The longest goodbye

The Roads Not Taken

Cast: Javier Bardem, Elle

Fanning Director: Sally Potter

Duration: 1 h 25 m Available: On demand

Never let it be said that writer/director Sally Potter chooses the easy path. Her last film, 2017’s The Party, was shot in black and white and told a complicated story of seven longtime friends in just 70 minutes, opening and closing on the same shot. Yes, from 2004, was written entirely in rhyming pentametric couplets, like a 90-minute Shakespearean sonnet.

In The Roads Not Taken she casts Javier Bardem as Leo, a man with dementia who is making his way through one day in New York City in the company of his daughter Molly (Elle Fanning). And as her title suggests, Potter has taken inspiration from Robert Frost’s famous 1916 poem The Road Not Taken. No pressure, then.

To say that Leo’s thoughts are wandering would be an understatement. A chance word or a sudden noise can suddenly shift his perception. One moment he’s at home with his personal care assistant, or in a taxi with Molly. The next he’s remembering time spent with Dolores (Salma Hayek), in his native Mexico. Or he’s back in Greece, where he once lived in solitude, writing.

In both these places he’s dealing with regret and uncertainty, which spill into his present life, though he’s no longer fully able to put his thoughts into words. “Everything is open,” he says cryptically in his first line. Trying to unravel what he means is like deconstructing a poem. There’s much room for interpretation.

Bardem’s dementia gives him the ability to travel through the space and time of his own life, while those around him try to make sense of his actions. Molly has the most patience in this regard, angrily asking her mother, Rita: “Why does everyone continue to refer to Dad as ‘he?’ As if he’s not here?” Mom shoots back: “Well, is he?”

The Roads Not Taken is a very personal film for Potter, who started work on the screenplay after her younger brother was diagnosed with early-onset dementia in 2010.

I’ll readily admit that it resonated with me more than it might some. I lost my father to Alzheimer’s, and when Molly tells her dad: “However far away you go, whatever they say, you are always you,” I thought my heart would burst. ★ ★ ★ ★

BLEECKER STREET Javier Bardem struggles to hang onto a lucid present in The Roads Not Taken.