Let’s not exaggerate anything! No, Montreal has not become a cinematic food desert where only star Quebec films, highly publicized foreign productions and big Hollywood machines attract crowds. During the year, it is true, certain fragile works appear in passing or not at all on our big screens. But there remain islets, oases.
Some people attend the New Cinema Festival for the atmosphere, the elbow-to-elbow, the party, the discoveries and the memory baths. Especially for the pearls destined to fall “between the cracks of the floor” on the calendar of upcoming releases. The New Cinema Festival picks them up by the bucketful; seasonal leaves, neither dead nor withered.
During this early autumn, between the end of the heatwave, the return of puddles and the terrifying reports on Israel on TV, I sit in front of the FNC screens, delighted to see the spectators, all generations combined, gathered in front of arthouse films and master classes.
In this vintage of hits, this festival was able to harvest the best of the works awarded at Cannes last May: Perfect Days, by Wim Wenders; Anatomy of a fall, by Justine Triet; Dead leaves, by Aki Kaurismäki; The Zone of Interest, by Jonathan Glazer, and others Monster by Hirokazu Kore-Eda, which will be released here sooner or later, but not all. You might as well breathe the air of the Croisette in October in Montreal. At the same time harvesting films from other important festivals and several Quebec premieres.
An established filmmaker, Robert Morin has never abandoned formal exploration, his best vein. In Boreal feast, it places the viewer in front of the carcass of a female moose. Here it is soon devoured by the wolf, the fox, the hare, the lynx, the bear. Not forgetting insects, crows, vultures and vermin of all kinds. Documentary? Not really. The staging pirouettes multiply. Several attacks by forest beasts on the large deceased mammal are “arranged with the view guy”. Blow above all on Boreal feast Morin’s love for wild nature, his joys as a man of the woods, his condemnation of sylvan felling by giant machines with the mouths of Tyrannosaurus rex. An autofiction in the form of a nourishing carcass? Eh yes !
At the Cinémathèque, people can see a fascinating installation by actress and multidisciplinary artist Larissa Corriveau for free in the Raoul-Barré room until October 29. human voices, a kaleidoscopic portrait of the actress Monique Miller, with extracts from the key roles of her life, is fragmented into several screens, beams of light, faces and voices. This murmuring and poetic mosaic surveys Monique Miller’s career on stage and screen as much as her rediscovered childhood and captures snippets of conversations. We like to see his artistic memories merge with the adventure of cultural Quebec which so often marries its features over the decades.
As I liked too Attikamekw suns, by Chloé Leriche, the sensitive and gifted filmmakerBefore the streets. With her formidable Attikamek cast, the filmmaker retraces the course of a drama from 1977, when five people from the community of Manawan, in Lanaudière, drowned in the car of two Montrealers passing through Saint-Michel-des-Saints. Accident ? Murders? Criminal negligence? Beyond the deliberate failures of the police and the judicial system, beyond the injustice, the finesse of the staging, the quality of the images, the natural performance of the performers, their inhabited silence and poignant funeral rituals create the magic that captivates and tightens the heart. May this beautiful film (expected in theaters in 2024) awaken those who still refuse to name systemic racism in our lands and forests.
It is always disconcerting to see to what extent certain praised and award-winning works can touch many people while leaving you unmoved. So, Priscilla, by the American Sofia Coppola, was widely applauded at the Venice Film Festival, which awarded its laurel for female performance to its young actress Cailee Spaeny. The filmmaker of Lost in translation, recounting Elvis Presley’s relationship with his only wife, seemed boring as hell to me. Due to not having obtained the musical rights to the King’s songs, the film’s soundtrack faded. And this unhealthy bond maintained by the rock icon with a thousand conquests with this white goose, soon confined to the home, relegates both Priscilla and Elvis to insignificance. Perhaps you will find virtues in it when it comes out on November 3. On me, his grace will, alas, never float.