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>> Yellowknife is a bleak and distant drama

by JASON BOGDANERIS

Filmmaker Rodrigue Jean has made an uncompromising film that explores what happens when people stay together out of need instead of desire. Set in the Canadian North, Yellowknife is the story of Max and Linda, a couple fleeing their past who meet other emotional refugees along the way.
The film starts as Max picks Linda up from the hospital. The nature of her illness is never explained and its ambiguity hangs over the rest of the film. The two speed off towards an uncertain future, the tension between them unyielding.

They soon meet a couple of male strippers whose ambiguous relationship mirrors their own. They dance, hustle and get high, moving across the arid landscape like a couple of hedonistic cowboys. Their attempts to get closer to Linda go nowhere and only seem to exacerbate her hostility. She resents Max’s paternalistic hold on her but seems powerless to strike out on her own.

Then a clue to Linda’s past appears one night in the form of a middle-aged couple in the motel room next to theirs. The sounds of a bizarre sexual ritual draws her to them like a magnet, the look in her eyes suggesting something both familiar and unwelcome. Linda eventually meets the woman: Marlène, a former disco diva (Patsy Gallant), who’s also a willing hostage to her male companion. Their lives seem like one long denouement from her days of stardom, trading in on her faded celebrity while her sleazy manager/boyfriend spends his share of the take on blowjobs and Scotch. Linda and Marlène’s parody of a mother/daughter relationship seems to satisfy their needs temporarily but can’t last.
What’s infuriating about this challenging film is the inability to ever get a sense of what’s inside Linda’s head. It becomes difficult to feel close to a character who alternates between wounded anger and autistic frigidity. Young director Jean has managed to create an intriguing atmosphere, but the lack of empathy for the characters and corpse-like coldness permeating both the look and feel of the picture make it a tough film to connect with. :

Yellowknife opens Friday, March 1