Poetic doc can be hard to swallow

Filmmakers Brian Cassidy and Melanie Shatzy’s documentary about the forsaken residents of a remote nursing home belongs on a triple bill with Michael Haneke’s Amour and A Simple Life, last year’s drama about the trials of old age in a Hong Kong nursing home.

Filmed at an elderly care facility over the course of five years, The Patron Saints is not an expose of senior care, and it’s difficult to know whether there is even a narrative. Several residents are introduced one by one — followed by a deep-voiced woman who sings in Spanish while whistling and strumming a hand-drum — and by virtue of their advanced age many have regressed to a childlike mental or physical state. Like May We Be Forgiven, A.M. Homes’s recent debut novel, an elderly couple here is given doll babies, both as a therapy for dementia and for comfort (one woman feeds her baby portions of her sugary white cake).

Subject matter aside, the attempts at turning realism into poetry are at times heavy-handed, if not painfully obvious: the wind howling through scant dry blades of wheat in the surrounding barren fields, the chain-link fence contrasted with the promise of freedom from a flock of birds overhead, and the home being in the flight path of the nearby airport. (Demolitions scenes and pans of a nearby dump also suggests comparison.) The documentary fares better when it lingers directly on the residents — their stoicism, dignity and despair.

Streaks of defiance share the screen with streaks of regret. We listen in as one woman incessantly begs her roommate for a little bit, “just a mouthful,” of coffee. The roommate is either unmoved, or deaf. “What am I doing here, anyway?” one woman asks as she makes her way down the hall, fully expecting an answer. “I’ll be honest with you: I don’t know why I’m here.” It’s hard to know what to make of the mix of voyeurism and resignation.