Weekly round-up

A charming Québécois family
fable and an absurd actioner

PECULIAR PERIOD PIECE:
René Richard Cyr and Vincent Guillaume Otis

by MALCOLM FRASER
and JOSH LOVEJOY

Babine
Busy Québécois character actor Luc Picard, who also directed the acclaimed L’audition a few years back, returns to the director’s chair with this magic-realist fable, from the pen of storyteller Fred Pellerin. Set in a deliberately unspecified earlier time in a remote and proudly isolated Quebec village, it tells the tale of village idiot Babine (Vincent-Guillaume Otis). His mother (Isabel Richer) dabbles in witchcraft, which gets tongues wagging that he brings bad luck, causing some of the villagers to treat him with suspicion. A mean-spirited priest (Alexis Martin) comes to town and takes advantage of this scapegoating, forcing Otis to go on a coming-of-age quest.

Pellerin and Picard fill the movie with charming, whimsical details (a watch planted in the ground grows into a clock tree; a woman with several kids decides to let herself off the hook by staying permanently pregnant) that plant the story firmly in fantastical territory. It’s also a proudly local film, with thick Quebec accents and hardcore joual all around, including in the narrative voice-over, and a wink to Quebec’s idealization of its backwards rural roots (the film initially seems to take place in the Middle Ages, before certain technological details hint that it’s actually set much more recently).

With characters drawn in broad strokes and an ultimate detour into outright fairy-tale structure, it’s fundamentally a movie for the kiddies, but its unique approach, wit and creativity make it a far cut above the average family film these days. (MF)

Transporter 3
Depressed Formula One fans looking for their dose of high-octane driving may have found their fix with the newest Transporter franchise installment. The film’s plot is simple: Frank Martin (played by Jason Statham, Britain’s answer to Bruce Willis) is yet again yanked out of retirement and asked one last time to drive somewhere… fast. The curveball is that the package he’s transporting is a hot Ukrainian girl (Natalya Rudakova). And for reasons unclear, they both have to wear explosive wristbands that will detonate if they stray too far from the car.

The script comes from the arrested-adolescent mind of Luc Besson, with the help of Robert Mark Kamen, creator of The Karate Kid (and 1994 Razzie Award nominee for Karate Kid 3). As expected, the film has a quick-cut kinetic approach to editing, philosophical musings (“a man is only good as the car he drives”), a decent bad guy (played by Prison Break’s Robert Knepper), off-the-wall action, and hardcore fight scenes. One of the best of these cuts between Statham wildly fighting bad guys and Rudakova smiling seductively, clearly getting more excited the more ass he kicks. He finally manages to take his shirt off as part of the fight, to her climaxing approval.

If you feel that the James Bond series has gotten too cerebral, this one’s for you. Statham has claimed to the press that the Bourne trilogy has lifted the bar for action movies, and “with this movie we had to step up our game.” It seems like everyone is still playing the same old game—sequels for dollars. (JL)