A young soldier (François Arnaud) returns to live on the family farm in northern Ontario after serving in Afghanistan. But this sniper does not return alone, his demons accompany him. Suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, Marc finds it difficult to readjust to the too quiet daily life of his small town.
Those of you who have read our review of Causeway the past week will surely have a feeling of deja vu. After the Americans Lila Neugebauer and Jennifer Lawrence, it is the turn of the Canadians Michel Kandinsky and François Arnaud to portray us in The switch the psychological suffering of demobilized soldiers. And not for the better.
Michel Kandinsky, director who directs his second feature film here, displays a monomaniacal obsession with artistic blur effects. Indeed, almost all of The switch is filmed keeping only a small patch of each shot in focus. Everything else is just shrouded in perpetual blur. Worse still, between the movements of the camera and those of the actors, the ruse of focusing only on a precise element of the image lacks precision and misses the objective. The lack of mastery, the overuse of the visual effect, the impression that the director is taking us by the hand for fear that we will get lost in a straight line, we don’t know what annoys us the most. Applied from beginning to end with questionable usefulness, one comes to wonder if the camera does not simply have fog on the viewfinder.
The other visual effect too recurring to be honest proves us wrong: all this is well intended. The punctual distortion of the colorimetry to represent the peaks of stress would have been more than enough on its own to convey the message of the director. But this one, it seems, felt the need to resort to an overflow of flashy effects to compensate for his choices of plans sometimes agreed, sometimes on an ill-adapted scale, even to become counterproductive.
From minute to minute, Kandinsky tries clumsily to represent to us the progressive slide into the psychosis of his main character, who is looking for a new target to shoot down. However, the sequence which would have benefited from reserving all the visual effects too expensive for the director does not stand out and weighs down the climax of a story which was very close to being interesting.
The script, meanwhile, tries to surprise us at the climax of the narrative. A great idea from Kandinsky, who also signs the writing, but whose pen is not yet sharp enough for the final result to live up to his aspirations as an author. It’s a shame, because the approach, although already seen, had potential.
To come to the rescue of this announced cinematic shipwreck, we cannot really count on the distribution. François Arnaud as an ersatz of Robert de Niro in Journey to the End of Hell takes us little further than the end of the farm. The apprentice remains far behind the (grand) master and above all makes us want to see Michael Cimino’s masterpiece again. The cast is probably the one to blame, as the entire cast isn’t at the peak of their abilities, including 1996 Best Actor Genie winner Lothaire Bluteau.
Why make it simple when you can make it complicated ? This is the question that Michel Kandinsky answers with this film, but we are not sure that this logic is the best to follow. The switch is far from living up to the aspirations of its director and does not do justice to the subject it deals with. It looks like an end-of-studies feature film by a director who is still looking for himself.