Fantastic voyage

>> Life Without Death captures Frank Cole's existential journey across the Sahara

by MATTHEW HAYS

The Sahara Desert is captured with an epic beauty in Life Without Death that is truly astonishing. Filmmaker Frank Cole, who made the Guinness Book of Records for crossing the Sahara by camel, films the desert with an awe that we immediately understand through his bleak and minimal imagery.

What's less understood is Cole's obsession. As we learn in the film's opening moments, he has become possessed by the spectre of death since his beloved grandfather passed away. Now, in an apparent effort to face down that final big sleep, Cole ventures to the Sahara to make the trek. Cole never really tries to explain his obsession to us, but rather allows his obsession to unfold onscreen.

Creating his own unique docudrama style, Cole films his own cinematic travel journal, depicting spats with his ornery camel, efforts to give medical attention to a starving boy and shots of Cole's desert-stricken body parts that would send shivers up and down David Cronenberg's spine (he also captures a c-section delivery in one scene).

Through it all, Cole flashes back to fleeting memories of his grandfather, while capturing the desert in a series of stunning montages. The filmmaker narrates the film himself, telling us of his contemplation of mortality while on his Saharan trek. Again, it's never clear why Cole chooses this way of dealing with his own mortality, but part of the intrigue of this film is that the question never seems to bother us.

Hanging over the film and making Life Without Death a truly haunting experience to watch, is the fact that on a subsequent journey to the Sahara last year, Cole was murdered by bandits. Oddly enough, Cole left strict instructions to the film's co-producer, Francis Miquet, that were Cole to die in the Sahara, that information must not become part of the actual film. Thus the film's final text does not include any note about Cole's demise.

But Cole's death is a crucial part of the experience of watching Life Without Death. That Cole, who spends the entire film staring death in the face, was finally done in--particularly at the hands of other humans and not the elements--gives the film a whole other layer of existential angst. Ultimately, it's Cole's stunning testimony to the impossibility of life without death.

Life Without Death opens Friday, Jan. 12 at Ex-Centris