Dr. Pain

A pain reliever turns into a pain giver in Les Sept jours du talion (7 Days). Directed by Podz, (aka Daniel Grou), 7 Days chronicles in agonizing detail the degeneration of a surgeon (Claude Legault), whose eight-year-old daughter (Rose-Marie Coallier) has been brutally raped and murdered. After the film’s restrained opening, Podz lingers on shots of the little girl’s lifeless, mangled corpse and blood-stained panties from her father’s traumatized point-of-view, and for the rest of the movie’s running time, 7 Days keeps the brutality coming.

Early on, the picture moves forward rapidly as the weirdly grinning killer (Martin Dubreuil) is arrested, and Dr. Bruno Hamel contrives to kidnap and transport him to an isolated cabin. Then for a week, Hamel punishes the man who wrecked his life with an elaborate programme of escalating tortures. The moment you see the naked and manacled Anthony’s penis, you know it doesn’t have a bright future. Neither does the rest of his body, which gets subjected to everything from relentless chain whipping and a shower of the doctor’s urine to unhelpful surgical interventions.

After informing the police about his intentions, Hamel goes about his grisly business in deadpan silence, holding up neatly written cards when he needs to explain the subtleties of a particular ordeal. He moves lugubriously, sipping beer, even though given his normal upscale lifestyle you would expect him to enhance his talion (retaliation) with Chablis. Eventually, the doctor sinks so deeply into his meticulously calibrated atrocities, he begins to seem no better than the creature writhing in pain at his feet. The bloodstains on his immaculately white t-shirt, which he doesn’t take off, imply the transference of guilt.

In Quebec, those who see 7 Days as an arthouse think piece, argue that it confronts audiences with the monstrousness of violence, not to mention the futility and moral vacuity of selling one’s soul to Mr. Vengeance. The cop pursuing Hamel also lost a loved one to vicious, mindless crime. But although Detective Hervé Mercure (Remy Girard) can’t stop himself from staring at security camera video of his late wife’s violent death during a convenience store robbery, he believes the justice system should take its course without intervention. And when Hamel tries forcing the mother of one of Anthony’s other victims into sharing his revenge, she screams, “When you torture this man, you’re killing your own daughter!” Not everybody in the movie agrees. In one tense scene, Hamel is recognized by a young woman who rather than calling the cops, tells him that she’s on his side.

Based on a novel by Quebec horror writer Patrick Senécal, whose 5150, rue des Ormes was adapted into a successful 2009 film now on DVD, 7 Days matches the extreme horror of recent pictures like Martyrs and Antichrist, its brutalized child recalling the little girl in The Lovely Bones. No doubt, Senécal and Podz are fans of South Korean director Park-Chan Wook’s crazed parables about revenge, particularly Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, but their movie lacks Park’s mordant wit, stunningly surreal images, indelible characters, and wide range of evocative settings. Moreover, there isn’t much of a dramatic arc to a story about one guy torturing another guy to death in a basement – apart from the doctor’s shift from ruthlessness to blind rage with an interval of haunting tenderness.

After selling quickly to an American distributor (a feat for a Quebec film), 7 Days played the Sundance Film Festival’s midnight genre slot where it stirred up admiration in some viewers, fear and loathing in others - a preview of how non-festival audiences will react to it. One unfriendly online critic imagined Podz standing beside the screen eagerly seeking a likely American re-make. After all, the torture porn genre, which Podz told entertainment journalist Brendan Kelly he abhors, has been a box-office draw since the 2005 release of Eli Roth’s Hostel.

Meanwhile at Slamdance, Sundance’s alter-ego event, two Quebec movies picked up awards. Charles-Olivier Michaud's Snow and Ashes was named best narrative feature while Alexandre Franchi's The Wild Hunt took the narrative film audience prize. The latter picture, an action-thriller about a Medieval role-playing game gone nightmarishly haywire, has been steadily building steam since its TIFF 2009 screening and inclusion on the Toronto Festival’s annual Top Ten Canadian movies list. Observers have noted that in Quebec, The Wild Hunt and Snow and Ashes, both English-language productions, have drawn almost zero media interest. 


Innocence Lost?

Some Quebeckers will see irony in the fact that the producer of Les Sept jours du talion, Nicole Robert, launched her career as a producer on the 1984 children’s film, La guerre des tuques (The Dog Who Stopped the War). Robert was working for producer Rock Demers, who created Tales for All, a series of kids’ pictures initiated by La guerre. Demers speculated correctly that Quebec could make a name for itself on the world market by specializing in children’s entertainment promoting humanistic values. He was so opposed to a worldview that divided humanity into good and bad guys, he had problems with the all-time classic of children’s cinema, The Wizard of Oz.

As Quebec cinema seems poised to make a name for itself on the world market by specializing in ultra-horrific pictures like 7 Days, 5150, rue des Ormes, and the shot-in-Quebec French film, Martyrs, La guerre des tuques is still a fondly regarded movie. Last year Demers and his production company Les Productions La Fête celebrated its 25th anniversary with events that included a live re-creation of the anti-war fable’s epic snowball battle. And this month, an exhibition of 51 production stills by Jean Demers opens in Montreal’s Grand Bibliothèque.


The Tierneys’ Brand New Show

Like Nicole Robert, producer Kevin Tierney was once a Rock Demers associate. Unlike Robert, whose track record includes hit comedies and family friendly movies, Tierney wouldn’t go near a blood-soaked story like 7 Days. Even though his current production, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce depicts a Montreal neighbourhood terrorized by a serial killer, Tierney insists that it doesn’t paint things too black. Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, he told trade magazine Playback, is "a comedy... on the nicest side of scary."

Once a leafy refuge for working and middle class families, the Montreal neighbourhood of Notre-Dame-de-Grâce transformed into a relatively upscale community with quality restaurants and gourmet food shops. At the same time, its vintage apartment buildings and lower NDG duplexes house students and hipsters all of whom are devotees of the massive, heart wrenching breakfasts served up in a hole-in-the-wall called Cosmos.

Kevin Tierney, his writer-director-actor son Jacob (pictured), and burgeoning star Jay Baruchel are all former inhabitants of NDG and retain a love for it that will probably imprint on their follow-up to The Trotsky, a festival hit scheduled for a wide release in May. Shooting since mid-January, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce is Jacob Tierney’s adaptation of a Quebec novel called Chère voisine by Chrystine Brouillet. His producer and father described it to me as “a black comedy, a very Hitchcockian kind of noir. Shallow Graveish. Nobody’s terribly nice, but it’s funny.”

Baruchel, who takes the Mickey Mouse part opposite Nicolas Cage in the upcoming The Sorcerer's Apprentice, plays a  grade-school teacher who moves into a building and hooks up with a waitress (Emily Hampshire) and a handicapped young man (Scott Speedman). The picture conflates quirky character ensemble with its thriller story thread. Many cast and crew members from The Trotsky are on board the $5.3 production.


Dolan, Dolan

He’s everywhere, including the relentlessly cool CBC radio program Q. Interviewed by Jian Ghomeshi in relentless fawning mode, 20-year-old Xavier Dolan was disarmingly self-critical,worrying that maybe all the praise and prizes he’s received for his debut film, Jai tué ma mère were driven more by his tender youth and elaborate hair than his talent.

In France, Jai tué ma mère recently picked up a Prix Lumière from that country’s foreign press, and a César nomination. The Lumière honours Dolan for best French-language movie made outside France; the César is for top foreign film. Moreover, Anne Dorval, who plays Dolan’s autobiographical anti-hero’s beleaguered mom, won a best actress prize at the Palm Springs International Film Festival. And in Toronto, Dolan took the Toronto Film Critics Associations’ new Jay Scott Prize for an emerging artist. “Xavier Dolan did not just emerge,” said TFCA president Brian D. Johnson, “he burst onto the world stage in Cannes at the age of 20, dazzling us with a daring first feature that he wrote, produced, directed, and starred in.”

Jai tué ma mère, playing in Toronto from February 5, was Canada’s submission to be considered for a Best Foreign Film Oscar nomination. When Dolan didn’t get the nod,  some Quebec and Canadian journalists lamented Hollywood's myopia. In reality, as nifty as his film is, it’s not even in the same ballpark as 2010 Oscar nominees like Jacques Audiard’s volcanic Un Prophete and Michael Haneke’s masterful The White Ribbon. At the Oscar-like Césars, Jai tué ma mère is again up against both these films, not to mention James Cameron’s Avatar, which Quebeckers love as much as viewers in the rest of the world, and they don’t always buy into massive international hits.

The peripatetic Xavier Dolan has already shot his second movie, Nos amours imaginaires, and performs in Jacob Tierney’s Notre-Dame-de-Grâce. Nos amours imaginaires, scheduled to be finished within a few month, will be distributed by Remstar, a company larger than K-Films Amérique, handler of Jai tué ma mère.

Incidentally, Nos amours imaginaires is not, as I stated last month, a story about a woman and her transsexual boyfriend. Dolan described that idea to me last summer as a picture called Laurence Anyways, and I thought he had changed the title. In fact, the gender-bender, on Dolan’s production slate, is still called Laurence Anyways.