Not So Wise Guys

In Ken Scott’s Les Doigts croches (Sticky Fingers), a gang of smalltime crooks is interrupted by cops during the biggest boost of their lives. In desperation, they turn over two million in cash to one of the guys in their crew and send him off to stash it. The money ends up in Spain, where the man who knows the fortune’s location won’t give it up unless the bad boys, now out of the clink, turn good. They’re supposed to hike 839 kilometres along the 1000-year-old pilgrimage route leading to the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela (Saint-Jacques-de-Compostelle) and during the process, redeem themselves. If they can prove they are now better men, the booty is theirs.

Longtime pals from the same survival-of-the fittest Montreal neighbourhood, the pilgrims’ incapacity for moral improvement drives the film’s comedy. In a key scene, one of them argues he must be evolving because he just shot a guy without killing him.

Like many movie ensembles, the five gangsters are designed to be a colourful mix. We get nerdy-looking, tremulous Donald (Patrice Robitaille); stocky hardcase Isidore (Jean-Pierre Bergeron); relatively cool-headed Conrad (Claude Legault); elderly, beret-wearing Eddy (Paqolo Noël); and the sleek but volatile leader Charles (mege-vedette Roy Dupuis).  When Charles in not being coolly seductive, he flies into rages and breaks chairs in churches. He also has a girlfriend (French actress Aure Atika, partly because this is a Canadian-French-Argentine coproduction) who lends a seductive, enigmatic presence to this boys’ story.

Set in the 1960’s, the picture’s melancholy comedy and hints of magic realism feel more European than North American. The central image is our old friend, the long and winding road, often appearing in subdued afternoon light. As our pilgrims trudge along, bickering, shouting, wondering whether they can meet the challenge facing them, the plot twists and turns. Oddly, Les Doigts croches depicts very little interaction between its Québécois principals and the world they’re travelling in. Spain, filmed on location in Argentina, operates mainly as a background for the gang’s existential crisis.

As reported in July’s Inside Quebec, Les Doigts croches marks the directorial debut of top screenwriter Ken Scott (2003’s La Grande Séduction, 2005’s Maurice Richard). Like La Grande Séduction, which depicts the inhabitants of a remote island trying to con a young doctor into providing them with medical care forever, Scott’s latest depicts single-minded characters engaging in offbeat behaviour. He says that he was inspired to write Sticky Fingers when he overheard a bunch of obvious ne’r-do-wells “sincerely discussing the emotional wounds they were trying to overcome.” In the press notes for his picture, Scott continues, “The film poses a question as fundamental as it is universal. Are we capable of changing? Really changing?”


Humping Just for Laughs

The first viewers to ponder Ken Scott’s query saw Les Doigts croches on closing night of the Just for Laughs Film Festival. For actor Joshua Reynolds, co-star of Humpday, the provocative new comedy that played the JFLFF and also deals with inner makeovers, the human capacity for change is limited.

“I don’t believe in epiphanies that happen in one’s life, and change one 180 degrees,” Reynolds told me just before the festival’s screening of Lynn Shelton’s mainly improvised film. “I do believe in epiphanies that change somebody for about two days, and then they revert back, and retain maybe 15% of that knowledge. It will invariably, profoundly affect the rest of their life, but it’s going take training, and it’s going to take creating new contexts.”

In Humpday, Leonard, (one of the lost souls in The Blair Witch Project), plays opposite Mark Duplass in a story triggered by the surprise reunion of two old friends. Although both are straight, the bosom buddies decide to perform together in an amateur porn video. Ostensibly, they want to create an art project and enter it in an upcoming competition, but of course, they have other, more nuanced motives.

Humpday is the kind of emotionally grounded, forthright comedy that Reynolds believes in. “Really awkward people doing awkward shit makes me laugh,” he says. “I don’t like elevated things too much. I like people who try to be honest and call their own shit out on the table and allow a certain sense of honesty and vulnerability into their creativity. I grew up listening to punk rock music, which sounded like a bunch of buddies putting a microphone in a room and just screaming about what they were feeling.”

An American, originally from Pennsylvania, Reynolds champions the kind of emotional truthfulness many Canadian filmmakers say they aspire to in their work. While gravitating toward acting, he was inspired by the works of filmmakers like Hal Hartley and Allison Anders. “You could smell ‘em, you could taste ‘em. They felt closer than home, and that was really inviting to me.”

The dramatic conflicts of Hollywood movies are, says Reynolds, “the same conflicts and fallibilities that you bring into a job interview. Protagonists are conflicted because they just try too hard. They care too much. I don’t relate to that because when I fuck up, I hurt people.  I hurt myself. And I get really ashamed about it. And if get ashamed enough then I fuck up some more.” Growing up means “acknowledging that is not going to stop happening. And the best I can do is try not to repeat the same patterns over and over again. And act with compassion.”

Other highlights of the Just for Laughs Festival’s movie event included current master of comedy Judd Apatow’s shot at humour with a dark edge, Funny People; the latest Robin Williams’ vehicle, World’s Greatest Dad; and Montreal director Albert Nerenberg’s Laughology, his documentary homage to the chortle, chuckle, and belly laugh.


Glourious Wrap for FanTasia

This summer’s edition of the FanTasia Film Festival will go down as one of the most memorable in the event’s 13 year history.  The showcase for genre moviemaking from around the world drew more than 90,000 viewers and sold out 40% of its 195 screenings. FanTasia climaxed bigtime with its closing night screening of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, the wildly anticipated movie’s first public screening since Cannes, and its North American premiere.

For everyone at the packed event, including a platoon of executives from the film’s Canadian distributor, Alliance Vivafilm, magic charged the air.  FanTasia’s normally fervent audience went ecstatic at the appearance of actor-director Eli Roth (Hostel), who plays one of the leads in Tarantino’s ultra-movie conscious World War II extravaganza, and directed a mock Nazi propaganda film that appears in a key scene. Reparatory theatre operator and festival programmer turned film producer Don Lobel says that he’s “never seen anything like that kind of energy in a major festival,” and that the screening was “a mark of appreciation and affection for FanTasia.”

Via an Email interview, Mitch Davis, FanTasia’s co-director of International Programming, told me, “Closing with Basterds was something we'd been hoping to do since the August release date was announced several months ago. Unfortunately, Quentin had to be overseas on our closing night, and wasn't able to attend the screening, but he went out of his way to make it happen, and Alliance collaborated closely with us for many weeks to make it as special as possible.”

On another unforgettable night, FanTasia honoured legendary Brazilian director-writer-actor José Mojica Marins with a Lifetime Achievement Award. Now in his seventies, Marins rolled on stage in a coffin, wearing the top hat and black cloak of his uproariously demonic persona, the undertaker Coffin Joe. The thrilled fans in the audience included beautiful blonde Melantha, a young actress with a finely detailed Joe tattoo on her arm.

Marins is the last iconic horror figure, says Dennison Ramalho, a talented Brazilian filmmaker who co-scripted the first Coffin Joe film in years, Embodiment of Evil. Face to face, “he’s like a crazy uncle, just full of warmth and playfulness,” says Mitch Davis. “Mojica is an extraordinary person, a true original in every sense of the word.”

As for Embodiment of Evil, it’s Marins’ most elaborate and extreme movie, loaded with hallucinations and demented monologues. One of the more amusing things about the picture is that in several scenes, the bogeyman Coffin Joe is himself screaming in terror, petrified by the ghosts of former victims.

Of the 115 features that FanTasia screened, the festival’s best feature prize went to South Korean actor-director Yang Ik-june’s Breathless, a story about a brutal thug redeemed through his relationship with a high school girl. The multi-talented Yang Ik-june also took the Best Male Performance award for his startling depiction of the film’s protagonist.


Flic Tops Harry

Writer-director Émile Gaudreault's De père en flic (See July’s Inside Quebec) is well on its way to becoming one of the most financially successful Canadian films ever made. On its third weekend, Father and Guns, (the picture’s English title), captured 24.9% of the Quebec market on 122 screens, and by then had earned close to $6 million. On that weekend, the film topped both Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and Sacha Baron Cohen’s Bruno at the Quebec box office.