Weekly round-up

Radio activity, a French femme
fatale and a trip up the Andes

OMINOUS BEAUTY: La Fille de Monaco

by MALCOLM FRASER

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Local documentarian Karina Goma’s latest is a poetic meditation on solitude and the need for community. It’s taken for granted in the digital era that people can be virtually connected through online communities, but this film concentrates on the old-school technological connection of talk radio.

With a structure that could be described as boldly vague, Goma floats between an assortment of characters. June Blackburn is an elderly shut-in who spends the film preparing to attend a personal appearance by talk radio host André Pelletier, who she’s spoken to on his show for decades but never seen in person. Jean Paray, another Pelletier fan, chats with the host on air in between his engagements as a low-rent singer, and other radio regulars tell their stories.

Goma’s last film, Un coin du ciel, had a free-wheeling cinéma vérité energy to match its subject, a sometimes anarchic CLSC in Park Extension. Here, her style is much more subdued, with tight and still close-ups, and lengthy tracking shots of the phone lines that connect her subjects. She has a knack for subtly touching moments— when Paray talks about how he turned down a contract in Vegas to stay with his family, and Goma cuts to him crooning at a seniors’ buffet, it’s quietly tragic without being condescending.

La Fille de Monaco
High-profile Paris lawyer Bernard (Fabrice Luchini) travels to Monaco to take on a murder case. He’s assigned a bodyguard, Christophe (Roschdy Zem), a nononsense professional whose excessive precautions leave Luchini perplexed. In between court dates, Luchini develops a fascination with a local weatherwoman and party girl, the Paris Hilton-esque Audrey (Louise Bourgoin), who as it turns out also has a history with Zem.

The tone of the film is odd—it seems like a fairly standard comedy, with Luchini (playing his standard role, an uptight highsociety man whose prissy manner masks a fundamental vulnerability) loosening up around the unrestrained Bourgoin and learning to get along with Zem in spite of their differences. But Zem’s refusal to go into detail about what happened between him and Bourgoin, along with occasional strains of ominous Hitchcockian strings, indicate that something may be afoot, and indeed the story takes an unexpectedly dark turn towards the end.

Watching the film, it seemed to me that anyone with remotely feminist sensibilities would likely take some measure of offence at Bourgoin’s character, a standard-issue male fantasy/nightmare of a sexual dynamo with hidden black widow tendencies. I was therefore fairly surprised to find out that the film was directed and co-written by a woman, Anne Fontaine (who’s made a number of other films including Comment j’ai tué mon père). Maybe, like many details in this film, it’s a French thing that anglos wouldn’t understand. But that aside, the film is well executed and enjoyable if ultimately not that remarkable.

Trisomie 21: Le défi Pérou
Just when you thought all possible subgenres had been exhausted, behold the rise of… the disabled mountain-climbing documentary! First there was last year’s Blindsight, about a bunch of blind kids hiking in the Himalayas. Now, this local doc chronicles the trek of a group of young adults with Down’s Syndrome to the Peruvian mountaineer destination Machu Picchu.

Local CEGEP teacher Jean- François Martin, whose son Karl was born with Down’s Syndrome, spearheads the project, assisted by a group of idealistic students. Martin speaks candidly about the struggles he’s faced as a parent, while insisting that the Down’s kids be looked at not with pity, but as legitimate citizens with something to contribute to society.

The film’s most interesting section is actually after the mountain climb, when the group spends a few days living with Peruvian peasant families. In a memorable scene, one of the teenage handlers is asked to help prepare the traditional welcoming meal of boiled guinea pig—in a true test of nerve and cultural openmindedness, she has to suffocate one of the hapless rodents by gripping its head in her hand for 20 minutes.

Earnest and heartfelt by nature, a film of this sort is difficult to criticize. It has a very straightforward structure and workmanlike style, with plenty of awe-inspiring views of the Andes. About the worst thing you can say about the doc is that it resembles a TV news item more than anything remotely cinematic, but it’s genuinely touching and inspiring.

ALL FILMS OPEN THIS FRIDAY, FEB. 13