About ten years ago, Camilo (Jorge Martinez Colorado) was the chef of a restaurant acclaimed by critics and gourmets, Le Coyote. Forced to lock up for reasons that Katherine Jerkovic will reveal later in this story of resilience and self-abnegation, the Mexican immigrant established in Montreal works night shifts for a cleaning company. As the promise of a sweeter future arises for this fifty-year-old widower living frugally, Camilo will be faced with a difficult dilemma.
Thus, after Fred (Emmanuel Bédard), a long-time friend, offered to replace the chef of his restaurant in La Malbaie, Camilo receives a visit from his daughter Tania (singer Eva Avila), whom he does not haven’t seen for years. By announcing to her father that she wants to follow yet another detoxification treatment, Tania asks him to take care of her five-year-old son whom she is raising alone, Zachary (Enzo Desmeules Saint-Hilaire), whose existence Camilo was unaware of.
Delicately pursuing her study of uprooting and transmission, Katherine Jerkovic, a Quebec filmmaker born to a Uruguayan mother and a Croat-Argentinian father, offers a second feature film as a counterpoint to her first, the morose but luminous Roads in February (2018), where a fatherless new Quebecer went to see her grandmother in Uruguay to understand why her parents had left their native country ten years earlier.
This time, the director sketches in halftones the portrait of a man turned towards the future. Unlike his colleague Edgar (Christian de la Cortina), who is content with his modest lot, Camilo wants to live from his passion for cooking and proudly share his culture. When he visits his Romanian neighbors, Ana (Catalina Pop) and Cornel (Virgil Serban), he brings them his specialties while his hosts happily share their country’s alcohol with him. Sad to see that his grandson does not speak Spanish, Camilo speaks to him in both languages to introduce him to his mother tongue.
Although she depicts a character who fights with dignity against adversity and never falls into misery in her illustration of the reality of immigrants, whose spirit of mutual aid she salutes, The Coyote is weighed down by an invasive melancholy, which threatens to bring everything down into the most total slump. By dint of sobriety, the photo of Léna Mill-Reuillard (A colonyby Geneviève Dulude-De Celles; Noémie says yesby Geneviève Albert) becomes almost dull, while the editing by Sophie Farkas Bolla (Beansby Tracey Deer) seems to underline the lack of substance of certain scenes in this slow story.
In fact, the camera lingers for a long time on Camilo, a man of few words, and on his smallest gestures: here, staring into space sitting on his loveseat; there, chopping vegetables. Admittedly, the film wants to be introspective, the hero, torn between his own desires and his paternal duties, being in deep reflection, but in places, his contemplative nature bores more than it seduces.
However, there remains Katherine Jerkovic’s empathetic gaze, the timid note of hope that points to the very last shot and the nuanced interpretation of the charismatic Jorge Martinez Colorado, seen in drunken birdsby Ivan Grbovic and Sara Mishara, and in Raspberry timeby Florence Longpré, Suzie Bouchard and Philippe Falardeau, who make Coyote a sensitive and moving drama.