by MALCOLM FRASER

Montrealer B.P. Paquette’s feature debut, A Year in the Death of Jack Richards, is a true labour of love. Shot in 1998 and completed in 2004, it won a handful of prizes on the festival circuit last year, and is finally having its local premiere with a one-week run at the Parc.

The film stars Vlasta Vrana, who may be familiar to viewers without them knowing it: in a 30-year career, the local character actor has become an onscreen fixture, playing a multitude of cops, mobsters, scientists and so on in films ranging from The Day After Tomorrow to countless straight-to-cable cheapies. Here, he’s excellent as the titular Richards, a former professor who has a mental breakdown and, after doing some time at an institute, takes on a job as a superintendent at a downtown Montreal apartment complex. His attempts to put his life back together are thwarted by recurring inner voices that keep bringing up the dark parts of his past. Québécoise star Micheline Lanctôt, in her first anglo role since 1974’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, complicates things further as a love interest.

The film has a peculiar style, one that’s hard to classify as a directorial choice, a function of Paquette’s low budget and relative inexperience, or somewhere in between. Shot mostly in black and white, tinted in various hues to set the mood, the film has a lot of long, static shots à la Jim Jarmusch, but with a much less naturalistic feel. When the actors are shot in close-up, it’s often from directly in front, which again results in a highly staged, artificial mood. Since the film liberally mixes Richards’ hallucinations and memories with his “real” experiences, usually without distinguishing between them, this sense of unreality somehow works, adding to the disquieting sense of looming danger that the threadbare plot sets up.

There are echoes of Eraserhead and Barton Fink in the portrayal of a man slowly succumbing to insanity; ultimately, though, Paquette seems to be striving towards his own vision. It’ll be interesting to see what he can accomplish with more means in the future; in the meantime, A Year in the Death is an atmospheric and intriguing little curiosity.

A Year in the Death of Jack Richards opens Friday, Dec. 1

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