, I have failed to find an understanding soul, so I have lived with this secret for most of my adult life.”
He continues, “Unable to speak openly about what had happened, I’ve tried to write about it, but each attempt was too painful to go through as it made me feel both shame and disgust, mostly with myself. So, instead of recounting this event in fiction form, I decided to take a few steps back and focus on the themes and characters.”
His story is tethered to his art. The Very Last Day certainly stands on its own as a masterful debut, but to completely appreciate it, particularly the third act, which contains one of the single most emotionally-grueling scenes set to film, you must understand Jouarie’s journey. The film’s script took 10 years to finish. In its original form, he found it “too raw, too violent, too angry,” he admits, so he let it marinate for a number of years as he conquered the trauma still raging inside of him. “Giving it perspective wasn’t enough, I also had to give it time,” he says. “These 10 years allowed me to find a certain peace with myself and with the ‘material,’ so I could stop judging the characters and feed them with aspects of my own personality.”
Time serves the film well.
The Very Last Day is an outstanding achievement. Alongside cinematographer Kuan-Yu Chen, whose work can not be understated, Cédric Jouarie plops the viewer in the front seat of a tremendous, striking, and truly surprising roller coaster. Once Melanie lures Raymond in taking a romantic rendezvous into the mountains, her true intentions are revealed: she begins torturing him in order to elicit a confession of his crime. Here, Jouarie pulls the strings on suppressed memories, and you question the notion of revenge-seeking for past traumas (Is revenge the answer? Does it heal you? Does it make you a monster, too?). He answers these questions in a brutally-unsettling scene in which Melanie reenacts her own rape, at the hands of Raymond, when she was a teenager. But the very act of sexually assaulting him in return sends her careening into a frantic, mentally-disturbed state.
When you assume there’s no more story to tell, Jouarie tightens the screws one last time. The very last 10 minutes punctuate his entire thesis statement. Raymond’s wife Viola, who never got to fulfill her own artistic dreams, turns his harrowing experience into her debut novel, titled The Very Last Day. In that final reveal, panning across to Raymond with prominent facial scars, and perhaps psychological trauma, the film ends with a somewhat satisfying cathartic release. You won’t want to miss this gem.
The Very Last Day is currently up for rental and purchase on Amazon Prime.
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