Monsieur Lazhar (Friday, April 13, 2012) (37)

French-Canadian Philippe Falardeau's film Monsieur Lazhar was one of the nominees for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2012 Oscars. It is a celebration of everything that is wonderful about modern multiculturalism and how people are good inside if you give them the chance to show you what's in their heart. This sentiment makes me a bit sick as it's so sunny and saccharine it's almost impossible to be interesting. Even with a story that has some rather dark and challenging moments, the film really only falls into the predictable category of "movies about teachers and students who seem different but connect with love." 

Bachir Lazhar is an Algerian immigrant to Montreal who turns up at an elementary school the day after a popular teacher has hanged herself in her classroom on a school morning. As the administrators and kids come to grips with the loss of their friend and guide, he explains that he was a teacher in a similar school in his homeland and is the process of getting his asylum status in Canada. At first he's an odd fit for the school, which has a rather liberal view of educational (teachers are called by their first names, students are encouraged to sit in a circle rather than rows). He has a more traditional process, including an autocratic style and dictation from old texts involving complex, arcane language. 

As he comes to learn about the pain the students are feeling (one boy and one girl who witnessed their teacher killing herself moments before class began), Monsier Lazhar begins to relax and thrive in this environment. At the same time, it seems he wasn't entirely forthcoming about his background and his status in the country and in the school could be in doubt. 

This is a nice film, but nothing very interesting. The real tension rests on whether the kids accept him as positive force, but we've seen this movie dozens of times before and know they always do. Then there's a bit of tension based on the silly and incidental fact that the school doesn't do a thorough check of his life before hiring him... but that's not really interesting and has nothing to do with the emotional development of the story. 

This feels much more like a prescribed series of events than any story I can become particularly invested in. We know there will be tension with the students and other teachers, we know he'll come to be loved, we know there will be ongoing cultural disconnections, we know it probably can't last. At no point do we really care what happens to the moving parts, because they really only function as parts in the greater banal story. 

It's very nice that this was nominated for the Oscar, but it's clearly not as good as other foreign language films that were also (it's not even the best French-Canadian film from 2011). It has all the hallmarks of sweet movie (and I generally like any movie that begins with a grizzly hanging), but none of the oomph of something I really care about. 

Stars: 2 of 4 

Heartbeats (May 17, 2011) (32)

I never saw Xavier Dolan's first feature from last year called I Killed My Mother, but I heard very good things about it. When his second feature, Heartbeats, came out, I was interested to see it. To say Dolan is a wunderkind is an understatement, having written, directed and acted in two highly regarded films by age 22. (Shit. My life is a fucking waste.) He is super handsome, gay and lives and works in Montreal; he embraces youth culture and is very smart and apparently very well-versed in film history.

Heartbeats is about two friends, Marie (Monia Chokri) and Francis (Dolan) who both fall in love with the same guy, Nicolas (Niels Schneider). It is never clear to them nor to us whether Nicolas is gay or straight, so it seems totally reasonable that they could both have a chance. They both pursue him with cold-bloodedness, possibly ruining their own friendship in the process and possibly making themselves unattractive to him.

More than anything, Heartbeats is an examination of narcissism and how the presence of a narcissist makes those around him feel amazing. The magnetic power of such blind self-confidence is intoxicating for the less-than-confident souls who follow them. I feel like we have all been in a situation where we fall for a person (in a sexual or a friend sense), until we realize that we don't even register on their radar, because they are so narcissistic. Once they drop us, because we no longer help them with whatever they use us for, there is an emptiness left in us. We've just given something of our own away in exchange for the illusion of something substantial that was never there.

Dolan has a really beautiful style reminiscent of early Almodovar or Lynch films. He uses a soundtrack beautifully as well as slow motion and daring lighting choices. (Slow motion is very hard to pull off well and is hardly used these days because it is so hard to do right; Dolan does it wonderfully.) There is a melodramatic quality to the story, that the characters are just playing "types" and that the forces of the story are bigger than the characters inside it. Though I normally don't go in for such false formality, it works interestingly here in a near-operatic way.

One major gripe I have is that Dolan uses an epilogue after the story has effectively wrapped up that somewhat ruins the previous culminating scene. There is a suggestion at the end that although Nicolas might be a narcissist, Marie and Francis are partly to blame for falling so head-over-heels for the guy. I think this subverts the argument of the film and would have been better to leave out. It also suggests that the duo are bitter jerks, rather than helpless victims. I'm not sure I like that idea as much.

Clearly Dolan is a writer/director to look out for in the future. His maturity surpasses his years and his technique is second-to-none.

Stars: 3 of 4

Incendies (Sunday, May 15, 2011) (31)

The French-Canadian film Incendies, adapted for the screen and directed by Denis Villeneuve from a play by by Wajdi Mouawad, is a very interesting exploration of a family's complicated history. The film opens with twins Jeanne (Melissa Desormeaux-Poulin) and Simon (Maxim Gaudette) sitting with the lawyer and friend of their mother Nawal (Lubna Azabel) in his Montreal office, after she has recently died. He tells them that her estate will be split between them equally, but that they have to search for their father (who they presumed was dead) and brother (who they didn't know existed) in her native Middle-Eastern country. It seems their mother had an eventful life before she immigrated to Canada, a life that included a lost son.

At first they are dumbstruck that their mother kept these people from them, then they are angry that she was "making things difficult from beyond the grave". She was probably not a wonderfully loving mother to them, and hunting for their family members is the last things they want to do.

Jeanne sets out first to find the brother, going to the mother's remote village (in a country that is given no name on purpose, but is something very much like Lebanon) to get information from anyone who might remember her. She finds that her mother was an outcast who has no friends left where she came from. As the story unfolds to the twins and to us, we realize that their mother was a political activist who left a trail of pain behind her.

The structure of the film is very complex and not-totally linear, making it sometimes difficult to establish place and time as we move from one chapter to another. We see Jeanne flash back to a moment just before her mother's death where she was suddenly and literally dumbstruck at a public pool, we then jump to the mother's life back when she was in her twenties and fighting for a rightist Christian agenda in the largely Muslim country (see: Lebanon). This disorientation is important for us to understand how head-spinning these revelations are for the twins. Sometimes the story they are discovering is so strange and unexpected that even they can't believe it.

Still, there is a tension and a sense that we never quite know exactly what we should be knowing but that we are very close, the comprehension equivalent of having a word on the "tip of your tongue". Many of the stories we see or hear are so elliptical and subjective that we never get enough space to figure out a full meaning. I think this is an effective device, but it is a bit showy and overdone at times I really would rather there was a more standard sequence of scenes.

Technically Villeneuve does a beautiful job with the look of the film and the framing of the shots. He uses a lot of hand-held cameras and near-point-of-view shots putting us relatively in the subjective position of the characters (mostly Nawal and Jeanne). He brilliantly uses the frame to conceal parts of bigger images and give us a very interesting selective view of things. This approach is used brilliantly in the climactic moment when the identities of the father and son are revealed. In many ways this style is all used to foreshadow that one shot - a very literary technique used beautifully in the visual here (how nice!).

The penultimate scene of the film ties the story up elegantly, but Villeneuve, unfortunately uses an epilogue that is totally unnecessary and very annoying. After we've just come to the end of a very complicated story, the epilogue has one character reading a letter explaining exactly what we have just seen. It's as if Villeneuve goes from thinking we are the smartest audience in the world to the dumbest in a matter of minutes. Aside from being intellectually frustrating, the epilogue is banal, leaving a very common, simplistic idea in our heads.

I feel like this is a very good movie, but has a bunch of problems that should have been washed out over drafts and re-writes of the script, not to mention stage-productions. This is a beautiful, emotional roller coaster of a story that gets us deeply into this family, but some of its formal qualities are too distancing. I think Villeneuve sometimes tries too hard to impress us rather than just telling a good story.

Stars: 3 of 4