André is an Fool evaluation: An excellent, life-affirming documentary of a person battling most cancers

André is an Fool evaluation: An excellent, life-affirming documentary of a person battling most cancers

Feb 02, 2025 06:19 AM IST

HT at Sundance | André is an Fool is miles away from the weepy sentimentality of a movie revolving round most cancers, embracing its topic with humour and charm.

The documentary programming on the Sundance Movie Pageant by no means fails to showcase a few of the most original, pathbreaking tales yearly. This yr, one of many breakout entries is André is an Fool, a documentary that takes the viewer into the hilarious and life-affirming journey of 1 man as he paperwork his life within the wake of a colon most cancers prognosis. It’s in contrast to some other movie on most cancers that you’ll ever see, informed with very good fashion and a bracing wit. (Additionally learn: Khartoum evaluation: Hybrid, self-reflexive doc captures the facility of alliance)

André Ricciardi is the topic of this new documentary that premiered at Sundance Movie Pageant.

The premise

Tonny Benna’s movie revolves round André Ricciardi, a person with quite a lot of concepts. He begins the movie with a slightly worrisome anecdote from when he was a toddler and injured his personal elements. Now, he’s a middle-aged man who has colon most cancers, which may have been prevented if he had listened to his good pal Lee and obtained a colonoscopy. However this isn’t a cautionary story with André as a person dying of that one huge remorse. It’s fairly the alternative, in its personal distinctive and eccentric vogue.

As André informs, this movie is his thought. It’s a means of not solely embracing these years but additionally a doc of the life he has lived and the individuals he has liked and all of the loopy concepts he has had all this whereas. André sits in entrance of the digicam and talks about how he volunteered to marry Janice out of the blue, begin a household and do effectively in promoting. These are pleasant tales informed by a person who sees life because it comes, whose wide-eyed and eccentric humour is infectious.

What works

It helps that André was a born storyteller who had a stellar display screen presence. Benna lets these unfiltered tales take form as they arrive, approaching them in an eccentric visible flourish which makes use of animation and re-enactment. It is a movie that may really feel a bit too stuffed with itself, a bit of tied up with its topic to even try to ask the harder questions. However that can be the purpose André needs to make. He needs to course of his most cancers by humour and coronary heart and never let it management his actions.

Despite the fact that the movie stays away from any type of weepy sentiment, there isn’t a escaping it. Despite the fact that André faces the horrific actuality of getting chemotherapy and brushes it off, saying that he can bear all of it, the viewer is witness to his physique because it shrinks and swells across the river. Janice is commonly the movie’s rational core, main on to the inescapable actuality with emotional transparency. André’s relationship with life itself is a factor of utter pleasure and heartbreak. On the finish of this documentary (which is dealt with excellently), I used to be grateful that I obtained to know him. Benna’s movie has an exquisite tonal readability and is cautious with its topics; it by no means sidesteps one emotion to prioritize one other. It’s so profound but so hilarious, so tender but so completely eccentric.

Santanu Das is masking Sundance Movie Pageant 2025 as a part of the accredited press.

rec-icon Really helpful Matters

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *