Knockin' on Heaven's Door

As a writer I take pride in the titles of my articles. They usually are a twist for well-known expressions or insinuations about movies, songs or pop culture anthems. This title, alas, is not the fruit of my work. It is a Bob Dylan anti-Vietnam song which was used by a German director as a title for a movie which won the Silver Lion in the Moscow International Film Festival back in 1997.

Incidentally, I consider the movie as the best one I have ever seen, even topping classics such as Natural Born Killers, The Usual Suspects, and the always uplifting Groundhog Day. The movie starts as a male version of another favorite of mine, Ridley Scott's Thelma and Louise: two men getting away from it all, breaking loose with their past and going to where they know there is no chance for return.

But Knockin' on Heaven's Door has more to it than that. After all, it was not hindered by any mainstream big studio marketing policy and did not have to be politically correct to please the audiences. As a side note, one of the stupidest characters of the movie is Turkish.

It's the story of two guys who don't even know each other until they meet in a hospital-- in the oncology section no less--and discover that they have just a little time left to live. After getting drunk, they decide to go see the ocean since one of them--the conservative one--confessed that he had never seen it before. The other terminally ill patient promises to go along the trip and lead the way.

So they steal a classic Mercedes from the parking lot of the hospital, a baby blue colored roadster, and off they go to a journey of self discovery and money squandering, since the trunk of the car contained a bag full of a million dollars. The baby blue roadster belonged to the town's hottest mob. But dead men cannot use money, so they might as well spend it while still alive. When both made a list of their last wishes and asked each other to choose one item randomly, one of them got to buy a replica of Elvis' Cadillac for his mother, and the other--the conservative one who wanted to see the ocean--got to have his wish too, of sleeping with two women at the same time.

The police became involved in the matter when it was believed that one of the men kidnapped the other, giving the movie an even sharper and funnier twist, with pseudo-smart police officers and a lovely quid pro quo played on the Stockholm syndrome, a state of mind where a victim starts identifying and sympathizing with the kidnapper.

I am relating all of this because tonight I was told a true story. Apparently a friend of mine who was working closely with AIDS patients as a volunteer in a hospital in Toronto, Canada got a call when he was taking a vacation in Paris from a dying Turkish patient who wanted to see the ocean before he died.

My friend ended his vacation promptly and headed back to Toronto. I have no knowledge of the details of the trip which my friend and the Turkish patient took to get to Florida, but I know that the patient's health was so delicate that he couldn't see the ocean during the first days of the trip, and that he couldn't see it during the day either because of his collostamy bag.

Eventually, on Saturday night my friend carried the patient to the ocean and dipped his feet in the water. They came back to Toronto on Sunday and the patient died two weeks later.

In Knockin' on Heaven's Door, one of the two friends--the one who was supposed to lead the way--turned out to have never seen the ocean himself: His pretext was his friend's wish. The final scene witnesses one of the two friends dying after severe convulsions and lack of medicine on the ocean shore. The conservative one--now much less conservative--gets completely wasted on alcohol and goes for a swim in the ocean he wanted to see.

Strangely, the scene was not dramatic at all but simply effortlessly moving, a bit like the whole movie.

You will be pleased to know that audiences which watched in Lebanon were so mesmerized that no one left until the end of the film credentials. We were rewarded with a funny joke: the two friends had sent large chunks of the stolen money to randomly chosen names taken from the telephone directory, and during the scene inserted after the end of the credentials a policeman is seen arresting a suspicious looking man who claims that two strangers had sent him money over the mail. The policeman ends up putting the money into his own pocket.

Thelma and Louise is Hollywood cinema making which grossed millions of dollars. Knockin' on Heaven's Door is beautiful cinema and earned a Silver Lion in the Moscow International Film Festival in 1997. My friend's story is a very moving fact of life that no one has ever heard about, except for you.