SONG
Brief synopsis
© David Lowe, 12/1/2002
A middle-aged man, neatly dressed, walks through city streets. He reaches for his mobile as it rings. Suddenly, shockingly, he's hit by a truck. The collision throws the man into another place and time. He's in medieval Europe, a warrior on a misty battlefield. Thrown from his horse, he's seriously wounded.
Physically, the man is lying in intensive care, in a coma. Noisy machines keep his body alive. His wife, 40s, sits beside him, distraught. A doctor monitors the machines. The man's mother arrives, worried, and replaces the wife in vigil by the bedside. The man is completely unconscious.
On the medieval battlefield, the man opens his eyes. His face is stained with blood. In the aftermath of the battle, he's surrounded by dead and dying soldiers, armour in disarray. The soldiers lie in and around the sandy bed of a stream, trickling softly. In the distance, enemy soldiers approach, some mounted on armoured heavy horses. The man tries to move, but something is broken inside.
In the hospital, an exotic, bird-like woman arrives at the door of the coma patient. She is a music therapist. Reluctantly, the man's mother and his doctor allow her to enter the room, although the situation seems hopeless.
On the battlefield, the enemy soldiers are killing the wounded. From the man's perspective, the sounds of the life support machinery merge with the sounds of the enemy soldiers as they steadily approach.
The young woman stands by the man's bed, takes his hand in hers. She tunes out all the noises in the room but the sounds of the man's breathing. She amplifies the sound. Listening intently, the young woman synchronises her own breathing rhythm with the man's.
Among the enemy soldiers on the battlefield is a medieval queen. In the coma victim's hallucinatory imagining, she looks like his wife, but hard and ruthless. She appears to be searching for a particular person among the dead and dying. Above the chaos of the battlefield, the man hears a woman's voice, singing. The music is all around and yet far away.
In the hospital, the woman sings. The man's breathing is her metronome. On the battlefield, it begins to rain. The man hangs on to the woman's voice like a drowning man to a rope. He is transfixed. Simple and hymn-like at first, the song becomes more complex, urgent.
The man's wife returns to the intensive care ward to find a strange woman singing to her husband. Upset, she tries to intervene. The man's life signs weaken. The woman is pushed away. She sings more stridently. A storm rages on the battlefield. The enemy soldiers and their queen are getting very near now, killing the wounded.
The hospital's machines fail. The man is dying as doctor and nurses scramble to save him. Still the young woman sings. The enemy soldiers reach him. As the man on the battlefield is about to be killed, the song reaches its peak. In the intensive care ward, the man wakes. He smiles at the woman, tears in his eyes. Her song has given him back the desire to live.© David Lowe, January 2002