Most valuable players

>> The captivating documentary Junior
portrays a season in the life of a
Baie-Comeau hockey team

by MALCOLM FRASER

Most definitely not to be confused with the Arnold Schwarzenegger male-pregnancy caper of the same name, Junior is an NFB documentary portraying a season in the life of a junior hockey team, the Baie-Comeau Drakkar. Filmmakers Isabelle Lavigne and Stéphane Thibault focus on the ambitions and challenges of the team’s most promising players, largely through the eyes of the coaches, agents and other self-appointed authority figures of the game.

In a rather audacious move, Lavigne and Thibault take hockey itself out of the picture; other than a brief snippet where the players analyze a videotape of their own game, we see zero ice time in the film. The drama takes place when the team steps off the ice into the dressing room; the Drakkar’s coach, Éric Dubois, who bears a chilling resemblance to James Gandolfini, lets loose on the players with passionate rhetorical fury, trying his damnedest to whip them into shape.

Lavigne and Thibault subsequently go even deeper behind the scenes, to the backroom meetings where team representatives plan complex, sometimes Machiavellian schemes to trade players. These scenes combine the macho-poetic grandeur of Glengarry Glen Ross with the insider-lingo realism of The Wire; the relative importance on a universal scale of minor-league, small-town hockey clearly doesn’t occur to these men, who treat the dealings with the gravitas of UN treaties or 11th-hour hostage negotiations. And they’re not the only ones who take the players seriously: the deep-set symbolic national significance of hockey is brilliantly captured in the looks on the faces of the teen groupies and wide-eyed little boys watching the games.

We get to know the players themselves mostly as pawns in the backroom manoeuvring. Traded around between small-town teams, constantly henpecked by their coaches and agents, and occasionally manipulated into Lord of the Flies-like backbiting, even those of us with a Revenge of the Nerds attitude towards jocks can’t help but feel sorry for the poor bastards. The views into their world are brief but intriguing—and franglais fans will thrill to the anglo players who frequently end their English sentences with “ostie.”

The aging backroom men’s investment of energy and passion into the lives of the players—confused teenage boys with no control over their own destinies—can be interpreted different ways; are they selflessly acting as role models, or seizing on an easy way to flex authority? Lavigne and Thibault steer clear of an easy judgment. Their filmmaking style is old-school cinéma vérité, with no interviews, voice-overs or self-reflexive cleverness, but with a poetic eye for small, meaningful moments. They also have a knack for capturing visually arresting images—the Saint Lawrence river seen through a train window, the strangely dramatic wipers of a bus windshield, a pensive coach reflected in a dead TV screen—that’s sorely missing from a lot of documentaries in the digital era.

Their fresh, inventive aesthetic is a relief, particularly in the context of the NFB, who often seem to prize politically correct social content over cinematic concerns. And where other filmmakers might take the easy way out and scoff at the small-time self-importance, they’ve drawn out deep and meaningful universal truths.

Junior opens this Friday, Jan. 25

>> Movie Listings