by MATTHEW HAYS

This past two weeks must mark some kind of renaissance in Leonard Cohenmania. At least on the big screen, anyway. Consider this: two weeks ago, Looking for Leonard, a Hal Hartley-esque locally made indie feature had its debut, full of references to the pop poet icon. Then last week came So Faraway and Blue, Roy Cross’s directorial debut, which felt soaked in the influence of Cohen.

This week sees the unveiling of The Favourite Game, Montreal filmmaker Bernar Hébert’s adaptation of Cohen’s first novel of the same name. Notably, the film will open this year’s Les Rendez-vous du cinéma québécois, the province’s pre-eminent showcase of all local celluloid. Cohen’s and Hébert’s combined stature is so great in the Quebec cultural milieu that this will mark the first time Les Rendez-vous has opened with an English-language feature.

Words built for the screen

At first glance, it would seem The Favourite Game would beg for cinematic treatment (Lord knows, there’s lots of shagging). But the book, which was first published in ’63, also clearly presents a pretty intense challenge for a filmmaker. The novel is virtually entirely devoid of any action, surely a roadblock for a medium that has become so utterly narrative-driven.

But Hébert says the challenges The Favourite Game presented were clear and welcome. When producer Michel Ouellette handed him a copy of the book eight years ago, he immediately saw its potential. “When I read it, I thought it was really dense and perhaps not easy to condense,” says Hébert, whose previous films include La nuit du déluge and Le petit musée de Vélasquez. “It was about a character who wanted to create his own world out of poetry.”

The book has clearly taken its place in the Can-lit and Jew-lit canons. Its central character, Lawrence Breavman, the only son of a Montreal Jewish family, romances various women and works towards publishing his first novel while discovering his own creativity. Game has become noteworthy for many reasons, including Cohen’s ability to make the novel intensely romantic and deeply ironic at once.

Compared to everything from the films of Richard Lester to J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye to the paintings of Chagall, critics have long held the book up as one informed by a love of cinema itself. When Michael Ondaatje wrote a book on Cohen in ’70, he wrote that “the most obvious quality in the style and technique of The Favourite Game is its visual or cinematic style. Each chapter is a scene, and the feeling one gets in reading the novel is not so much an insight into a character as a vision of Lawrence Breavman in different poses playing the lead in several movies.”

Desperately seeking Lawrence Breavman

Hébert says the toughest aspect of making the film hasn’t been Cohen’s considerable shadow, but rather making the central casting call. “It’s unusual to find an actor who wants to explore new ideas in a movie with little or no action. This is a character-driven movie, in which relationships are examined. The sensibility of the actor is very important, that he’s in touch with the text. There’s a lot of subtlety here.”

After an exhaustive two-year search, with extensive interviews with actors from Los Angeles, New York, Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver, the final city turned up J.R. Bourne (Josie and the Pussycats, Antitrust). “We needed someone who would take the sensibility farther,” says Hébert. “Subtext plays as much of a role as text does here. Sometimes, [Breavman] is doing something, while his voiceover tells us the opposite of what he’s doing.”

Hébert says another production challenge was the New York shoot, which ate up a good deal of the film’s $3.4 million budget, due to the brutal U.S.-Canada exchange rate. And on an aesthetic level, Hébert says he feels he doesn’t have a lot of movie role models to go on. “I wouldn’t use any of the surrealistic imagery I’ve used in any of my previous films. I’ve tried to use a realistic setting, more classic than my previous films, to follow the character without obstruction.” :

The Favourite Game opens Les Rendez-vous du cinéma québécois on Thursday, Feb. 20

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