1. Pu-239 also titled The Half Life of Timofey Berezin (2006).
Viewers of The Wire will understand at once what inevitably happens to a quiet, honorable husband and father when he travels to Moscow to try to sell something on the street and get a lot of money for it.
This is the only way left to him to get enough money to provide for his family’s future once he is dead — a matter of a few days. How has such a good family man and steady worker, whose main care is his wife and child, gotten himself into such a terrible situation?
He worked for 12 years in the plant that developed the weapons-grade plutonium, and, seeing a leak and trying to stop it, was fatally poisoned by radiation. The company lies to him, telling him he got only a low dose and will recover, but, finding his contaminated dose card, he verifies that he’s had a lethal dose. They try to get him to sign a paper saying the leak was his fault, refuse to offer him compensation for his wife and small son to live on despite his years of service, and tell him he’s lucky they don’t prosecute.
In desperation, with no other alternatives open to him, and knowing he needs to raise a large sum of money to take care of his family after he dies in just a few days, he steals a canister of weapons-grade plutonium — Pu239 — and travels to Moscow to try to sell it on the street, knowing no one there.
Between the bureaucratic attempt to pin the tail on the sacrificial lamb and the street thugs in Moscow — even more quickly than from the lethal radiation dose itself — his life is over, the result of stupidity, greed, violence, and above all, ignorance.
At the beginning of the film, a joke is quoted. One Russian asks another about how life has changed since Perestroika. The answer: “The chain is still too short, and the food bowl is still out of reach, but now we are allowed to bark all we want.”
This is a moving film, not just in its tragedy, but in the love story between the husband and wife and their love for their son, and in its entirety tells what they both do to take care of him and his future. Because the boy is fortunate to have two strong parents, who between them find their way through the maze.
2. The Secret Life of Words (2005), dir/written Isabel Coixet, with Tim Robbins and Sarah Polley.
It is not the future but the past that is toxic for nurse Hanna (Sarah Polley). We hear her story winkled out of her — not easily — by her patient Josef (Tim Robbins), who has been blinded and partially burned in an oil rig fire, trying to save another man.
The patient, Joe, is a friendly man and a talker, telling stories, asking questions, guessing at the answers himself when, at first, she doesn’t talk about herself at all. She is friendly enough to her patient, and takes excellent care of him, but she does not reveal anything about herself at first.
It is only after they get to know each other better — after he tells her about something he did, probably the very events leading to his burns — that she begins to share a few things about herself. Eventually, she tells him her story.
Her story is never portrayed on the screen. We don’t see it at all, except, searingly, in our mind’s eye, and that is more than enough. Hanna is what we call today collateral damage, in this case of the Balkan war, 10 years of war that devastated the entire area of the former Yugoslavia.
In this film, what you see is life on a marine oil rig, and in a factory elsewhere which makes huge rolls of plastic twine. And you will hear what life was like for Hanna during the Balkan War.
Why should you watch the film, if it is so searing? Because the story of Hanna and Joe is a tender love story, never saccharine or false. How can it be? Isabel Coixet, who wrote and directed, has done a masterly and award-winning job of bringing this story to the screen.