by MATTHEW HAYS

In person, Ziad Touma has this warm, cuddly, filmmaker-next-door feel about him. He's polite to a T, speaks generously about everyone who comes up in conversation and has a gentle demeanour.

It's unexpected, seeing as the former MusiquePlus producer has just completed his first feature, Saved by the Belles, a raucous and unpredictable unleashing of Montreal's nightlife underbelly on the big screen. Inspired by the true stories of several amnesiacs who showed up in Canadian cities over the past few years, the film's storyline has one screwed-up (but entirely sexy) young man rearing his head in Montreal's club milieu, claiming not to remember a thing about his past or who he is. Discovered by local drag diva Sheena Hershey (Brian C. Warren) and scenestress Scarlet VJ (Karen Simpson), this young amnesiac is soon dubbed "Sean" and taken under wing by the club-junkie duo. Hoping to jar his memory, they take him on a tour of Montreal's club scene, introducing him to various characters along the way; Touma's cast includes numerous authentic night life figures, among them drag fixtures Mado and Madame Simone.

In fact, Touma's everyone-including-the-kitchen-sink approach to casting gives the film a who's-who of Montreal's nightlife aura. The press kit sums it up pretty well when it states that Saved by the Belles stars "fags and hags, blonde bimbos, label whores, sugar daddies, club kids, bicep builders, leathers and feathers, funky junkies, freaks and geeks, sex addicts, chupa chicks, lube monsters, pimply pimps, weight watchers, nympho virgins, mingle singles, glowstick ravers, cheap strippers, wannabe actors, guestlist leftovers, glittery debutantes, kinky grannies, impotent hustlers, baggy-eyed scenesters, size queen cupids, self-taught porn stars, air miles jetsetters, showgirls, smoking players, bendable bisexuals and mama's toys."

Identity crisis

Touma and Warren wrote the screenplay together over a two-year period. Their hope was to reflect Sean's struggle for identity, a search that would stand in contrast to Sheena and Scarlet, who have their own manufactured identities. The film is beautifully shot, with a music-video aesthetic matched by over-the-top art direction and an odd sense of realism surrounding the proceedings. The film hearkens back to Allan Moyle's Montreal Main (1974) and The Rubber Gun (1978), independent features that captured the rough-around-the-edges, drugged-up, night-time underbelly of Montreal.

Touma says a key part of his goal was to create a stylistic tension within Saved by the Belles. On the one hand, he wanted the film to feel completely real; on the other, he wanted to capture the artifice of the club scene. "I wanted the film to be almost like a documentary," says Touma, whose '97 short Line Up also captured a glimpse of Montreal night life. "While I thought about cinéma-vérité, I also wanted to create very contrived spaces and environments, where all the direction would work together - the hair and makeup and costumes and set designs and cinematography. I wanted all those artistic elements that bring film together to create a playground space for real characters to come into that plastic fantastic world, and then to be themselves."

Paramount to the film's realistic feel, Touma explains, was the casting call. Taking his cues from the Italian neo-realists, Touma says he deliberately avoided using professional actors. "It is a scary experience working with non-professional actors, because there's no technique there. It's real life for them and that's how it's lived. But that's not how it's lived on a film set. So we had to set down some rules that actors spend years learning. I didn't want to cast actors that wanted to act freaky, or who would shave their heads just to be freaky or funny."

Acting's a drag

But a lack of traditional acting didn't mean Touma's cast was out of touch with the idea of performance. "Our two central characters, they had created these characters for themselves before. Brian created Sheena, Karen had created Scarlet - these two double-identity people, put together with a non-identity guy, I thought would make for an interesting combination." (As for Sheena's occasional similarities to late drag pioneer Divine, Touma casts them aside: "Sheena is Sheena, Divine was Divine. Brian has his own charisma and personality and sense of humour. He's not provocative for the sake of being provocative. There's a tenderness about Sheena's character - it's not the old-school drag attitude about being bitter.")

Saved by the Belles, at about 90 minutes, was cut down from over 50 hours of footage. That shooting ratio does indeed place the film in the category of documentary. As well, the filmmakers employ local settings for colour; the film features trots through the Village's biggest gay club, Sky, St-Laurent's Ilume, as well as a scene in Café Campus, where local glam band One 976 perform.

"I've always been inspired by the club scene," says Touma. "I used to club a lot. Now I talk and write about it. I try to put the clubbing experience into images and music. The club scene has always been a great way to figure out where youth culture is going." And the movie's specific relation to Montreal? "It's specific about me being a Montrealer. It's specific about me seeing my second city, my adopted city of Montreal, after growing up in Beirut. Montreal always seemed like a circus of North America. Growing up in the Middle East, North America is the colourful place, where everything is a joy ride. That's what I find in Montreal's night scene. The city is an essential backdrop for this movie."

Bi the way

As well as pushing notions of identity in the film, Touma makes Sean an ambiguously gay character, as confused about his sexuality as he apparently is about everything else. "Is he gay? Is he bi? I wanted to leave that open in the film. And I wanted him to get saved by a girl and a guy. She just wants to sleep with all the fags. And the drag queen wants to sleep with the straight guy. So it adds to the confusion issues in the film. Ultimately, I wanted the film to be about this cross-mélange - beyond gay, beyond straight, beyond male, beyond female, beyond language.

"This film really is about reinventing fiction. It's like we went out and documented fiction. I call it neon realism. In the dogme movement, the director's signature isn't supposed to be there. I was inspired by that too, but I wanted to create a new fusion of all those styles: cinéma-vérité, fiction, neo-realism and dogme."

Drawing so heavily on various annals of film history, what was Touma's most vital role model for Saved by the Belles? "Paul Morrissey - he took real people, the Warhol entourage, and captured them doing what they did. He really captured Chelsea in the '60s with those films. I like that, when you can look back on film history and grasp a sense of that city, of that time and look. It's a mirror of who we are.

"This film is a farce in a way, but there are deeper themes. It's deeply superficial. Or superficially deep, depending on how you look at it."

Saved by the Belles opens this Friday, April 25 at Ex-Centris

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