Bulgarian rhapsody

>> Local director Denis Côté’s erotic
psychodrama Nos vies privées is uneven
but uncompromising

by MALCOLM FRASER

Denis Côté is a filmmaker of a rare breed, at least since the heyday of the French New Wave: a film critic who decided to put his money where his mouth was and leap into filmmaking himself. Côté made several shorts while working as a critic and editor at the Mirror’s francophone sister paper, Ici, made his feature début with 2005’s Les États nordiques, and follows up with the unusual psychodrama Nos vies privées.

The story takes place almost entirely in a cottage in rural Quebec, where Milena (Anastassia Liutova), a Bulgarian immigrant settled in Montreal, greets Philip (Penko S. Gospodinov), a photographer from the Bulgarian capital of Sofia with whom she’s conducted a torrid online affair. The two set about bringing the affair into the non-virtual realm, but once the initial heat has worn off, the isolation of the cottage starts to create tension.

That’s pretty sparse as far as plot descriptions go, but it’s not a plot-heavy film: the two-person interaction is only interrupted a couple of times. There’s an ill-fated trip into town to attend a fair, and later a somewhat unlikely pair of incidents that constitute the only major plot points in the traditional sense, but they both happen so far into the film that to reveal them would constitute a spoiler.

But plot is not the focus here; it’s all about the atmosphere and the chemistry between the two protagonists. Liutova has a captivating presence, her free-spirited, capricious character reminiscent of Anna Karina in the early Godard films; it’s entirely believable that someone would travel halfway around the world to hook up with her. Gospodinov is considerably less fleshed out, as if Côté wanted him to be alienated from the audience as well as the environment of the film.

Côté developed the film on a writing retreat in Bulgaria, and it’s as though he fell completely for the old-school European way of filmmaking, where such New World concerns as plot and character development are thrown out the window, leaving only theme and atmosphere to hold the film together. It’s a risky gambit that doesn’t totally work, but certainly establishes Côté as a bold and uncompromising filmmaker unafraid to go against the grain.

Nos vies privées opens this
Friday, Nov. 23

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