A scene from 'Heal the Living'
A scene from 'Heal the Living'

Based on Maylis de Kerangal’s 2014 novel, Réparer les Vivants, the french film “Heal the Living” opens in New York on April 14.

It is almost dawn as 17-year-old Simon (Gabin Verdet) pops out of his girlfriend’s bed, dresses and, with one glance back, drops out her window and takes off on his bike. Joyously racing through the streets of the French port city LeHavre, he meets a friend, who races along with him on his skateboard, until they pull up at the beach and join a third pal for a plunge and surf on the arrogant ocean waves. Dawn lifts the darkness as they mount their surfboards and the sea roars like a team of angry monsters daring the young men to defy them. Simon dives deep and the camera shoots him from below. Is Simon drowning? Is he going to die? Yes, but not now.

Exhausted, the boys catch a bus back to town, Simon and his friend resting their heads on one another’s shoulders. The driver, tired, keeps blinking. In a flashback we see Simon meet a pretty girl at a trolley stop and race her trolley up a steep hill on his bike so he can kiss her at the top.

Simon’s parents have been called to the hospital. As spouses, they are separated, but their son, lying shirtless and silent, attached to wires and tubes, brings them together at his bedside. He is brain-dead, and, as they depart, the medical specialist, Thomas (Taher Rahim), takes them aside and delicately invites them to sacrifice Simon’s organs so that somewhere, someone else may live.

Their immediate reaction is shock, but their answer is yes. This is a film with very little dialogue, but we know the characters intimately by watching them in these most intimate moments, and in these moments we are being invited to love them.

There is hardly a religious word in all of “Heal the Living,” but the film doesn’t need them.

Miles away in Paris, the heart of Claire, a fragile, middle-aged woman, a former musician with two college-age sons who love her and a husband somewhere whom she has not seen in a long time, is failing. Sometimes she has to be carried up a flight of stairs.

What follows, back in LeHavre, are scenes unique in the history of cinema. Thomas asks the assembled surgeons to pause as he bends down and whispers into dead Simon’s ear an affectionate message from his family and friends. If and how this message is heard depends on the faith of the audience.

We watch as the scalpel cuts into Simon’s bare chest, gloved hands help open the wound and snip snip delicately at veins and muscles, and human hands plunge into the hole and lift this beating central engine of life from its home, quickly bury it a box of ice and pass it to waiting officers who rush it to the airport and take off for Paris.

There, men on motorcycles speed it to the hospital where Claire’s body has been sliced open to receive it. Outside the operating room her two sons, exhausted, rest their heads on each other’s shoulder. Again, the theater audience has the disturbing—yet beautiful—bird’s eye view as the gloved hands lower Simon’s gift into the opening.

I am reminded of the great film “Jesus in Montreal,” in which a troop of local actors re-stage a passion play outdoors and in the pageant resemble truths in the lives of the actors. Somehow the crucifixion scene is violently interrupted and the cross topples and the young man playing Jesus is killed. The last scene is a hospital operating room where the actor’s heart has been transplanted to give life to another person. Consistent with the whole film, this is also seen as symbolic of Jesus’ resurrection. Jesus lives on in this person.

There is hardly a religious word in all of “Heal the Living,” but the film doesn’t need them. The images of young men resting on each other’s shoulder, sons protecting their mother and hospital personnel noted for their tenderness also suggest the Biblical references to the “body of Christ.” Katell Quillévéré, the film’s director, has called it “an ode to the living.” She concludes: “A heart stops beating in one body to prolong the life of another…an incredible journey, on which one human being becomes aware that they are a link in a chain, part of a whole. Connected.”

Son of Raymond A. Schroth, of Trenton, N. J., a World War I hero and editorial writer and reporter for the Trenton Times, Brooklyn Eagle and New York Herald Tribune for over 40 years, and of Mildred (Murphy) Schroth, of Bordentown, N. J., a teacher in the Trenton public and Catholic school systems, Raymond A. Schroth, S.J., has spent his life as a Jesuit, journalist, and teacher.

After graduating from Fordham College in 1955--where he majored in American civilization, studied in Paris, and was editorial editor of the Fordham Ram--he served as an antiaircraft artillery officer in Germany for two years and joined the Society of Jesus in 1957. Ordained a priest in 1967, he obtained his PhD in American Thought and Culture at the George Washington University and taught journalism at Fordham until 1979. During that time he was also associate and book editor of Commonweal magazine.

After two years as academic dean of Rockhurst College in Kansas City, he became academic dean of the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass. In 1985-86 he held the Will and Ariel Durant Chair in the Humanities at Saint Peter's College in Jersey City. From 1986 to 1996 he taught journalism at Loyola University in New Orleans and was adviser to the Maroon, its award-winning newspaper. In 1995 the Southeast Journalism Conference named him Journalism Educator of the year. In 1996 he returned to Fordham as assistant dean of Fordham College Rose Hill and director of the Matteo Ricci Society, which prepares students to compete for prestigious fellowships. Meanwhile, from 1967 he served as a resident faculty member in the student residence halls.

He has published eight books, including: The Eagle and Brooklyn: A Community Newspaper (Greenwood); Books for Believers: 35 Books Every Catholic Should Read (Paulist); with Jeff Theilman, Volunteer: with the Poor in Peru (Paulist); and The American Journey of Eric Sevareid (Steerforth), a biography of the CBS commentator.

In 1999 he moved to Saint Peter's College, where he wrote two books: From Dante to Dead Man Walking: One Person's Journey through Great Religious Literature and Fordham: A History and Memoir, (Loyola Press in 2001-2002). In 2000 Saint Peter's College named him the Jesuit Community Professor in the Humanities. In Spring 2003 he was made editor of the national Jesuit university review, Conversations and will continue to serve in this position until 2013. His The American Jesuits: A History, (New York University Press, 2007), was followed by Bob Drinan: The Controversial Life of the First Catholic Priest Elected to Congress, (Fordham University Press, 2010). He taught a graduate journalism course at NYU in 2004 and journalism history at Brooklyn College in 2006.

In recent summers he has traveled to Gabon, South Africa, Peru, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, France, Thailand, Vietnam, Cuba, Indonesia, the Czech Republic, and China to educate himself, write articles, and take pictures. In 2003 his National Catholic Reporter media essays won the Catholic Press Association's best cultural columnist award. His over 300 articles on politics, religion, the media, and literature have appeared in many publications, including the Columbia Journalism Review, Commonweal, America, the New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Times, New York Newsday, Kansas City Star, Boston Globe and the Newark Star Ledger, where he was a weekly online columnist for several years. From time to time he lectures and appears on radio and TV. He is listed in Who's Who and Contemporary Authors. In his free time he swims, bikes, walks, reads, goes to movies and restaurants, and prays.