Hearing the title, “The English Surgeon”, I didn’t expect to find our characters in cold, unglamorous Ukraine. I thought of tea and biscuits and little old ladies that looked like the Queen. I noticed the main patient, Marian, living in the desolate-looking country where nothing is growing, walking past what seems to be a graveyard. I don’t think rich people live near run-down overgrown graveyards. That’s a good establisher sequence, especially when he walks into his cavelike dark home. The surgeon’s introduction was also great, seeing how he was drilling into wood to make a box for-we’d never guess-a surgeon’s chair, to be shipped somewhere. The drilling bit sort of let me make the association between drilling wood and drilling into someone’s head to remove tumours. And it would be the poor Marian’s head we would soon be seeing opened up and ‘cured’.
Regarding the sound aspect, I recognised a few themes being repeated and used. It felt appropriate at all times.
Out of curiosity, I googled the release date, 2007. Before Russia invaded Ukraine. And I also saw the runtime, 94 minutes. It felt shorter when I was watching it.
Characters – looking back, I guessed the filmmakers had footage of many other patients they ‘saw’ at the hospital, but chose few of them for the sake of time. I wouldn’t mind watching more but it’s emotionally very heavy seeing people in pain. So the characters that were featured were good for the story. In the sense that I don’t think the story wandered off because we followed the ‘wrong’ character.
Journeys – I like the shots in the car. I imagine that in Ukraine, unlike Singapore, travel by car is a longer journey and important conversations would take place between our main characters: the doctors. So it was a good decision to set up a way to record what they said. It seems that some of that car footage was from fixed cameras. Otherwise the camera crew would die of cramps from filming everything and not moving throughout the car journey.
Aftermath – I was thinking about how the surgeon visited the little girl’s grave at the end. We saw a repeat of the little girl on archive footage and I guess it’s because they didn’t have other footage that would honour that person. Also in case we the audience were confused as to which female person we’re looking at being shown to us. At this point I was thinking about the people in my life and tearing up. Incidentally, a friend of mine passed away a week ago from cancer. The cancer was in various parts of his body and he had been receiving treatment for around 2 years already without much success. So things like cancer and tumours – it’s good if they can be diagnosed early like the doctor said. In places like Ukraine where average people seem to be poorer than people in Singapore, diagnosis often comes too late as we see in the movie.
Morality – while I agree with the statement that filming people in suffering is exploitative by nature, I also think that the filmmakers were respectful of the people they recorded, and did not dishonour anyone. Things would be different in other countries. I have two points on this. 1. In Singapore, many of us stay in HDBs, and many of us have access to the Internet. On the Internet people say a lot of mean things and information gets around quickly to people you’d never intended to know. I think that out of fear of shame (Who are these people with the camera? What if my neighbours see me in this state? What will my friends at school think of me?) many people would refuse to be filmed and a documentary like this would be more difficult to make. 2. From past experience, it is not easy to shoot in a hospital, because of many reasons.
On the other hand, the people in Ukraine may not be aware of the exploitative nature of this documentary. They may not even know what a documentary is, or not have watched documentaries themselves. But it seems that BBC is fine with it, so things appear to be OK.
One last point, I think it’s also a film about friendship. The English surgeon and the Ukrainian doctor are friends for fifteen years. I don’t think I have had any close friendships for that long. So these two gentlemen seem very committed to saving people’s lives and their friendship is a positive thing. They look like a great team in spite of all the hard decisions they have to make every day at work, and all of the failures they’ve had to overcome from a nosy government or botched operations.