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Most able-bodied people don’t know what to say to 23-year-old Vera (Lucia Zemene) in the months following a traffic collision that left her without a leg, but one empty platitude really stands out: A friend suggests
that maybe it happened for a reason. Haunted by this thought, she eventually asks a fellow young wheelchair user if he agrees, and he does. “The reason,” he says, “is that a truck crashed into you.” That reply captures the refreshingly direct, no-bullshit tone of Mari Sanders’ “Stand Up,” a Dutch drama that seeks to cut through the condescending sentimentality that often characterizes portraits of disability on screen, and instead trades in more straightforward truths.
That approach begins with the casting of young actor-musician Zemene, a real-life amputee who lost her leg in similar circumstances to Vera. She and her director, who himself uses a wheelchair, bring not just lived experience but a lively, varied palette of feeling to the material. Though it tells a simple story in unadorned fashion, it’s the frank, often funny authenticity of perspective in “Stand Up” that lifts it from the familiar. Following a premiere in the international narrative competition at Tribeca, Sanders’ thoroughly accessible, audience-friendly film should be a popular selection on the fest circuit, and merits thoughtful handling by inclusivity-minded distributors.
“Stand Up” wastes little time in getting to the crux of its story, introducing the tattooed, fun-loving Vera on a typically raucous night out in Rotterdam with her friends Inaya (Hana Hussein) and Roos (Manouk Pluis), before she tipsily wends her way home — and is hit by a truck in the road. Waking up in hospital hours later, she finds her left leg has been amputated, and the film plunges her immediately into the practicalities of living with a sudden disability. It’s a wrenching challenge for a naturally independent, headstrong personality: An early scene captures the painful physical difficulties of acts as everyday as going to the bathroom, while Zemene conveys Vera’s quietly seething aggravation at being told by her parents to rest as they fuss around her.
She’s better suited to the tough love dished out by her physical therapist Jonathan (Kendrick Etmon), who doesn’t mind when she pushes back in frustration: “Fuck you,” said with varying degrees of anger and affection, is their common language. But it’s in Xander (a sharp, spiky Daan Buringa), a wheelchair user and aspiring standup comedian whom she meets in her rehabilitation centre, that she finally finds a kindred spirit — someone who vocally resists society’s perception of the disabled community as essentially passive, but is equally skeptical of hollow empowerment slogans that present disability as something to be transcended. “Maybe you should look closer,” he says, when one of Vera’s well-meaning friends banally says that she “doesn’t see” the wheelchair, only the woman.
Most of all, Xander is an advocate for the right of people in his position to be stubborn, defiant, even badly behaved: A comic high point of the film follows a group of disabled people from the center on a trip to the cinema, cheerfully flouting rules intended to literally put them in their place. Not everyone has to be such a firebrand. While Vera forms an increasingly tender bond with Xander — the complications of sex for wheelchair users being another rarely explored detail that Sanders addresses with candor — she also gradually develops her own relationship to her new body, and her own happy medium between challenging and complying with the world around her.
Though editor Yorgos Mavropsaridis (a Yorgos Lanthimos regular) cuts the film with brisk concision, there’s also a welcome temporal elasticity here — the sense that life can change in the blink of an eye, but also stall for undefined passages. Either way, no step of this journey is presented as easy or fast. Vera learns, for example, that she has a longer road than she initially expected to walking again with a prosthetic, and “Stand Up” doesn’t feel the need to follow her all the way there, since it’s hardly the only victory worth celebrating. Thanks to its fluid, perceptive writing and finely rounded performances — Zemene is sometimes pained, sometimes giddy, but never martyred — the film offers an unusually convincing view of the volatile day-to-day moods and back-and-forth progress structuring the life of one disabled person, without presuming to speak for many others.
