Cinema Superstar

The Canadian film scene has never seen anything like the meteoric rise of Xavier Dolan. Within a year, he shot from a relatively obscure career as a child actor in Quebec to his current international acclaim as a moviemaker. Everybody in Quebec has been writing about Dolan, including me, since his debut feature, J'ai tué ma mère (I Killed My Mother), played last year’s Cannes Film Festival, winning friends and awards.

Dolan inspires unprecedented attention because of his talent, energy, and unstoppable determination. On his new feature, Les amours imaginaires (Heartbeats), not only did Dolan write the screenplay, produce, direct, and play one of the leads, he edited the film, took charge of the visual design, chose the costumes, worked out the graphics for the press kit, and handled some of the still photographs. But Dolan’s appeal also stems from his youth (he turned 21 in March), his looks (he’s been called a Muppet Johnny Depp), and his impeccable style sense. The spectacular hairdos and snazzy threads feed into the breathless coverage of a guy who would be less mythologized if he were 34-year-old Guy Choquette, sufferer from bad hair and ill-fitting T-shirts.

In the aftermath of J'ai tué ma mère, Dolan planned to shoot a script he called Lawrence Anyways, a story about a young man who hopes that after his surgical transformation into a woman, his girlfriend and fiancé will hang in for the ride. A cool idea, but Dolan, who is perhaps the only Canadian film auteur to avoid government funding agencies, had trouble raising the $7 million necessary for filming a complicated Canada-France coproduction in Montreal, Three Rivers, Colorado, Paris, and Miami over four seasons.  Although the project stalled temporarily, Dolan anticipates Lawrence Anyways will be ready by Spring 2012, which means it would have a shot at Cannes’ Official Competition.

Rather than slow the pace a little and wait until he could go to camera with his transsexual romance, Dolan decided to knock off another picture and concocted Les amours imaginaires on the train between Montreal and last September’s Toronto Film Festival. J'ai tué ma mère played the Quinzaine des Realisateurs sidebar at Cannes 2009; this year, Les amours got programmed into the official Cannes section, Un certain regard. A seriocomic, unrequited love story that Dolan managed to complete in about six months, it’s the first Canadian picture to screen in Un certain regard since Zacharias Kunuk’s Atanajurat: the Fast Winner, winner of the Camera d’Or for best first feature in 2001. A range of film content that extends from an ancient Inuit legend played like an epic sci-fi/adventure story/psychodrama to a pop arty chamber piece about a boy, a girl, and the boy they’re both nuts about says a lot about divergence in this country, eh/n’est-ce pas?


Longing to Long

Dolan wasn’t eligible to win the Camera d’Or with Les amours imaginaires, but he took a youth prize, and more significantly, Cannes bought into the film at both press and public screenings. Naturally, critics speculated that with his follow-up to J'ai tué ma mère, Dolan might prove himself to be a one-shot wonder, but overall, they praised Les Amours, despite reservations in some reviews. For Variety’s Rob Nelson, it is a “gorgeous, mushy … classic example of style over substance. But as looks can often be a heartbreaker’s chief attribute, Dolan’s googly-eyed two-guys-and-a-girl romantic comedy … does prove to be an alluring companion for most of its running time.”

Somewhat less enthusiastic, Peter Brunette of The Hollywood Reporter called Les amours imaginaires “an archly frothy comedy that exalts the superficial into a philosophy of life,” eventually concluding “At its very end, Heartbeats becomes more endearing as it tries to salvage some shopworn but nevertheless true things about love and life.”

In the movie, gay Francis (Dolan) and straight Marie (Monia Chokri), are close buddies. He is a glum and deferential puppy, but one with a bite. Marie, seemingly more aggressive, is also capable of being unsettled and insecure. The minimalist narrative kicks in when Francis and Marie meet Nicolas (Niels Schneider), a stranger in town who instantly becomes their inscrutable object of desire, or maybe a manifestation of their longing to long.

Dolan’s camera also falls head over heels for Nicolas. Lingering closeups fetishize the curly-haired, angel-faced youth, who does little more than smile radiantly and exhale cigarette smoke that spirals through the air in slow motion. In one fantasy montage, Dolan links Nicolas to Michelangelo’s David and Jean Cocteau’s drawings of alluring boys. The character also suggests the ethereal object of desire in Luchino Visconti’s 1971 masterpiece, Death in Venice, and in one scene wears a straw gondolier’s boater just like Tadzio’s.  On the other hand, aware of the absurdity of all the idealization, Dolan also mocks it with blatantly over-cranked classical music, repetitions of Sonny Bono’s Bang Bang in Italian, and scenes like the one in which Francis’ fervent masturbation is interrupted, and then resumes instantly when an unwelcome visitor leaves. Like Woody Allen, Dolan the writer-director sometimes uses Dolan the actor as a hopelessly neurotic buffoon.

Loaded with style, Les amours imaginaires deploys eccentric plunging angles on beautiful faces, slo-mo shots of sleekly clad female bodies and feet in high heels, not to mention the kind of lengthy straight-to-camera monologues typical of Woody Allen pictures and the 1960’s French New wave. Scenes are bathed in monochrome red or blue, as in Claude Lelouch’s New Wave lite, A Man and a Woman (1966), or Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run (1998).

The film’s graphic pop art colours and framing recall early Pedro Almodovar films and 1960’s era Jean-Luc Godard, while for some viewers, but not for me, Chokri evokes Godard’s leading lady, muse, and lover, Anna Karina. Of all the influences and references, including nods to Audrey Hepburn, James Dean and François Truffaut’s Jules and Jim (1962) the most palpable and obvious is In the Mood for Love (2000), the hyper-Romantic and yet ironic ode to unfulfilled yearning by Wong Kar Wai, himself a devotee of the French New Wave. France’s culture magazine Les Inrockuptibles, which loved the film, notes all the influences and concludes that Dolan stirs them into his own sauce.

I agree. With its sexy glamour and seductive rhythms, Les amours imaginaires is a pleasure to watch. On the other hand when it comes to recent Canadian movies about imaginary love, I got more bang from Vincenzo Natali’s Splice.


Going Country

Two potential hit comedies beckoning on the horizon share fish-out-of-water premises in which outsiders are lost and confused in remote, insular rural communities.  Think Local Hero, Bill Forsyth’s classic from the 1980’s, or the more recent Did You Hear about the Morgans?

In horror movies, tightly-knit villages devoted to its codes and rituals, not to mention proximity to wild nature, are scary. In the upcoming French Immersion, the directorial debut of producer Kevin Tierney (The Trotsky, Bon Cop Bad Cop), and the recently announced The Grand Seduction, an English-language re-make of Jean-François Pouliot’s 2003 hit, La grande séduction, rural outposts are hilariously frustrating, and ultimately charming. Pouliot once told me that his film "transports you beyond day-to-day life. It's almost a fable, a fairy tale.”

The outsiders in Tierney’s picture, now in production, are Anglo Canadians eager to learn the language of the other founding people. The film zeroes in on the imaginary Centre Linguistique Nationale, located in the imaginary Saint-Isidore-du-Coeur-de-Jésus (St. Isidore of Jesus’ heart). The school with its pompous, politically charged name is the brainchild of director Sylvie Tremblay (Pascale Bussières), a woman devoted to bringing cash into her economically faltering town. Meanwhile, Tremblay’s first clients, who have come to Saint-Isidore from all over Canada, are having trouble adapting to the Centre Linguistique’s and the town’s hardcore nationalist, French Only mindset. The school’s Vice-Principal Pierre-Emile (Yves Jacques) is a petty tyrant who would penalize students breaking the cardinal No English rule by speaking it in their sleep.

Apart from parodying the kind of Quebeckers who can’t stop themselves from obsessing on language and cultural identity, French Immersion plays around with ancient French Canadian clichés and stereotypes, tabarnak. Almost everyone in the town (incarnated by the Montérégie region’s Saint-Césaire) is named Tremblay. The town’s name, Saint-Isidore-du-Coeur-de-Jésus, takes Catholic kitsch to the max. Sylvie’s father, Senator Onésime Tremblay (1960’s rock ‘n’ roll maestro Robert Charlebois), gets her the contract for the School in a way that’s less than kosher. The senator’s pothead son Michel-Mike (Christopher Williams) associates Canadians with Wayne’s World, which he watches compulsively.

Of course, French Immersion also lampoons Anglo-Canadians via characters played by an ensemble that includes Colm Feore (a regular in Tierney’s films including his son Jacob’s The Trotsky) and Fred Ewanuick (Corner Gas). Written by Tierney and Jefferson Lewis (Emotional Arithmetic), produced by Tierney and partner Claude Bonin (Cruising Bar 2), French Immersion’s amused take on Canadian identity is far removed from the solemnity of Hugh MacLennan’s Two Solitudes. When the comedy was first pitched to funding agency SODEC, not everyone got the joke. But eventually SODEC deemed that the film was not mocking the Québécois and committed to the $6.2 million production. On top of that, numerous Quebec vedettes from Pascale Bussières to Karine Vanasse wanted in.

Clearly, Tierney, who in the past has doubted whether English speaking Canadians and the Québécois will ever show much emotion for each other, believes that comedy can break the ice a little. Like Bon Cop, Bad Cop, Quebec’s biggest hit ever and high profile in the rest of Canada, French Immersion is a bilingual movie in which English and French Canadians share the stage, a rare mash up for homegrown productions. Appropriately, film will launch in theatres on Canada Day, 2011.

As for the other rustic yuk fest, the idea of remaking La grande séduction has been floated for years. Produced by venerable producer Roger Frappier’s Max Films, the $5.7-million movie caught fire when it wrapped Cannes 2003’s Quinzaine des Realisateurs and opened wide in Quebec. Up against the American blockbusters and tentpole shows released that summer, La gande séduction earned $6 million. Then it was screened as a Special Presentation at the Toronto International Film Festival, closed the Independent Feature Film Project Market (IFP) in New York City, and won the top award at the Festival of Francophone Films in Namur, Belgium.

Written by Ken Scott, La gande séduction has obvious universal appeal. On a distant island where the fishing has gone bad, depressed families live on welfare. Their only hope lies in a plan to build a small factory that will employ them, and for that to happen, they must satisfy an insurance company requirement that a doctor lives permanently on the island. The plot, comedy, and pathos  kick in when the islanders organize a ridiculously complicated scheme aimed at enticing a young physician into committing himself to them. They study him carefully and try to satisfy all his needs from food and music to sports and sex.

According to Roger Frappier, American and European interest in the story was strictly about money and remake rights, not collaboration with his company on a strong new version of the story. He resisted all proposals until the current deal materialized. Written and directed by Michael Dowse (It’s All Gone Pete Tong), The Grand Seduction will be transposed from northern Quebec to Newfoundland. Budgeted at $11 million, it’s a coproduction between Max Films and Newfoundland’s Morag Productions. Frappier will share production tasks with Morag Loves Company’s Barbara Doran who made last year’s Love and Savagery with Kevin Tierney. Scheduled to start shooting in April 2011, the film’s lead will be an actor with a high profile in the U.S.