Mens’ Story

Louis Bélanger’s adaptation of Trevor Ferguson’s 1995 novel, The Timekeeper, opens on 18-year-old Martin Bishop (Craig Olejnik of TV’s The Listener) flying to a distant mountainous region. Martin’s father just died, the family farm was seized by the bank, and the boy needs the job awaiting him in those bristly mountains. He will be the work hours timekeeper for a crew that has 52 days to hammer out 52 miles of railway demanded by a mine.

Unfortunately, the work camp is a hellhole blighting the spectacularly beautiful landscape. The men are over-worked and underpaid. The cook (Gary Farmer) thinks he’s a prophet of doom, and he’s far from the only dangerous lunatic Martin has to deal with. Worst of all, the foreman (Stephen McHattie) is a sadistic, openly corrupt tyrant with zero respect for human life. This strange, isolated regime of men (the film drops the novel’s lone woman) becomes a testing ground for the story’s young hero.

Like The Shawshank Redemption, Cool Hand Luke, and other stories featuring dislocated protagonists in a cruel new world, The Timekeper, set in 1964, is an initiation story tracking the struggle between Martin’s humane values and Fisk, the foreman’s psychopathic oppression. In Martin’s first major confrontation with his antagonist, he turns Fisk’s frothing hellhound of a dog into an affectionate pooch. The scene establishes Martin, armed with the legacy of his righteous father’s goodness, as brave, defiant, and compassionate.

Martin’s willingness to break the rules for the sake of fellow workers enrages Fisk, who beats the kid to a pulp and banishes him to the “Wilder Few,” exiled workers who struggle to survive in the woods by feeding off the camp garbage. One of them, a zombie-like creature with yen to shoot off people’s faces, is handled by Roy Dupuis in a role far from the kinds of controlled characters the star usually plays.

As the story builds, the foreman (McHattie’s scariest creation since his vicious killer in A History of Violence) gets more dangerous, people die brutally, and Martin organizes a revolt against this larcenous creep with the power to dehumanize people into “garbage-eating swine.” Obviously, The Timekeeper can be read as a parable about class divisions and the ruthlessness of those who control the means of survival, or a morality tale in which a two-fisted lamb battles the embodiment of evil. Based on Trevor Ferguson's own youthful experiences in the Northwest Territories, the film is also an adventure story with the feel of Jack London novels and stories like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Following the movie’s Montreal debut, Louis Belanger told an interviewer, “I took pleasure in mixing adventure, drama, humour, and a touch of the fantastic.”

Perhaps the best cinematic storyteller in Quebec, Belanger’s work is natural, fluid, and believable although in The Timekeper, he falters somewhat when the film gets less focused in the second act. The filmmaker’s taste for extreme situations jumped out at viewers in his 1999 debut feature, Post Mortem, a film about a lonely mortuary attendant who falls for a beautiful corpse and wants to pursue the relationship when she turns out to be alive. Belanger followed up with Gaz Bar Blues (2003), a flawlessly directed and touching comedy-drama, which like The Timekeeper, focuses on an all-male world, that of a family-run gas station.

A co-venture between Coop Vidéo of Montréal and Vancouver’s Perfect Circle Productions, The Timekeeper is Belanger’s first English—language theatrical movie, and according to him and his Quebec producer Réal Chabot, it won’t be his last. The picture’s original release date in summer 2008 came and went when its distributor, Christal Films, was besieged by financial problems. Seville Films, acquired by E1 Entertainment not long after the big new company first appeared on the scene, took over distribution, and has released the film in Montreal and Vancouver after screenings at the Brooklyn Film Festival and the Shanghai International Film Festival.

It’s unlikely that The Timekeeper, shot with his usual meticulousness by Guy Dufaux, will be a theatrical hit, but it’s solid moviemaking from one of this country’s best directors.


Serge and Danièle’s Magical Mystery Tour

At the Montreal World Film Festival’s annual programming briefing for the media, MWFF President Serge Losique and VP Danièle Cauchard sat in their usual position: up on the stage of the refurbished Imperial Theatre (a classic movie palace owned by the festival) behind a long conference table. This time around, the sometimes-embattled duo were reluctant to discuss potentially hot items in their line-up. They emphasized themes, genres, and countries of origin. After all, the most devoted fans of the MWFF often take their vacations during the event so that they can settle back in the Imperial, the Quartier Latin multiplex, or one of the other venues, and enjoy some cinema seat travelling.

This year, Losique, Cauchard and their team programmed 240 features, 202 of them some kind of premiere, from 78 countries. As for the 33rd MWFF’s Official Competition, twenty features and 13 shorts are vying for prizes as I write.  The only Quebec feature in the running is Roger Cantin’s Un cargo pour l'Afrique (A Cargo for Africa) about a desperate man (Pierre Lebeau, being honoured by a festival tribute this year) who will do anything to get back to Africa, where he worked for twenty years.

Positioning itself increasingly as a discovery festival that allows first time moviemakers and other unknowns to make a splash, the MWFF emphasized this orientation by slotting 64 debut features into its First Films World Competition. Diehard fans of the fest, not to mention visiting professionals, invariably tell you about how much they enjoy discovering gleaming gems, often from first-timers, amidst pictures that are acceptable, but less-than-stellar.

Guaranteed to attain discovery status, Asiel Norton’s debut feature Redland, screening in the Official Competition, is an exquisitely rendered throwback to a bygone era when directors like Terrence Malick thought that movies were supposed to breathe visual poetry. Far more mainstream, and indicating the variety of MWFF programming, Geoffrey Enthoven’s The Over the Hill Band is the kind of movie festivalgoers embrace for its feel good vibe. Set in the wilderness of northern California during the Great Depression, Redland is about a young woman’s dangerous passion and her affinity with nature. The Over the Hill Band, scheduled in the MWFF’s Focus on World Cinema section, zeroes in on three 70-year-old women in the Netherlands who form a hip-hop r&b band and energize their lives.

Also in feel good mode, Writer-director’s Ricardo Trogi’s new film 1981 world-premiered as the opening picture of MWFF 2009. Following up his hits Québec-Montréal (2003) and Horloge biologique, (Dodging the Clock, 2005), 1981 is a quasi-autobiographical story depicting Trogi as an 11-year-old child of an Italian immigrant and a Québécoise mother, an outsider trying to win friends and influence the first love of his life.

Just before the fest’s opening ceremonies and the screening of 1981, a moment of drama gripped the MWFF. At the end of July, Official Competition Jury President Jafar Panahi was arrested in Tehran at a ceremony honouring Neda Agha-Soltan, the young woman who was fatally shot during a protest against the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. On his way into Place des Arts, Panahi and other jury members wore the green scarf of the Iranian protest movement while demonstrators, some with their faces painted green, shouted their support.


Quebec Does TIFF

This year’s line-up of Quebec films at the Toronto International Film Festival is small but tasty, and interestingly varied.

World Premiering as a Special Presentation, writer-director Jacob’s Tierney’s The Trotsky (see Inside Quebec, November 2008) is a comedy about a high school boy who wholeheartedly believes he is the reincarnation of doomed Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky. Leon Bronstein (rising star Jay Baruchel) doesn’t merely fantasize about about his connection to the iconic Marxist, he acts on his conviction, antagonizing his father (Saul Rubinek) and a school commissioner played by Geneviève Bujold. Tierney, whose father Kevin (Bon Cop, Bad Cop) produced his second feature, told me recently that The Trotsky was heavily influenced by Warren Beatty’s brilliant 1998 political satire, Bullworth.

Also a Special Presentation, Xavier Dolan’s dramedy J’ai Tué Ma Mère (see Inside Quebec, May and June 2009) has its English Canada premiere at TIFF 2009 after scoring at Cannes and playing to enthusiastic audiences in Quebec. In I Killed My Mother, which the 20-year-old Dolan wrote when he was 17, caustic, precociously intellectual Hubert (Dolan playing a version of himself) can’t bear the sight of his petite-bourgeoisie mother (Anne Dorval). Referring to the contradictory emotions flying around the picture Dolan said during a recent interview, “It’s not only a movie about hatred and war; it’s a movie about love and peace too.”

Screening in TIFF’s Vanguard section, Denis Côté’s Carcasses (See Inside Quebec, June 2009) tracks the daily rituals of an utterly marginalized man called Jean-Paul Colmor who lives in rural Quebec with the wrecks of 4000 cars. For Côté, a film that “tries to find the soul of a place,” Carcasses blurs the lines between documentary and fiction. It has already played to receptive audiences in the Cannes Film Festival’s Quinzaine des réalisateurs sidebar.

Bernard Émond’s La Donation, a movie about a doctor who must decide whether she wants to take over a medical practice in a remote region of Quebec, recently picked up awards at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland. A Contemporary World Cinema presentation, the film completes Émond’s trilogy on the virtues of faith, hope, and charity, a cycle that began with Contre toute esperance (Summit Circle, 2007) and La Neuvaine (The Novena, 2005).

Pedro Pires’ nine minutes short, Danse Macabre, is a David Lynchian, Stanley Kubrickian immersion in the poetry of death. Screening in TIFF’s Short Cuts section, the beautifully shot film depicts the last moments between flesh and ashes as a somnambulistic dance. And while TIFF’s closer, Jean-Marc Valleé’s The Young Victoria, is not a Quebec or Canadian-made film, Valleé is the Quebec writer-director whose 2005 film C.R.A.Z.Y. set up huge expectations for his follow-up. The Young Victoria is it.


Claude’s Conquest

Claude Robinson, the graphic designer and writer who for thirteen years has been claiming he was ripped off by children’s TV production company Cinar Corp, has finally won his case. Back in the 1990’s Robinson pitched an idea for an animated show to Cinar co-founders Micheline Charest and her husband Ron Weinberg. They passed on Robinson’s concept, but eventually developed, produced, and marketed a show that was almost identical to his. Robinson’s relentless investigation of the company uncovered all kinds of seedy activities that brought down Weinberg and Charest, who subsequently died during a complicated cosmetic surgery.

In late August, Claude Auclair, the judge who ruled in Robinson’s favour to the tune of $5.2 million, called the behaviour of the defendants “outrageous, premeditated, and deliberate.” They are “thieves in ties and skirts.”