Inside Québec - November 2009
by Maurie Alioff
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Maurie Alioff is a film journalist, critic, screenwriter and media columnist. He has written for radio and television and teaches screenwriting at Montreal’s Vanier College. A former editor for Cinema Canada and Take One, as well as other magazines, his articles have appeared in various publications including The Montreal Mirror and The New York Times.
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Floating
Although it’s only tangentially connected to the subject of film and television in Quebec, I’d like to take a moment to meditate on the Flight of the Balloon Boy, one of the most peculiar media events ever. On the afternoon of October 15, CNN was beaming in Barack Obama talking about health care in New Orleans. Suddenly, the network cut away from the President to what looked like a cut-rate flying saucer in Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space sailing across the blue Colorado sky. Apparently, a 6-year-old boy was trapped in the giant Mylar balloon, and he might or might not survive his wild ride.
For sure, the boy’s father and mother, Richard and Mayumi Heene, come across as discombobulated and scuzzy scammers who seem to have implicated their family in a plan to convince the world that youngest son Falcon - actually safe and sound in the family garage – was in mortal danger. But as crazed as the Heenes might be, and so inept they got outed by Falcon on Larry King Live (“You guys said that we did it for the show”), the couple succeeded in pulling off an unconscious masterpiece of conceptual art, one that would have given Andy Warhol a hard-on. For one thing, hypnotized viewers interacted with the hunk of silver polyester, projecting their own scenarios onto it. Was little Falcon on the roller-coaster ride of his life giggling with delight, a buoyant figure in a Chagall painting? Or was he screaming in terror as he bounced off the Mylar walls?
For hours, millions of people listened raptly to experts charting wind currents and speculating about whether the poor little tyke would survive the dropping temperature if he soared too high. But as revealed in the next plot twist, the flying saucer was just an empty balloon. And a balloon is the perfect metaphor for OJ’s white Bronco, Paris Hilton’s shenanigans, the bickering of talentless narcissists like Jon and Kate Gosselin, and all the other “shows” and “stars” of reality TV. The Heenes, featured in two episodes of Wife Swap, craved media exposure and its rewards with mindless fervour, yet managed to inadvertently expose and satirize the vacuity of everything they aspired to.
The Monster Next Door
A dysfunctional family far more sinister than the Hennes is the focus of Éric Tessier’s 5150, rue des ormes (5150 Elm’s Way), the best of various Quebec attempts to come up with a  potent horror picture. The Beaulieus are a seemingly ordinary suburban family consisting of father Jacques (Normand D’Amour), mother Maude (Sonia Vachon), and their two daughters -sexy teenager Michelle (Mylène St-Sauveur), and little Anne (Élodie Larivière). However, before you can say dangerous nutcases, Jacques has imprisoned a young man called Yannick Bérubé (C.R.A.Z.Y.’s Marc-André Grondin) in a grungy, bloodstained little room that clashes jarringly with the house’s otherwise tidy, 1950ish décor.
Yannick’s life turns hellish when he crosses the path of a black cat, falls off his bike, and walks into the Beaulieu home to clean up his wounds. In one of the dumbest movie moves ever, especially for somebody who just got accepted into film school, he heads upstairs to investigate a thumping noise.
Throughout 5150, rue des ormes, Jacques’ family lurches back and forth between comfy banality, even kindness, and demented violence. The Beaulieus live by Jacques’ view of himself as one of the last of the just on a mission to destroy evildoers. Eventually, he engages Yannick in a chess game that could allow the boy to free himself, but of course, the game is fixed. Jacques is a prize-winning chess master who keeps foiling his prisoner’s desperate attempts to escape. Yannick gets battered and stomped and almost frozen to death in an icy pond, his ordeals adding a touch of torture porn to the proceedings.
Based on a best-selling novel by Patrick Senécal, who wrote the screenplay and whose book Sur le seuil was adapted by Tessier in 2003, the movie benefits from an almost foolproof suspense premise. Like the victims in Stephen King’s/Rob Reiner’s Misery, Hitchcock’s Psycho, and the French film Martyrs (in which the monsters are also driven by a crazed religious ideology), Yannick gets trapped in a world that is both commonplace and mercilessly destructive. The movie plays on the primal fear that the people on the other side of the white picket fence could be fiends.
Produced by Pierre Even (C.R.A.Z.Y.) for ITEM 7, the new company he set up recently, 5150, rue des ormes opened well in Quebec, and by mid-October was the top grossing film in Canada.
From Ghouls to Girls at the FNC
Losing the Ex-Centris media art temple as an HQ and screening venue was a blow to the Festival du nouveau cinéma, but the 38th edition of Canada’s oldest film pow-wow flourished anyway. This year, the FNC screened a lineup of 250 films from about 38 countries, ran various sidebar events, and threw a packed party every night. In a sign of the festival’s ongoing close relationship with TIFF, the latter’s co-director, Cameron Bailey, sat on an FNC jury that named Peruvian director Claudia Llosa's Fausta: La teta asustada best international feature.
After opening with Les Dames en bleu, Claude Demers’ affectionate doc about the elderly Québécoise women who since the 1960’s have never stopped idolizing the still active pop star Michel Louvain, the festival’s high-profile items included Lars von Trier’s Antichrist, Catherine Breillat’s Bluebeard, Lone Scherfig’s An Education, and Bong Joon-ho’s Mother. Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, Cannes 2009’s Palme d’or winner, screened as a last minute addition to the slate.
While the normally confrontational Breillat’s Bluebeard is a relatively benevolent take on a fairy-tale loaded with misogynist menace, provocateur Lars von Trier’s Antichrist has outraged viewers, especially women, since its debut at Cannes. In the movie, a couple  (Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe), traumatized by the death of their son while they were fucking each other’s brains out, retreats to an isolated cabin for a healing that degenerates into horrific violence. The night I saw the film, an acquaintance’s lady friend was rendered speechless, mainly by the uniquely gruesome things that Gainsbourg’s “She” does to Dafoe’s “He,” possessed by her vision of women as Satan’s minions. On the other hand, apart from the shockers that climax the picture, Antichrist isn’t all that different from Hour of the Wolf and other dark couples psychodramas Ingmar Bergman came up with during the mid-sixties.
As for Haneke’s The White Ribbon, this elaborate, multi-character tale about a prim, repressive German village on the cusp of World War I projects Haneke’s usual jaundiced view of humanity, but with a restrained and masterful control of everything from the film’s shimmering black and white cinematography to its performances. He drops the shock tactics of films like Funny Games and The Piano Teacher.
Lighter in spirit, Bong Joon-ho’s Mother, the brilliant South-Korean director’s follow-up to his eccentric monster movie, The Host, is a perverse yet beautifully shot detective story in which a wildly over-protective mom strives to clear her dim-witted son of a murder charge. And guaranteed Oscar nominee Lone Scherfig’s An Education is the most enjoyably seductive film of the year - for its style, wit, and above all, depiction of a very smart, precocious  teenage girl (Carey Mulligan) and her giddy excitement at being charmed out of her drab middle-class life in early 1960’s England by a man twice her age (Peter Sarsgaard).
One of the FNC 2009’s unforgettable moments was the naughty Temps Ø section’s presentation of George A. Romero’s latest excursion into zombieland, Survival of the Dead. Fan boys packed the refurbished Imperial, Montreal’s last functioning motion picture palace, and gave Romero a standing ovation when he appeared to introduce his film and accept the festival’s Louve d’honneur for the work he’s been doing since 1968’s apocalyptic horror classic, Night of the Living Dead, which is enshrined in the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry.
During a fireside interview the next day, the easy-going Romero told me he’s had enough of the flesh-eating creatures he thinks of as ghouls, not zombies, but fan enthusiasm and economic realities keep him up at night “trying to find something different to do with them. If there’s a certain integrity to the core, beyond that I feel free to be as whimsical as I like.
Some might be surprised to know that Romero counts among his biggest influences Orson Welles’ Othello and Macbeth, the beleaguered genius’ cheapest, most ingeniously stitched-together productions. And the number one movie on Romero’s best ever list is Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's 1951 adaptation of the Offenbach opera, The Tales of Hoffmann, which he first saw as a youth. “I fell in love with it,” Romero recalls. “The fantasy is so beautifully painted, and you could see how they did things. They weren’t working with a lot of money. You could see a double exposure; it was accessible. I could see myself some day understanding it, or maybe doing it. If at the same age I had seen Jurassic Park, I would have said impossible. You can’t see how they did that.”
Pierre is Gone
On September 25, Pierre Falardeau, one of the Quebec film scene’s most indelible characters, died at the age of 62. An excellent moviemaker and unquestioning supporter of Quebec independence, he was a bundle of contradictions whose caustic attacks on his perceived opponents could be refreshingly earthy and annoyingly intolerant. While some Falardeau movies, like Octobre and 15 février 1839, are relentlessly grim, his satirical Elvis Gratton series achieves the hilarity of John Waters pictures.
I interviewed Falardeau twice, in the workspace he mockingly called his “rat hole” and in the lobby of the Queen Elizabeth Hotel, just outside the Beaver Club, a venue he often chose for interviews because he saw it as a bastion of anglo privilege. During the four-hour rat hole conversation, Falardeau chainsmoked unfiltered Lucky Strikes and alternated between warm generosity and sudden fits of nationalist fervour.
Whatever your feelings about Pierre Falardeau’s politics, he represents a long-gone era when Quebec moviemakers were expected to simmer with passionate conviction. These days, in a far more cynical and market-driven world, Quebec’s very own Balloon Boy is waiting to be born.
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