The festival-circuit documentary The Oldest Person in the World is an intentionally incomplete project, in that it could theoretically be expanded upon into infinity . . . or at least for as long as humanity is still viable and still making movies. As such, it’s a project without a clear goal beyond marking the passage of time, one that director Sam Green has taken on as a personal mission within the scope of his own family life but could, theoretically, stray into any direction the next filmmaker in his lineage wants to take it. The logline premise is simple. Green has spent the past decade interviewing the world’s currently oldest living person, as determined by Guinness World Records, one reigning champion at a time. He hopes to continue this project for as long as he continues working & living as a filmmaker, with an open-ended invitation for it to carry on beyond him in another documentarian’s hands — preferably his young son’s. The idea is that, every ten years, a new edition of The Oldest Person in the World would be issued with a new batch of interviews as the title changes hands, inviting the audience to reflect on the passage of time at the furthest edges of a human lifespan. That project only takes up so much of the movie’s runtime, however, as Green allows himself space for his own self-reflections on the passage of time within his immediate family, getting sentimental about his growing son, his aging mother, his deceased brother, and his own prematurely failing health. The world’s oldest living people only have the strength and the self-awareness to say so much about what it means to live an extraordinarily long life, so Green fills the void with his own ups, downs, and neuroses. It’s unclear what place, exactly, that perspective would have in a future edition of this project once Green passes the baton, which is probably why the Guinness Book of World Records isn’t typically written in first-person.
It likely goes without saying that Green’s interview subjects are of far greater interest than his personal video diary entries that fill the gaps between them. It also likely goes without saying that the oldest person in the world is almost always asleep or grumpy, which makes them terrible interviewees — delightfully so. The MVP subject of this initial batch is the 118-year-old French nun Lucile Randon, who attributes her longevity to the mystery of God’s will, which she treats as a kind of supernatural hostage situation she wishes to be over as soon as He’s ready to relent. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the kindly 117-year-old Jamaican woman Violet Brown sees her continued life as more of a gift than an extended prison sentence, stressing to Green how important it is to hold onto the memories that matter most for as long as you can, lest they slip away to time. Green also does some extracurricular research between interviews into the history of the Oldest Living Person title, uncovering bar-trivia tidbits like how all-time champion Jeanne Calment was not only the world’s oldest living person ever at 122 years of age, but also became the world’s oldest rapper on a novelty record to promote her achievement in delaying the inevitable. These women (and they’re seemingly always women) are endlessly fascinating subjects in their own right, so it can’t help but feel a little disappointing that Green relies so heavily on his own cutesy narration to sell their shared story’s poignancy. The resulting film is frequently poignant, though, and funny too, so the indulgence is forgivable. It’s just always a relief when he finds himself at a loss for words (if not only because he doesn’t always speak his interviewee’s language) and sits with his subjects in a shared silence, allowing the passage of time to naturally imbue the moment with meaning.
Conceptually, the idea of The Oldest Person in the World continuing on as a collaborative project is a little flawed, given how much of himself Green has inserted into the initial work. The way he proposes it, the movie would not be followed up by sequels every decade like the Seven Up! series, so much as it would be continually expanded upon in new, fluctuating edits. A new edit from a new contributor would have to transform the work radically to be at all worthwhile, though, as Bresson’s axiom goes that, “A film is born three times: first in the writing of the script, once again in the shooting, and finally in the editing.” What happens if Green’s son grows up to be an avant-garde experimental filmmaker in the Godardian tradition? Would he be allowed to remix footage from this first edition into a multimedia collage of abstract, incongruent imagery, or would Green’s more Varda-inspired approach to documentary filmmaking play out in full before abruptly switching modes as the next contributor takes over? Furthermore, who’s to say that anyone besides Green would be interested in continuing this project at all, including his own son, given how personal the initial outing is to his own familial sentimentality? The imperfection of the proposed project does not delegitimize its existence, though, no more than the imperfection of Guinness World Records’ tracking of the world’s oldest living person makes that pursuit meaningless. Guinness sometimes struggles to fully verify the birth records of the reigning champion, so that there are stretches of time where there technically is no official oldest living person until the next legitimate one can be crowned. Time marches on, though, and things are inevitably taken out of our hands as we’re decommissioned and replaced by the next batch of human beings behind us. All we can really do in the meantime is observe & document the process.
-Brandon Ledet
