Poetic picture show

>> Un cri de bonheur is an uneven homage
to happiness as seen through the eyes
of Quebec verse writers

by HILLARY BRENHOUSE

Eleven filmmakers (among them Manon Barbeau, André Forcier and Denis Villeneuve) join 21 Quebec poets to pay homage to a single theme: happiness. This is the central premise of Un cri au bonheur, a vibrant mosaic founded entirely on spoken word and accompanying images. The film is composed of a series of short clips—each one a mini flick in its own right—in which the poems are brought to life. Often, the authors appear directly onscreen to reflect on “le bonheur” and their craft in general. The result is a peculiar mélange, which is rather hit-and-miss. The bits that hit, hit home. The bits that miss are shoddy and stale.

In one of the more compelling segments, a middle-aged woman covers her face in white powder, then wipes it off to reveal dark, disfiguring bruises. In another, a dissatisfied harmonica player waxes poetic in a laundromat whose machines are filled with $10 bills and plastic flowers. Though happiness is their subject, some of the pieces are decidedly pessimistic, marked by desperation and aggression. An overwhelming majority draw on nature’s splendours: running water, blizzards, greenery and Canadian wildlife. In fact, director Philippe Baylaucq—who manages to bring fluidity to the poetic fragments—attempts to link the sections via the image of snow. Recurrent is the desolate white landscape, symbolic of a blank page.

The better vignettes play like the opening scenes of a powerful motion picture: slow, lyrical, visually stunning and delightfully dramatic. Unfortunately for Baylaucq, even these will leave you longing for a plotline. After nine or 10 poems-set-to-movie snippets, restlessness inevitably sets in and the most interesting elements of this collective endeavour grow tiresome. Their fate is to be dragged down by a film that is too long for its subject matter and a selection of uninspiring scenes. (Sequences in which the poet’s floating head is superimposed over a view of the countryside are particularly awful.)

It would be much more appropriate, it seems, if the worthwhile segments were taken separately and projected onto the walls of an avant-garde gallery as part of an art installation. So many of this film’s moments are beautiful, the verses enlightening, and the idea undeniably unique, and still it is terribly unexciting.

Un cri au bonheur opens this
Friday, Sept. 28

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