Slammer cam
>> Histoire de pen attempts to illuminate
Quebec prison life

by BERTIE MANDELBLATT

During the press screening of Histoire de pen, two reels of film were confused; hence I initially understood the plot as a jumble of characters dying and suddenly reappearing, escapes from prison and returns to prison, and abrupt changes in tone. Dream sequences? Flashbacks? Surrealist juxtapositions?

Chances are this mistake won’t happen in subsequent screenings of Histoire, Michel Jetté’s new film and the follow-up to his Hochelaga. Despite the success of that film, however, I’m still willing to bet this long, hyper-melodramatic treatment of prison life will appear to most viewers as a jerkily episodic accumulation of underwritten and overacted incidents with little poetic impact.

Judging from the subject matter of both Hochelaga (which deals with the biker wars) and Histoire, Jetté is clearly fascinated with Quebec’s underworld of drug dealers, trashy bars and blue-collar crime. And in Léo Lévesque, Jetté seems to have found a screenwriter who knows whereof he writes: Lévesque spent 25 years in prison and subsequently published five collections of short stories dealing with his experiences, the last of which inspired this film. But despite the presumed familiarity with life inside a maximum security prison, the screenplay reveals little beyond stock characters (the sultry transvestite, the jittery schizophrenic, the bestial muscleman, the sinister prison guard, the wise old guy) and stock situations (the confrontation in the cafeteria, the fights in the exercise pens, the gang rape). The film follows Claude, who enters prison and is immediately swept up in the struggle for supremacy between two rival gangs. Because of his physical prowess, he is forced to fight on behalf of gang leader Zizi Grenier in order to save his own skin. He is never really able to procure his safety though, and various horrors follow.

Despite the narrative superficiality, Histoire de pen is visually ambitious. Shot music-video style with lots of slo-mo and psychedelic effects, the film attempts to depict the extremity of prison misery. With no real framework to hang it on, its success is limited. :

Histoire de pen opens Friday, Sept 27

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