Vanity fare

>>Charlotte Laurier’s comeback Les Plus
beaux yeux du monde is a self-indulgent,
ultra-low-budget family project

by MALCOLM FRASER

Charlotte Laurier is a figure of Quebec film royalty. She burst onto the screen at the age of 12 with a ferocious performance in Les Bons débarras, and has subsequently worked with everyone from Claude Jutra to Jean-Claude Lauzon to Pierre Falardeau. After a long break from film, she’s returned with her directorial début, Les plus beaux yeux du monde (co-directed with Pascal Courchesne), an ultra-low-budget, DIY affair shot on video, with all the pitfalls that medium invariably entails.

Laurier stars as Marion, a French woman relocated to Montreal who’s abandoned her artistic dreams to work at a diner. The film begins with her in full mid-life crisis, as she decides to leave her husband (Patrice Savard) and her two daughters (Carlotta Laurier-Courchesne and Stella Courchesne-Laurier). While Savard tries to hold the family together, Laurier holes herself up in a rented room where she writhes in existential angst and contemplates her past, then takes off on a directionless road trip. Along the way, she gets seduced by Pierre-Luc Brillant of Borderline (in an “only in franco-Montreal” touch, his suave Lothario wears a frilly white shirt and Han Solo vest).

The attentive reader will have deduced that the young actresses playing the daughters are the directors’ actual progeny (a third daughter, Pialli Courchesne-Laurier, plays the young Marion and also composed the soundtrack). Aside from demonstrating a novel approach to compound naming, this gives the film a certain natural intimacy, but also the unmistakable air of a vanity project.

Shot and edited by Courchesne, Les plus beaux yeux looks like it cost about $30 to make; the aesthetic is somewhere between a Dogma film and a community-cable soap opera. For us anglos, it’s also marred by absolutely god-awful subtitles, full of terrible translations, arbitrary timing and outright typos.

The only thing that redeems the film is Laurier’s intense and committed performance—she has quite an amazing screen presence, and her eyes have a commanding depth of expression. Come to think of it, the fact that the title refers to her eyes pushes the film to a new level of egocentricity. But if they’re not necessarily the world’s most beautiful, they do make this self-indulgent mess somewhat watchable.

Les plus beaux yeux du monde
opens this Friday, May 30

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