Not Again
I recently saw Kristin Scott Thomas in Four Weddings and A Funeral. The first time I saw this film was probably around the time it came out, over thirty years ago. For me, it’s a snapshot of a time when grief and grieving barely featured to the point of almost disregard with barbed humor that masks a multitude of unhappiness and pain, as well as the drinking.
Thomas plays the role of Fiona, a thirty something who has been part of a group of friends for years but during all those years she has been secretly in love with one of them — Charles (played by Hugh Grant). It all comes out at the third of four weddings they attend in which the woman with whom he’s in love is getting married to someone else.
Watching this scene, I understood why it affected me then, and still. Thomas infuses Fiona with an uncanny depth that you know she knows more than most people. The emotion behind the emotion sharply contrasts with the other characters who barely skim the surface with the exception of John Hannah who plays Matthew, lover to Gareth (played by Simon Callow). At the same wedding where Fiona confesses her love for Charles, Gareth keels over from a major heart attack and dies. Matthew’s eulogy at his funeral plumbs the depths of grief that is raw and inexplicable — what it is to love someone wholly, completely, with all their flaws and idiosyncrasies, without whom life would be unimaginable until one day the unimaginable happens.
For Kristin Scott Thomas the unimaginable did happen — twice in perfunctory succession — her father died when she was five in an air accident followed by her stepfather when she was eleven in eerily similar circumstances. Both men were in the British Navy. In a recent interview she says that it was her stepfather’s death that had a profound and reverberating effect. At the time, she was away at boarding school. Her house mistress called her into the office and delivered the news. Afterward she returned to regular school activities.
There were no resources or services she could tap into, no way to navigate the turmoil. Societal cues were of the stiff upper lip kind with expectations to behave in orderly fashion, to continue as if nothing had happened, as well as the prevailing view that children were hardly considered when it came to grief. The less attention to oneself, the better. If anything it was the adults to mind out for.
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“Think of your mother” was what Thomas heard ad nauseam to the point of exasperation.
Grieving was a solitary almost subterfuge activity. Minimal visibility, minimal collaboration, more isolation, revealing itself at infrequent and sporadic intervals — becoming emotional watching a movie as well as manifesting in myriad other ways, often, sadly, in longterm destructive ways.
For Thomas acting became a way to channel some of that grief, as well as, eventually, therapy. Yet, speaking of those deaths sixty years later, her disbelief at both their deaths and how they occurred still haunts her.
“How could this be happening again?” Her voice echoes with disbelief.
It is a question I, too, still ask. When my father died in a car accident, barely six years after my mother’s death in a car accident, I couldn’t believe it. None of my siblings or anyone could believe it. Not again. It was too much, too difficult to absorb. Lightening had struck twice. That feeling never leaves you.
Now Thomas is part of an organization that provides bereavement support services for children of military families. The grief landscape has changed dramatically from then and now. She acknowledges this wryly noting that “trauma” and other similar terms are handled perhaps too easily but at least the gates are open and grief is not treated as something that is inconvenient or a kind of malaise stowed away like a shameful secret.
References:
Interview with Kristin Scott Thomas: https://www.bbc.com/audio/play/m002wt21
