The pros and cons of hope and shame

>> Charles Binamé gets ready to Rendez-vous with La Beauté de Pandore

by JONATHAN GOLDSTEIN

Since I had no idea what Charles Binamé looked like, I asked his publicist who I should be on the look-out for when we met. "He's a tall, handsome man," she said. "He's in his 50s, but looks younger." An accurate assessment, as it turns out.

There are people with whom, when you talk to them, you can hear the wheels spinning in their brains. And then there are those who look at you blankly without giving a single thing away. As we sit down at the Ex-Centris cafe, it strikes me that Binamé is probably the latter type.

But as the seconds would pass and I'd be thinking my last question had made little impact on him, his eyes would grow wide and he would deliver a very thoughtful response. Compared to many of his tragically romantic, over-wrought characters, Binamé comes across as surprisingly under-wrought.

La Beauté de Pandore, which will be opening the prestigious 18th annual Rendez-vous de cinema quebecoise, is the third film in a trilogy that began with Le Coeur au poing and continued with Eldorado. It marks the final chapter in a series that, when ingested in one gulp (I watched all three during the course of a week), comes off as a prolonged meditation on urban isolation.

But there's also the sense in Binamé's films that when the characters walk out the door of their homes, anything can happen; they can end up doing laps in a convertible around a swimming pool, making love to a beautiful woman or floating in a fountain in the park. The characters seem to seek out these kind of situations, self-consciously trying to make their lives less ordinary.

The myth of Bussières
Pandore is the story of Vincent (Jean-Francois Casabonne), a construction contractor whose workaday routine is shattered after encountering Pandore (Pascale Bussières), a woman dark and mysterious enough to make Mata Hari look like an Amway receptionist. Pandore's appearance in his life precipitates a series of events--and the makers of the film wish at this point to keep them secret--that catapult Vincent out of his serene world of illusions and towards the brink of his own mortality.

"Something happens to him where he can no longer stand lies," explains Binamé. "His life suddenly pivots and he is left only wanting truth."

In the Greek myth, Pandora is created by Zeus to wreak havoc on mankind. She is sent down from Mount Olympus with a box that contains all the evils of the world and by the time the box is shut, the only thing that's left inside is hope.

I ask him what he thinks that means and he pauses, pondering the question. "Once you stop hoping, you're dead. You have to hope. It's the main fabric of life."

In the myth, Pandora is ashamed of what she has done--but shame and Bussières are two things Binamé had trouble seeing alongside each other. "Pascale hasn't had to deal with a lot of shame in her life and you can't just tell an actor to be ashamed. She can play success, but she's never had to play shame. We had to do exercises to bring out her sense of shame and it's a burden I still see her carrying. It's a cloud that hangs over her persona that wasn't there before."

I tell him about an interview I once saw with Woody Allen in which Allen said that he wishes he could just press a button and have the movie in his brain suddenly become projected onto the screen. Binamé laughs when I ask him if he ever feels that way.

"There are some moments when I think, 'Why am I doing this to myself?' It's all about the trials and the joys, the loops and curves you have to go through. It's the trip that matters. It takes a while to accept that a film won't be how you thought it would be. You hope it will be better." :

La Beauté de Pandore screens as the opening film for the 18th annual Rendez-vous du cinema quebecois on Thursday, February 17. The film opens theatrically in both its original French version and with English subtitles on Friday, February 18. Rendez-vous info: www.radio-canada.ca/culture