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'Lily,' A Film About A Young Artist With Breast Cancer, And What's Next In Her Life

This article is more than 9 years old.

Most cancer patients aren’t celebrities. And maybe that’s exactly why LILY, an indie film about a young woman who happens to have breast cancer, has value.

The opening is spot-on: the patient’s face, boyish with scant hair, pale and pretty, blinking. She’s strapped in a radiation machine. Her expression alternates from brave, to scared, and tired, maybe bored. Her heart beats loudly, but that merges with the louder – overwhelming – thumps of the medical device delivering radiation treatments to her right armpit.

You might wince if you’ve been there. Because part of what this movie gets right is the loneliness of receiving cancer therapy – the feeling that kicks in when you’re awake and alive in some sort of hyper-sterile place, where there’s no one else.

The protagonist, Lily, is portrayed by Amy Grantham, a real artist and patient who was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 31 years. The film’s director, Matt Creed, began working with Grantham on the screenplay while she was completing her breast cancer treatments, around 2011. The film is loosely based on Grantham’s story.

“I wanted to make the film, to show what it’s like when your treatment ends,” Grantham told me in an interview. “What a strange transition that can be,” she said. “People say congratulations you when you finish your treatments. But I was mainly worried, I didn’t know what would happen to me next,” she said. “You’re supposed to be normal again, but that’s not how I felt.”

In the movie, Lily lives in a New York City walk-up with a man who appears to be more than twice her age. He’s supportive, and loving – nothing to take for granted with a breast cancer diagnosis, and wants to celebrate the end of her treatment by taking a trip to France. Apart from her cancer, the situation is far from ideal: Lily cooks, deals with his young sons after school, and doesn’t particularly enjoy hanging out with his older friends.

The film doesn't provide a lot of medical details. But there are clues. One of my favorites is when Lily walks up several flights of stairs to get home, exhausted, needing to rest on the landings. She’s tired from the radiation treatments, pale and likely anemic. But if you had seen Lily on the street, a few minutes earlier – you’d have no idea that she was ill. Maybe you’d have noticed her wig, She walks and smiles and looks pretty good – a problem faced by people with subtle disability.

A twist is that Lily’s got the BRCA-2 mutation, probably inherited from her estranged father. She’s at significant risk – after the lumpectomy, surgery and radiation – for developing another breast cancer, or ovarian cancer, besides long-term problems after treatment such as infertility. A genetic counselor advises Lily to inform her father about the genetic finding, because men who carry BRCA-2 mutations are at higher risk for getting early-onset prostate cancer, male breast cancer, and pancreatic cancer.

Like all cancer narratives, this movie is imperfect. Early on, Lily stops and observes a homeless person on the street ramble for so long, I almost left the theater. Shortly after she instructs her boyfriend’s son how to tie shoelaces. While she goes through this task dutifully, it seems the filmmaker is demonstrating, step-by-step, just how kind and patient a person Lily is.

Other parts are lively – and credible. Like when Lily breaks out into a tap dance and, seemingly, forgets her circumstance and her writer-neighbor downstairs. Or when she pulls out a blond wig while making love. Some are painful, like when she gets drunk and, knowingly, embarrasses herself. Or when she visits her estranged father.

Her life is neither glamorous nor easy. Lily worries about her future. She seeks work. She wants to pay her own medical bills, despite her older friend’s offer to cover those. She contemplates leaving him, and getting her own place. For some, the movie’s main message might be that breast cancer is not the only issue with which most patients grapple.

It would be impossible to watch a movie about each patient, every woman with breast cancer who has to deal with genetic information, life and health concerns after treatment. Infinite memoirs, on film… If I were a young cancer patient living in a city where there is no support group, or even where there is one – or the parent or lover or friend of such a person – I might want to see this movie. Sure, it's just one person's story. But it offers relatable insights.

LILY has aired at several film festivals including Tribeca. It will be available on iTunes and Google Play beginning on December 9th.

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