Fully loaded

>> Montreal director Stéphane Lafleur on his original and inspiring debut Continental:
A Film Without Guns

by MALCOLM FRASER

When reviewing the work of a first-time director, especially a local one, there’s always the temptation to pull your punches, to forgive the film’s excesses or overemphasize its minor moments of strength—whether out of a sincere desire to encourage the director’s improvement, or just out of what little human compassion remains in our cynical, critical souls. So it’s refreshing when a first feature comes along about which you can say, without qualification, that you’ve seen something that really meets the test of quality in a big-picture sense. Such is the case with Continental: A Film Without Guns, the feature debut of local writer/director Stéphane Lafleur.

Continental takes place in an unspecified Quebec suburb where a middle-aged man has mysteriously vanished; the disappearance sets in motion the stories of the film’s four main characters. Lucette (Marie-Ginette Guay), the man’s wife, goes through a cycle of grief and anger over his absence. Louis (Réal Bossé), an insurance salesman from out of town, gets hired to replace the man and takes up residence in a hotel, where the sounds of the copulating couple next door heighten his loneliness and awaken some dormant impulses.

Chantal (Fanny Mallette), who works the night counter at the same hotel, is a twentysomething woman whose social awkwardness keeps her perpetually single. Marcel (Gilbert Sicotte) is a gambling-addicted thrift store owner whose troubled tale weaves through the others as he desperately tries to come up with some money. The tone throughout is melancholy but hopeful, with flashes of dark humour.

Lafleur is an editor by trade, which explains the film’s solid structure, and was also a founding member of longstanding DIY video collective Kino. “You never really quit Kino, because you never know if you’ll get involved again, but I was mostly involved in the first three years,” he says. “What it taught me, perhaps, was to be conscious of the means I had at my disposal, and to try to push them to the limit, but at the same time to be realistic about the means I had.”

This understated approach works well with a film that’s not grounded in the usual rules of storytelling. “I’ve always been attracted to films where the main element isn’t necessarily the narrative, where they’re more like collages of ideas, of points of view, of observations,” says Lafleur, who cites Jean-Claude Lauzon’s Léolo as a particularly influential example. “What you follow in that film is more the fleeting moments, and the kid’s imagination. That’s what gives the film its poetic power; that comes across more than the story per se.”

Although the film has an unmistakable local flavour, there’s something universal underlying it that distinguishes it from the insider nature of many Quebec films. “We’ve shown the film in Venice, in Toronto, and it’s reassuring to see that our films are well received and understood elsewhere,” says Lafleur on the eve of screening the film in L.A. “I believe in films that reflect this society, but at the same time are open and address universal issues, to be able to reach out to others.”

Boasting a strong cast and a deliberate aesthetic (for which Lafleur is quick to share credit with cinematograper Sara Mishara), Continental is an original and oddly inspiring film that deserves to be seen at home and abroad.

Continental: A Film Without Guns
opens this Friday, Nov. 9

>> Movie Listings