Launched at the San Sebastián Festival, Engine noise has had a more than enviable career thanks to its unusual charm and fresh insolence. In addition to having been selected in some twenty festivals abroad and garnering three Canadian Screen nominations, this first feature film by Philippe Grégoire (Beep beep, Aquarium, one man) won the Quebecor prize for the best newcomer in the national competition at the Festival du nouveau cinema, the Special International Jury Prize at La Roche-sur-Yon and the Premio Competencia prize in Los Cabos. It remains to be seen if the film will be able to hold the attention of moviegoers overwhelmed by the cinema offer after months of deprivation.
Work carried out with a budget inversely proportional to the inventiveness that Grégoire deploys in it, Engine noise immediately captures the viewer’s attention by pretending to go in various directions before focusing on the existential drama of its main character, Alexander, played with great assurance by Robert Naylor.
The engine roaring furiously, a car turns on itself in a succession of shots while the credits roll. Would the director make fun of Fast and Furious and other films nitro ? In a sequence reminiscent of Christopher Guest’s memorabilia (Best in Show), follow one another close-ups where customs officers confide in their haste or their fear of learning to handle a firearm. Then, in what seems to be a parody of an erotic film, Alexandre, a trainer for Canadian customs officers, enters the room of one of his students, Laura (Naïla Rabel), who irons her helmet in her underwear. screwed on the head. And poof! Poor Alexandre finds himself face to face with the director of the establishment (Alexandrine Agostini, worthy of an Almodóvar comedy), who tells him that he is suspended because of his sexual behavior, not without trying to excite him.
So here is the young man forced to return to live in Napierville with his mother (Marie-Thérèse Fortin), owner of the drag strip, who transformed Alexandre’s room into a sanctuary to the glory of her adored son – to the great displeasure of the last. A misfortune never happens alone, Alexandre, who must deal with the attempts to seduce his hierarchical superior, is soon questioned by two policemen who do not hear laughing, Letellier (Marc Beaupré) and Rémillard (Maxime Genois). His crime? We recognized him on pornographic drawings pasted on the door of the church.
Then arrives Aðalbjörg (Tanja Björk, mischievous elf), Icelandic runner who is passionate about the French language and the cinema of André Forcier, who will offer her a more than charming treasure hunt, while Philippe Grégoire and the editor Kyril Dubé will have fun with the codes of the “tank movie”. And that’s where Engine noise really takes off.
Himself a native of Napierville and ex-customs officer, the filmmaker illustrates the disarray of his alter ego, prisoner of an alienating bureaucracy and a conservative society, in wide shots where the characters, motionless and distanced from each other, seem overwhelmed by the landscape. In order to translate the dehumanizing absurdity in which their characters trample, the actors declaim their replies in a deliberately artificial tone, sometimes theatrical, sometimes caricatural. If we don’t laugh out loud, we find ourselves smiling more than once and being delighted by this whimsical portrait of an artist in the making.
Combining the lunar beauty of Icelandic landscapes and the rustic charm of Quebec landscapes, Philippe Grégoire creates a singular universe that is both picturesque and playful, with a few hints of dreamlike and absurd. A rich program which is reminiscent, by its earthy poetry and offbeat humor, of the comedies of Gilles Carle and André Forcier, as well as those of the Swedish Roy Andersson (Second Floor Songs).