Identity shell game

>> André Turpin creates an odd romantic melodrama in Un Crabe dans la tête

by MATTHEW HAYS

The careers of director-writers André Turpin and Denis Villeneuve seem inextricably linked by both theme and collaboration, a sense that only grows while viewing Turpin's latest, Un Crabe dans la tête.

Villeneuve has an obsession with fate and water, something witnessed in his last film, the Genie-Award-winning Maelström (a film Turpin shot). In Crabe, Turpin's protagonist, played by the irrepressible David La Haye, plays a deep-sea diver. As well, Crabe begins as La Haye is recovering from a life-threatening incident; with Villeneuve's first feature, Un 32 aoùt sur terre, the film opened with its protagonist (Pascale Bussières) reassessing her life after a nasty car accident. (And Turpin shot that film too.)

Life, fate, romance, existential questions, heavy-handed symbolism--the gang's all here, and Turpin has assembled them in a film that's a mixed bag, but undoubtedly more satisfying than not. La Haye plays a deep-sea diver who suffers a memory lapse after surviving a brush with death in India. He winds his way back to Montreal, where he meets up with various people: his gay agent (true to stereotype, played as an unscrupulous, Mammon slut), his best friend's deaf girlfriend, a media critic, a megalomaniacal coke-snorting tycoon and a damaged drug dealer. As the film progresses, we feel La Haye's considerable dilemma. He's drawn to people, but can't entirely recall what his past experiences were. Did he really hurt his ex-wife that badly? (She leaves a Polaroid goodbye pasted on the wall for him, her middle finger raised in pointed salute.) More generally, was he a bad person before the accident or is he as sensitive as he feels now?

It's an odd predicament, one that both La Haye and Turpin handle well, by keeping things decidedly ambiguous. We're never quite sure how much La Haye recalls from his past. Is he a womanizing dog, or a true romantic? In a Hollywood film, these ambiguities would be swiftly cleared up (God forbid any dots not be connected) but Turpin avoids this instinct and gives us something more tangibly mysterious.

While the fish worked so well for me in Maelström (many I know hated it), the crab here feels like slightly forced, overly self-conscious symbolism. Still, it's a small complaint about a movie that's otherwise big in concept and heart. Un Crabe dans la tête opens Friday, Nov. 2