Come Fly with Me

It’s a real-life story bristling with drama, complicated by ironic twists of fate, and featuring a climax right out of a Hollywood movie. On August 24, 2001, Air Transat Captain Robert Piché somehow finessed a crash landing of an airbus that had lost its engine power. As if maneuvering a gigantic hang glider, Piché brought down Flight 236 on a Portuguese island, saving the lives of 291 passengers and 13 crewmembers.

Upon his return to Quebec, Piché had big trouble handling the media glare that spotlighted him as a superhero. Things got even worse when, as the New York Times put it, “it came to light that Captain Piché … had been arrested in the United States for transporting drugs. He served part of a five-year sentence in Georgia after a plane he landed solo at a small airfield was found to be full of marijuana.” Moreover, investigations came to the conclusion that the saviour and his co-pilot were themselves partly responsible for the near calamity. Ironically, the deeply flawed hero’s Piché’s dope running and his prison stint gave him the sang-froid he needed to pull off a seemingly impossible triumph.
Despite the obvious potential, it took a long time for Piché’s story to reach the screen, possibly because Quebeckers know it so well. Written by Ian Lauzon (the megahit De père en flic) and directed by Sylvain Archambault (the megaflop Pour toujours les Canadiens), the appropriately titled Piché: Entre Ciel Et Terre (Between Heaven and Earth) flips back and forth between different periods of its protagonist’s uncanny life.

Piché (played by Quebec stalwart Michel Côté) is seen as an emotional plane wreck and recovering boozehound in rehab, a family man endlessly being rejected by his disapproving daughter (Sarah-Jeanne Labrosse), a Reagan-era player womanizing and downing shots, a convict trying to avoid being sodomized by a gargantuan black kingpin (Montreal hip-hopper Gouchy Boy). Not until the last 30 minutes of a picture that sometimes meanders, and sometimes bounces around frenetically like an out-of-control ping-pong ball, do we thrill to the inspired skill and fearlessness of the pilot who atones for the damage he’s caused and redeems himself from his sins. “Do with your life what you did over the Atlantic,” Piché’s priestly therapist (Normand D'Amour) tells him.

The climactic sequence gives good suspense, the kind that’s worked since Arthur Hailey’s 1956 breakthrough CBC hit, Flight into Danger, which incidentally appeared two years after John Wayne saved passengers from an airline crash in The High and the Mighty. The audience at the red carpet premiere of Archambault’s movie applauded the penultimate landing, music to the ears of the distributor TVA Films, which has been trying to set it up as the summer’s big hit. As I write, the picture has opened on almost 100 screens to reviews that are not necessarily raves.

Between Heaven and Earth tells a classical Québècois redemption story, and Côté does Lauzon’s Piché as a typical French-Canadian no bullshit gar, who was just doing his job. He’s also the risk-taking pleasure seeker who thumbs his nose at authority, even when authority is a menacing American border cop to whom he shouts, “I’m not armed, hostie, I have pot.” Côté’s Piché ends so many brusque statements with an hostie or a pissed-off tabarnak, even when he’s talking to Jamaicans or Americans, you get the impression that the relentless barrage of liturgical cuss words is a strained attempt to forge a bond between the character and the audience.

Not exactly a subtle filmmaker, Archambault goes completely ga-ga during his film’s sequences in Georgia and Jamaica. As in the ambitious gangster saga, Le piège américain (The American Trap), Archambault’s U.S. is strangely off. He’s as tone deaf to American body language and speech rhythms as he is to Jamaican ones. In the riotously overdetermined Caribbean sequence, shot in Cuba, tits, booze, spliffs, and guns cram every shot (lest we forget) depicting Piché’s dealmaking with a metal-toothed gangsta far removed from the mesmerizing and scary hoodlums in a movie like last year’s Un prophète.

Meanwhile in the southern prison, people say things like “Get your Frenchie ass out of here,” and the African-American kingpin is a mind-boggingly grotesque cartoon. The monstrously fat and hairy white prison big shot with the swastika tattoo (Michael Perron) is equally grotesque, and oddly he’s the one who helps our hero survive. Even more odd is the fact that I saw little physical and emotional continuity between Côté and Maxime LeFlaguais, the actor who plays the younger version of Piché, even though LeFlaguais is Côté’s son.


The Incredible Expanding FanTasia

Last year, Montreal’s FanTasia International Film Festival closed with a Quentin Tarantino-approved screening of his World War 2 phantasmagoria, Inglourious Basterds. It was a breakthrough moment for an event that launched in 1996 on a shoestring budget with 60 features, many of them Asian martial arts classics. An instant hit with mainly young viewers willing to go boldly where Megaplex audiences never do, FanTasia became a world-renowned genre and fantasy festival, not to mention one of Montreal’s most eagerly anticipated summer pleasures.

The 14th edition’s 356-page catalogue, packed with vivid graphics, photos, and pungent descriptions of the wares on display, is a sign of FanTasia’s mounting self-confidence and stature on the Quebec culture scene. “Go home, read it three times, and then write articles in your sleep,” Mitch Davis, the festival’s exuberant sine qua non, told eager media types at the press conference that unveiled the 2010 lineup.

Last year’s edition of FanTasia drew 90000 spectators and sold out many screenings. This summer, all the fest’s usual private sponsors remain on board despite the economic downturn, points out Davis’ co-General Director Marc Lamothe, and organizers have attracted new ones. Once unable to draw serious government support, FanTasia now enjoys cred to spare within municipal, provincial, and federal agencies from Quebec Tourism, currently biting its nails over a drop of visitors from the U.S., to Telefilm Canada.

During a recent interview, Davis (pictured below), who also co-programs the festival’s international section, told me that there was a hangtime before “the institutions got a sense of first, what we show, and second, who comes to see the films and how they respond. Telefilm and SODEC can really appreciate a very young audience watching films shot in a language they don’t speak, from a culture they don’t identify with, an audience that’s voracious to see this stuff. It’s not an easy feat. Other festivals have a very hard time getting in young people to the more esoteric fare. At the beginning, the funders saw us as these crazy outsiders doing a fringe event, a culty, freaky, weird thing that happened over a few days. Now it seems that whoever you speak to in government is really impressed by the festival.”

For Davis, the fact that the escalating government support “comes without any compromises is a weird dream come true. Nobody is vetting our programming, nobody is questioning why we play a certain film.”  What? No nervous culturecrats getting hands-on with FanTasia because of its reputation for venturing into the outer limits of story and image? God knows what horrors lurk in Srdjan Spasojevic’s A Serbian Film, playing in Subversive Serbia, a slate highlighting moviemakers who grew up during the catastrophes that tore the former Yugoslavia apart. Davis points out that, as with most selections, the shocks in the provocative A Serbian Film are only one component of its artful methods. “It’s not like a Saw movie. It’s not predicated on extreme violence.”

Likewise, the agencies understand that the festival itself doesn’t depend on “the really extreme films that play. There really aren’t that many when you look at the overall lineup,” Davis continues, “but they are so vivid, they are the ones that are the most remembered, the most sensationalistic and easy to talk about. We certainly don’t shy away from playing an extreme film if we think it’s interesting.” In fact, “every festival that plays a broad array of world cinema will have one or two outlandishly extreme films in its lineup.” What could be more outlandish than Lars von Trier’s 2009 festival darling, Antichrist? Not many movies boast jumbo erections spewing blood and an evil fox that ghoulishly intones “Chaos reigns.”

As I write, the festival’s many fans are breathlessly gearing up for a wildly eclectic onslaught of 130 features and 250 shorts. The three-week-long schedule of genre pictures includes titles ranging from a re-make of I Spit on Your Grave to the 1988 animation classic, Land Before Time, whose creators, Don Bluth and Gary Goldman, are scheduled to receive a lifetime achievement award at the screening. You can’t get more mainstream than Bluth and Goldman, onetime Disney animators who exited the Mouse Factory to set up their own studio, where they collaborated frequently with Steven Spielberg and George Lucas on features like An American Tail.

Just before the 2010 opening, the FanTasiacs behind the scenes were delighted that Montreal Gazette entertainment reporter Brendan Kelly, who paid little attention to the fest over the years, speculated that “maybe the time has come for FanTasia to take a run at nabbing the crown as Montreal's premiere film fest.” Kelly floats the idea that instead of trying to score in the game of huge, all-inclusive powwows like Toronto’s, Montreal could “focus on a niche film fest.” Who ordained that a city needs a nightmare-to-program replica of the world’s major festivals? Many locations around the world are known for sharply focused movie events like Ottawa’s and the French town Annecy’s animation festivals; the Spanish city Sitges’ equivalent fantasy/horror platform; and even the Rotterdam Festival, which highlights envelope pushing work from Asia.

After 14 years, Montreal’s genre showcase finally hooks up with its namesake by opening with The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, a major summer release inspired by the unforgettably crazed segment in Disney’s 1940 musical extravaganza, Fantasia. Produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and directed by Jon Turteltaub, the movie stars Nicolas Cage and Jay Baruchel. A longtime FanTasia fan, Montreal-based Baruchel was happy to take on the Q & A following the packed screening. As for the closer, it’s a Canadian horror spoof, Eli Craig’s Tucker and Dale Vs Evil. Reportedly the best horror comedy since Shaun of the Dead, Tucker and Dale played Sundance and took an audience award at the SXSW festival in Austin. The movie concerns two country boys taken for rural psycho-killers by a gang of college kids.

Because FanTasia’s subsidies have spiked, and the budget jumped from 2009’s $1.1 million to $1.5 million, the festival has pumped up its special events schedule. A rarely seen, “complete” version of Fritz Lang’s endlessly influential Metropolis, his masterpiece of expressionist sci-fi, screens in the 3000-seat Salle Wilfred Pelletier of Place des Arts. The restoration, based on a copy found in 2008, highlights more than 25 minutes of shots and sequences that were chopped out of the film. Music designed for a live 13-piece orchestra accompanying the projection was composed by silent movie specialist Gabriel Thibaudeau.

FanTasia 2010 has also decided to honour British moviemaker Ken Russell, whose supercharged hallucinatory visdions include Altered States, Crimes of Passion, Women in Love, and Lair of the White Worm, with a lifetime achievement award. Russell picks up his prize on the night the fest shows one of the most bone-jarring movies I’ve ever been tortured by, the almost impossible-to-see 1971 picture, The Devils. Based on a novel by Aldous Huxley, starring Oliver Reed and Vanessa Redgrave, The Devils screens in FanTasia’s Death and the Devil program about churchly abuse and launches a retrospective of Ken Russell movies at the Cinémathèque Québècoise.

FanTasia is also expanding into live performance with Nevermore: an Evening with Edgar Allan Poe. In this one-man show, moviemaker and theatre director Stuart Gordon (best known for the cult classic, Re-Animator) guides his signature actor, Jeffrey Combs, through an evocation of the doomed 19th century fantasist’s public performances in the years following his young wife’s death. Gordon and Combs based their material on reviews, eyewitness accounts, and Poe’s own words. In tandem with the play, FanTasia screens Re-Animator, hosted by Gordon and Combs, to celebrate its 25th anniversary year.


Hot Buttons

Of the various issues and events now raising temperatures inside Quebec, moviemaker Jacob Tierney’s surprise critique of Québécois culture tops the list. In Los Angeles for a screening of his film, The Trotsky, Tierney told a La Presse reporter, “Quebec society is extremely turned in on itself. Our art and our culture depict only white francophones. Anglophones and immigrants are ignored. They don’t have a place in the Québécois dream. It’s shameful.”

As for the Quebec film scene, the bilingual Tierney, whose father Kevin is probably the most highly regarded “anglo” within the industry, told La Presse: Quebec cinema is white, white, white. … Look at the films we make: 1981, C.R.A.Z.Y., Polytechnique... These are good films, but films turned toward the past. It’s the glorification of nostalgia. Everything was more interesting back then. There’s something unhealthy in that.”

Before you could say “Quebec Basher!”, successful TV writer Stéphane Laporte wrote in La Presse, “It’s true that Quebec cinema could make a little more place for immigrants, but there is nothing scandalous about us placing our own stories first. We are a minority. And our only voice in the world is our culture.”

While many reader comments to the Montreal daily slammed Tierney’s comments and approved of Laporte’s, others had no trouble with the idea that minority groups are almost invisible on Quebec screens, even though we are far from invisible on the streets – at least in Montreal. I wonder whether this absence results from xenophobia, or a reluctance to break away from standardized modes of writing, directing, and performing various easily recognizable Québécois types like Robert Piché in Entre Ciel Et Terre, as compared to the more nuanced characters in a movie like Louis Belanger’s Post Mortem.

Meanwhile, cinema culturati have been worrying for months that the funding agencies are going to drop uncommercial auteur filmmaking like a hot baguette. Telefilm Canada was provoked by the directors who compromise the À tout prendre “front” of watchdogs that it will never stop supporting low budget, innovative features.

In a related issue, À tout prendre (named for the late, sainted Claude Jutra’s defiantly unconventional 1964 feature), and other groups, are worried that Quebec lacks theatres exhibiting non-Hollywood films, including Québècois auteur work. To help resolve the problem, Multimedia entrepreneur Daniel Langlois wants to sell ExCentris, his failed culture palace, to the Quebec government so it can turn it over to the long-running Cinéma Parallèle, once a storefront operation, now housed in Langlois’ sleek environment.

But Roland Smith, the Godfather of Montreal reparatory houses for 40 years and currently running the Cinéma du parc, is arguing publicly that Langlois’ bargain basement $12 million asking price is a ludicrously huge burden on the taxpayer. All you have to do is rent ExCentris to me, he argues, and I – unlike the people running the Parallèle – will know how to exhibit great movies and bring in revenue. Langlois and his posse, with all due respect to Smith, have written open letters defending their own record and asking him who he thinks he is.