This inspiring and heartwarming documentary charts the recovery of much-loved Scottish musician Edwyn Collins from a double stroke in 2005. The film gets its title from one of only two phrases he was able to say when he came out of his coma. The other one was his wife’s name. He was in hospital for six months and was barely able to move, suffering from aphasia – an inability to use or understand language.
After a short prologue featuring clips of Collins in his pomp in the ‘80s and ‘90s, there is silence and a blank screen. The next section is an impressionistic attempt to reproduce his post-stroke world: underwater images, ambient sound, stuttering speech. It provokes a feeling of alienation and dislocation comparable to the recent film UNDER THE SKIN. We do not see Edwyn and Grace until later, but we hear their commentary. ‘What’s happening to me?’ he says, ‘the world is a little scary and abstract’.
Instrumental in Collins’ recovery were Helmsdale, the place he grew up, with its wild natural beauty, and his recording studio in north London. But most of all it is enabled by the patient care of his remarkable wife, Grace Maxwell. She teaches him how to read again, an agonising process for such a literate and witty lyricist (sample: ‘to put it in a nutshell / you’re a heartless mercenary’). Not being able to find the right words is torture for Edwyn: ‘help me!’ he says at one point.
He acknowledges that he has lost his old arrogance, but he is still ‘fiercely independent’
Grace also encourages him to start drawing again and he perseveres, moving from drawing the same cartoon guy every day, to copying birds – many of which appear on the cover of his ‘comeback’ album, Losing Sleep. Edwyn starts to remember snatches of his songs and gradually returns to his guitar, which he can no longer strum with his right hand; instead, it is his wife and teenaged son who strum while he fingers the chords.
As Collins says, there was ‘no eureka moment for me’. His recovery has been marked in ‘tiny little amounts, up and up and up.’ He acknowledges that he has lost his old arrogance, but he is still ‘fiercely independent’ and ‘bloody-minded’ and we witness his acerbic side return in the comical bickering between him and Grace. ‘You’re a cruel little woman,’ he jokes, ‘you’re Sharon Osborne.’
This double-act was very much to fore in the post-film Q&A session. Its directors, James Hall and Edward Lovelace, pondered what they would do next after this ‘dream project’. ‘Can we do a sequel?’ asked Lovelace. ‘The one where we sit in Helmsdale and fight each other’, quipped Grace. She explained that they entrusted the documentary to two young, relatively inexperienced directors, because she wanted to avoid an obvious, sentimental take on their story. At the premiere in Austin, Texas, after the sombre and abstract opening section, Edwyn had piped up: ‘so far, so good, lads’.
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