It’s about one of the worst diseases of all: cancer. About ear cancer, bone marrow cancer, liver cancer, lung cancer, ovarian cancer, blood cancer, breast cancer and a brain tumor. But it’s also about rock music and spontaneous bisexual threesomes, and there’s smoking and copious amounts of weed. Can this work? Oh yes! The Spanish production “A Bus Full of Life” by Ibón Cormenzana (best known as the producer of hits like “Like Wild Animals” or “Robot Dreams”) gives cancer a stiff middle finger.
There’s no cinema of consternation here with dripping emo strings on the soundtrack, but rather an infectiously life-affirming tragicomedy with snappy songs that takes a refreshingly light approach to a leaden subject. This works thanks to a well-balanced script that perfectly strikes the balance between fun and seriousness, and a likeable cast that relies more on restraint than grand gestures – so wonderfully that afterwards you can hardly believe that you have just seen a film about cancer patients.
Andrés (Dani Rovira) dreams of being a rock star – but a terrible diagnosis changes his life fundamentally.
Andrés (Dani Rovira) is a 40-year-old music teacher from Madrid who writes songs for a musician friend but would actually like to be on stage himself one day. But severe stage fright has kept him away from the spotlight so far. His reserve is so great that hardly anyone knows that he is actually responsible for his friend’s hit songs.
When he starts a new job in a Basque village, he suddenly collapses during class and loses consciousness. The reason for this is a cancerous tumor in his ear – a diagnosis that will significantly change his life. But not exclusively because of the illness: In order to get regular treatment at a hospital in Bilbao, he travels with Mai (Susana Abaitua), who takes those affected there free of charge in her bus. In this way he gets to know other fellow sufferers such as Unai (Pablo Scapigliati), Santi (Antonio Durán “Morris”) or Manuela (Elena Irureta) and becomes part of a community of shared fate that gives each other strength.
Sounds cheesy, but it’s not
Of course, the poster already suggests that the introverted, brooding Andrés and the cheerful, lively Mai will get along in the end. “A Bus Full of Life” is relatively straight forward. The course of Andrés’ music career is also only mildly surprising. But that’s not the point, because Cormenzana is more concerned with conveying a message that is close to the pulse of a time, even outside of the cancer issue – this is about the disappearance (and rediscovery) of community.
It is only through his illness that the loner Andrés discovers the value of togetherness, which can also arise between completely different characters (everything from the very young to the very old is represented on the bus). He learns that suffering shared is actually suffering halved and that in the end, big rock star dreams may not be worth as much as the feeling of having finally arrived. That sounds pretty cheesy, but the great art of the film is to elegantly avoid these cheesy cliffs.
It is only through his illness that Andrés finds people with whom he truly feels like he belongs – including bus driver Mai (Susana Abaitua), with whom he falls in love.
Cancer is by no means trivialized. The effects of chemotherapy are discussed and there is also a death, but the script never indulges in great drama and does not force Andrés through a journey of suffering, at the end of which realizations have to be forced. Everything develops almost casually, with sometimes surprisingly cheeky humor – Unai shamelessly plays off his cancer in the clinic’s cafeteria in order to get the waitress to give him a second yogurt, contrary to the regulations. There is hardly a second film in which cancer patients indulge in smoking weed with such fervor – and Andrés and Mai’s first kiss takes place in front of a very special backdrop.
Conclusion: Heavy topic, packaged as light as a feather. “A Bus Full of Life” talks about death, but turns to life with a big grin: It’s not too often that a film about cancer comes across as relaxed as this – you’re happy to take a seat on this bus.