«What you hear me shouting is precisely what I least believe in.» John Davidson
We spend a large part of our lives believing that we own our bodies. Perhaps because we've never needed to ask for their permission.
We want to be quiet, and we are. We want to remain silent, and we are silent. We choose one word among thousands and we say it. We rarely think about the extraordinary privilege hidden in such banal gestures.
Until we met John Davidson.
I swear, Kirk Jones' book tells the true story of a Scotsman who began developing symptoms of Tourette's syndrome as a teenager, at a time when almost no one around him even knew what was happening to him. Before becoming one of the most important figures in raising awareness of the disease, John was for too long what others decided he was: ill-mannered, disturbed, aggressive, strange.
The problem was that John knew perfectly well who he was.
It was the body that, at times, seemed not to know.
And it is in this terrible distance between what a man wants to do and what his body compels him to do that I swear it finds its reason for existing.
Starting, curiously, with the title itself.
I swear It's one of those titles that's almost impossible to translate without losing something along the way. To swear It means to swear, but also to curse, to swear. Two words that therefore contain a little bit of genius: John can say I swear to ensure that he is telling the truth and, at the same time, to name what he so often cannot avoid doing.
It's difficult to translate this game into Portuguese. Still, it's curious how some recent Portuguese translations of titles seem particularly intent on demonstrating that translating words is much easier than translating ideas. Who decides on some of them would, in itself, be material for another column.
Here, however, the loss is especially ironic: in a film about a man whose relationship with words doesn't always depend on his will, even the title seems to say more than what it chose to say.
Kirk Jones could easily have turned this story into one of those biographies designed from the first minute to tell us when we should suffer, when we can smile, and at what point the tears will inevitably come. The film occasionally approaches that territory. The structure is relatively conventional, and some characters fulfill quite recognizable narrative functions.
But I swear It possesses something capable of making almost all of these reserves secondary.
Robert Aramayo.
I still don't know if he'll get an Oscar nomination for Best Actor. There are calendars, campaigns, competitors, and many performances I haven't seen yet. I only know one thing: of the films I've seen this year, no male performance has impressed me as much.
The danger of portraying someone with Tourette's is enormous. The tics, involuntary movements, sounds, coprolalia, and repetitions could easily transform John into a collection of symptoms. A few minutes of excess would be enough for us to stop seeing a person and start observing an actor demonstrating the work he did to represent a disease.
Aramayo does exactly the opposite.
And what is most extraordinary is that he achieves this not only through what he does, but also through what he allows us to see between each involuntary gesture.
A twitch crosses his face. His body interrupts a sentence. A word explodes precisely when silence would be desperately needed. Everything possesses an impressive physical precision, but it never seems choreographed. The tics seem to happen to him before they happen to the character.
Then comes that tiny instant that Aramayo makes devastating. The next second. The moment John realizes what has just happened and immediately looks for the face of the person in front of him.
In that gaze, there may be shame, fear, weariness, anticipation of rejection, or an apology that hasn't yet had time to be uttered. Other times, a smile appears, because perhaps those who spend a lifetime momentarily losing control over their own bodies need to find some way to regain control over how they look at it.
That's where the interpretation becomes extraordinary. Not in the mannerisms, but in the intervals between them.
Perhaps that's also why humor works so well. We laughed several times during... I swear And, in the first instance, laughter can bring with it a little discomfort. Can we laugh? Should we laugh?
The answer emerges naturally: we can laugh with John. What we can't do is laugh at John.
It seems like a semantic difference. It's a human difference.
Because John's Tourette's syndrome doesn't exist in a vacuum. Every involuntary gesture immediately finds another person who needs to interpret it. And it is in that space, between what he didn't want to do and what others believe he wanted to do, that much of the film's violence is born.
A word becomes an insult. A movement transforms into a provocation. An involuntary behavior is interpreted as intention.
Perhaps because we're used to a dangerously simple equation: we see what someone does and we believe we know who that person is.
John Davidson dismantles it.
And the film becomes more interesting when we realize that learning to live with Tourette's is not just John's task. It is also a learning process for those who decide to stay by his side. They cannot silence his tics or give him back absolute control of his body. They can do something perhaps more difficult: learn to recognize the man when the symptom tries to speak first.
And there are moments when the film achieves one of the most difficult things: it makes us want to step into it. We understand what is about to happen before we are sure it will happen, we recognize a mistake in someone's face before it becomes a consequence, and we feel like reaching through the screen, getting there first and preventing what might still be avoidable. Few things say as much about the effectiveness of a film as this absurd desire to intervene in a story that we know we cannot change.
That is why I swear He never truly needs our pity. Pity would only be another way to keep John at a distance.
What the film seeks is recognition.
And perhaps it is precisely there that Robert Aramayo achieves something very rare.
An interpretation of this nature could have been ostentatious. One of those that comes with the constant awareness that we are watching an actor doing something technically extremely difficult. Aramayo begins by forcing us to notice precisely that: the coordination of movements, the voice, the interruptions, the physical violence of a body that seems to rebel against the one who inhabits it.
For some time, I thought repeatedly about the extraordinary work that Robert Aramayo was doing.
Then something better happened.
I stopped thinking about him.
Perhaps the Oscars will recognize him. Perhaps not. But that hardly matters, because if there is a possible measure for a truly great performance, perhaps it is this: the actor works until he manages to disappear.
Robert Aramayo has disappeared.
John Davidson stayed.
And, among all the films I've seen this year, no actor seemed so present precisely at the moment they ceased to be there.
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