Weekly round-up

French baby yuks, documentary meets fiction,
hokey history and Venezuelan revolution

HISTORICAL INANITY: Je Me Souviens

by MALCOLM FRASER
and MATTHEW HAYS

Commes les autres
Manu (Lambert Wilson) is a gay Parisian pediatrician who dreams of having a child of his own. Trouble is, France won’t let gays adopt (here I was thinking they were all progressive and shit), and his partner Philippe (Pascal Elbé) isn’t so hot on the idea either. One night, the couple has a fender-bender with Fina (Pilar López de Ayala), an Argentinean immigrant who’s trying to stay in France past her papers’ expiration date. Wilson has the bright idea of striking a deal with de Ayala—they’ll get married so she can get residence, then she’ll deliver him a baby. Complications, needless to say, ensue.

As I recently bitched to my long-suffering editor, this cinematic season has strained my ability to come up with variations on the phrase “this isn’t very good, but it’s not really that bad either.” In this case, the comedy is neither laugh-out-loud funny nor particularly clever, and the plot is just this side of utterly predictable. Wilson and de Ayala are pretty watchable, but as far as drama and audience sympathy, let’s just say that anyone who’s tired of light comedies based on fertility as a coveted yuppie accessory would be well advised to stay away.

On the other hand, the film has some nice views of Paris, lots of beautiful people with stylish clothes and really swanky apartments, and a fundamental good-heartedness that saves it from degenerating into utter treacle. Expect a Hollywood remake sometime soon to make up for that. (MF)

Anchored in Her World
It was Martin Scorsese who once suggested that much of cinema rests on the tension between documentary and fiction. With his latest film, Michel Langlois delves into this tension, exploring his own fictional past and its actual inspiration.

With this quasi-documentary, Langlois returns to the family who inspired his 1993 fictional film Cap Tourmente. In that film, a Québécois family is unsettled by the return of one hunky son (played by Roy Dupuis) who is lusted after by both his sister and a male visitor. To keep the plot cooking, even mom is intrigued by the prospect of incestuous relations with Dupuis. Cap Tourmente attracted some attention on the international fest circuit, prompting a Variety review to refer to Dupuis’s acting as “jeans-ad posturing.”

Langlois’s return to his inspiration, Anchored in Her World, returns to the actual family who inspired his ’93 feature. It turns out to be a great big mid-life crisis home movie, as Langlois reveals he is recovering from cancer and this prompted some meditating on the family and its nonagenarian matriarch that had such an indelible impression on him.

It’s strange all right, and there are some interesting observations about the thin line between fact and fiction. But Anchored in Her World too often feels detached and cool; watching it feels like witnessing Ingmar Bergman doing Reality TV. This sequel of sorts will remain of primary interest to diehard fans of Cap Tourmente. (MH)

Je me souviens
This is the latest from veteran Quebec director André Forcier, whose work includes the critically acclaimed A Wind From Wyoming. It’s the story of a logging town during the Duplessis era, narrated by the son of socialist union activists. It’s stacked deep with Québécois actors of all varieties, and if the title is none too subtle in its effort to paint a sweeping portrait of Quebec history in the broadest strokes imaginable, the film is even less so.

If I hadn’t known the director’s identity and history going in, I might have suspected I’d stumbled upon a particularly awkward student film. The clumsy shooting and editing are matched by dialogue that’s as stiffly delivered as it is leaden and head-smashingly obvious, woven around an inane and directionless plot. Rémi Girard (as a Catholic priest) and Roy Dupuis (as an Irish nationalist, in a subplot-turned-main plot that truly spins the film into WTF territory) are solid as always, but as this film demonstrates, their journeyman acting chops are confounded by a puzzling lack of quality control.

Given Fortier’s resumé, I kept thinking that maybe the whole film was just one of those Québécois cultural things that anglos don’t get. But for the record, I saw the film in a theatre full of established Quebec film critics. And while some of them chuckled at the historical inside jokes, many laughed out loud at scenes clearly intended to be dramatic. And a few of them walked out. Only a sense of professional duty, mixed with masochism, prevented me from following them. (MF)

No Volverán: The Venezuelan Revolution Now
In recent years, Hugo Chavez has proven such a thorn in the side of George W. Bush and the American Right—Pat Robertson even called for his assassination—it was almost impossible not to cheer him on. But with every power-hungry leader in a destitute country, there are always reasons to be suspect.

Don’t look for them in No Volverán: The Venezuelan Revolution Now, a new documentary by Melanie MacDonald and Will Roach, a movie that shows us the revolution of “the ever popular President Hugo Chavez” while also outlining the struggles that the Venezuelan poor continue to face. There are profiles of various Venezuelans as they approach their respective uphill struggles, with footage of contentious elections and the background of Chavez’s move towards complete nationalization of the nation’s industrial sector. There are certainly inspiring moments here, and Venezuela’s bold moves in the socialist direction merit documentary investigation.

Don’t get me wrong—outright propaganda movies can be hugely entertaining. A film like I Am Cuba, for example, is undeniably stunning. But No Volverán doesn’t really come close to those aesthetic heights, and ultimately often feels like a one-note treatment of the Venezuelan situation. This screening will be introduced by representatives of the Consulate General of Venezuela, to no one’s surprise. (MH)

NO VOLVERÁN SHOWS AT THE CINEMA
DU PARC THIS THURSDAY, MARCH 5,
9:30 P.M. ALL OTHER FILMS OPEN THIS
FRIDAY, MARCH 6