Comic Commie

Debuting across Canada this month, Jacob Tierney’s The Trotsky has been a hot item on the international film festival circuit, winning friends and prizes in Toronto, Tokyo, Sofia, New York City, and appropriately the Russian town of Khanty-Mansiisk. Tierney’s second feature, a wacky comedy that steers away from his sombre Dickens adaptation Twist, (2003) obsesses on one of the most iconic of 20th century Russian figures.

The movie opens on a credit sequence that cleverly establishes its teen hero’s monomaniacal fixation on Leon Trotsky, Russian revolutionary and doomed enemy of the Soviet tyrant, Joseph Stalin. In the first decade of the 21st century, many adolescents can’t distinguish between the Vietnam and Second World Wars, let alone possess encyclopedic knowledge of Trotsky’s politics, social vision, and the events that led to his exile and assassination in Mexico.

Leon Bronstein, played by Jay Baruchel with his oddly compelling twitchy body language and wheezy voice, has exiled himself from his social networking, dope-smoking, prom-obsessed peers. He’s a hyper-perceptive teen outsider in the tradition of characters like Holden Caulfield, Donnie Darko, Pump up the Volume’s Hard Harry, and especially Jason Schwartzman’s Max Fisher in Wes Anderson’s 1998 comedy, Rushmore. Like Max, Leon is a prep school student whose implacable conviction in his radical life mission hurls him into a public high school. And like Max, Leon falls head-over-heels for an older woman (Emily Hampshire), a plot development that leads to one of the picture’s most amusing observations: 18-year-old boys are great lovers because although they come fast, they come often.

Driving the movie’s comedy is the fact that Leon doesn’t merely idolize Trotsky and his ideals; the turbulent kid thinks he is the legendary communist, returned to save humanity. No hoodies and baggy pants for this suburban rebel. Leon dresses like his idol in dark suits and waistcoats while acting out the milestone events in the dead Russian’s life. He organizes pro-labour demonstrations, woos a woman called Alexandra, and aspires to get whacked, “preferably in a warm country,” as his wish list stipulates.

Striving to enlighten and activate his fellow high school students, he annoys them with a nonstop barrage of history, ideology, propaganda, and even labour law. To do Leon, Tierney had to draw on what is obviously his own sophisticated grasp of leftist theory and polemic. During an interview he told me that he originally set out to write a “socialist high school film,” but it quickly bloated into depressingly ernest preachiness.  The only way to save the project was to treat Leon’s maniacal socialist didacticism as madcap comedy. He comes on to bored, clueless North American high school kids as if he was rallying oppressed dockworkers in turn-of-the century Minsk.

On the other hand, while Leon is ridiculous, there’s a Chaplinesque pathos to this skinny, black-suited figure who believes so much in his dream, he’s unstoppable. But unlike Donnie Darko or Rushmore, The Trotsky holds back on the darker implications of a teenage hero who can’t live without an obsessive belief system out of which he constructs an identity.

As for the picture’s U.S. release, not only was The Trotsky programmed by Robert De Niro’s post 911 redemption event, The Tribeca Film Festival, it made it onto a slate of 12 movies the springtime festival made available to U.S. cablecasters. The experimental video-on-demand presentation, concurring with Tribeca’s screening, reached a potential audience of 40 million American homes, and it might be followed up by a theatrical release handled by the festival’s distribution operation.


Whosgonnagetit?

While Jacob Tierney and Trotsky producer, Kevin Tierney, launch the Canadian theatrical run of their $6.4 million feature, they are putting the finishing touches on a new project. Tentatively called Notre Dame de Grace, after the Montreal neighbourhood where the story unfolds, the film is another close collaboration with Baruchel, who stars with Nicolas Cage in the upcoming summer blockbuster, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

During a visit to the set, Kevin Tierney (pictured) explained to me that his son Jacob’s third feature zeroes in on three residents of a venerable NDG apartment building: “a man in a wheelchair, his upstairs neighbour, a young woman who likes her cats more than she likes most people, and on the third floor, along comes a new tenant played by Jay Baruchel, and a kind of triangle is formed” – a triangle complicated by the fact that the guy in the wheelchair is a serial killer.

“We begin to realize as the story progresses that this triangle cannot possibly sustain itself,” Tierney continues, becoming a little Hitchcockian, “it will eventually become a duo. But what form, what permutation this may take will be left until the very last moment. Therefore, it’s not a whodunit, it’s a whosgonnagetit.”

Jacob Tierney wanted to adapt Chrystine Brouillet’s story, Chère voisine (Dear Neighbour), because it haunted him from the time he was a student reading his first French-language novel. At first, his father was reluctant. “Why would I want to make a movie about a serial killer,” Tierney wonders. “But when I read the book, I was totally seduced. Jacob has a lightness of touch and would really exploit the humour more than the gruesome.”

Tierney jokes that as he gets older, his “threshold for despair” diminishes. I don’t want to go to the movies to see human degradation and horrible things.” For Tierney, Notre Dame de Grace, or whatever the final title is, will be a darkly comic “celebration of cynicism and a lack of morality that’s all about morality, vengeance, and what is right and what is wrong. People are acting as immoral as they possibly can, all the while talking about their morality.”


10 Top Reasons Why Xavier Dolan Was Ignored by The Genies

Almost a decade younger than Jacob Tierney, Xavier Dolan shares with Tierney a drive to keep the movies coming. His latest, Les amours imaginaires (Heartbeats) plays the Cannes Film Festival this month in its official sidebar, Un certain regard. The last Canadian title to screen in the slot was Zacharias Kunuk’s Atanajurat: the Fast Runner which in 2001 won the Camera d’Or award for best first feature. Following last year’s Cannes debut of Dolan’s debut feature, J'ai tué ma mère (I killed My Mother), the writer-director-actor is now one step closer to making it into Cannes’ Official Competition, the festival’s ultimate selection - if he has a movie ready next year. And he will.

But the question that haunted Quebec’s film industry at Genie-time remains? Why didn’t Xavier Dolan receive a single Genie nomination for a movie that won innumerable awards, including Quebec’s Prix Jutras? Why was he restricted to a non-competitive award for being a striking new talent?

Some believe Dolan was snubbed because he has already won so many prizes. Here are ten other possibilities:

Politically correct feminists on the committee thought that a movie ridiculing a woman’s sloppy bagel eating is misogynist - especially when it’s called I Killed My Mother.

Politically correct gays objected to Dolan’s bitchy, narcissistic gay protagonist who loves/hates his mother.

Homophobes objected to Dolan’s bitchy, narcissistic gay protagonist who loves/hates his mother.

Social activists objected to a movie with no social agenda and voted to nominate Denis Villeneuve’s Polytechnique.

Some don’t like the excessiveness of Dolan’s flamboyant haircuts.

Others think “Xavier Dolan” sounds like the name of a rumba teacher, not a Canadian filmmaker who should have a name like John Smith.

Some were jealous that Dolan made it to Cannes twice in a row, and their films have never even played Chicago.

Some were jealous that Dolan is twenty and has his whole life ahead of him.

Some resented the fact that Dolan made his film without government money and used some of his own acting earnings.

Many resented the fact that Dolan has money to spend.

The trailer for Les amours imaginaires (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gCPIof4kNQ) offers vivid colours and stylized, sensual movements of its hot love triangle (a girl and two guys, one of whom is Dolan himself). It suggests that in his crucial second feature, he is doing Almadovar.

In the picture, Francis (Xavier Dolan) and Marie (Monia Chokri) are two friends head-over-heels in love with Nicolas (Niels Schneider), who may not give a damn about either one of them. The depth of unfulfilled romantic and sexual longing guarantees catastrophe. Dolan cut the trailer to a cover of the immortal Sony Bono/Cher/Nancy Sinatra lament Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down), crucial on the soundtrack of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill.


François on the Hot Seat

When veteran culturecrat François Macerola was named chief of the funding agency SODEC, few in the film and TV industry knocked the appointment. The 65-year-old former head of both the National Film Board and Telefilm Canada, not to mention Cirque du Soleil exec, is liked for his affable ways and respected for his expertise. Surprisingly, less than six months into his mandate, Macerola was fending off a dangerous revolt of A-list moviemakers, all worked up about statements he made during his first major public appearance. Echoing Richard Stursberg when he ran Telefilm, Macerola said that rather than defining itself as a producer of auteur films, SODEC should be open to a diverse range of productions that included potential crowd-pleasers.

Immediately, film artists like Philippe Falardeau and Xavier Dolan “manned the barricades” in the words of ultra-serious auteur Bernard Émond. They formed a protest group called À tout Prendre, the title of the late Claude Jutra’s wildly spirited first feature, and an obvious reference to a time when movies were about making art, not a buck. A petition circulated, meetings were held.

Then after insisting that Macerola could not alter the system without government approval, Culture and Communications Minister Christine St-Pierre announced that she had absolute confidence in him. She, Macerola, who said he would sign À tout Prendre’s petition, and the group itself all agreed that the true goal of all filmmakers is quality, whether a movie is a box office hit like De père en flic or work like Émond’s La Donation. The border between auteur and commercial moviemaking is fluid; the distinction between them is a false one.  As I write, Macerola has agreed to meet with the champions of film art, who, despite all the affirmations of shared values, remain concerned that their passion could be dampened by too much business.