The camera follows a driving car on a Road which curls itself through a huge forest landscape. It is a very long sequence with a quiet but anxiously swelling music. One almost feels the thin red line between the perception of a real landscape and the gradually sinking into a dream. The car and its protagonists seem strangely fragile in this mighty dominating landscape. Two films came into my mind: The opening sequence from Kubrick´s The Shining but as well the more horror between people in Konkona Sensharma´s bleak A Death in the Gunj. Jeff, a teenager is invited by his best friend Max to spend some days in an isolated forest cabin. With them are Max´s father and his sister Aliosha (in whom Jeff is secretly in love with). After the car drive, the film director Blake Cadieux (once a very close friend of Max´s father), picks them up with a water plane, the only way to reach the cabin.
The film has a bit of this situation everybody knows. The anticipation of an exiting trip and later the disillusion that one has chosen the wrong people to travel with. The impressing natural environment overstrains especially the young Jeff very soon. One of his first experiences he has to make is to go astray in the forest, just after he walked by night a few hundred meters away from the cabin. One wrong step and one can loose the orientation
Lesage uses often very long takes, sometimes with slightly camera movements or even static shots. A motive which recurs several times in slightly changed variations is when all the visitors of the cabin are sitting around the dinner table. These are scenes without the slightest manipulation and here Lesage has a deep confidence in the attention of the audience. These dinner table scenes alone remind me in another master of long takes, the Taiwanese Hou Hsiao Hsien. Like out from the nothing the tensions between the protagonists are loaded up like static electricity and it often leads to harsh emotional outbreaks. The anticipation fades away. Cabin fever is taking over. Overstrained and confused by this stay in a very isolated place, most of the characters become not only more aggressive but strangely as well much more vulnerable. In one of these dinner table shots and after a seemingly harmless joke, a harsh argument between Max´s father and the film director breaks out. The father, a helpless neurotic is the first victim of Blake´s often cynical games. The film motivates the tensions between the protagonists only in small hints which raise the feelings of doubt and suspiciousness. Blake Cadieux, once a successful director is obsessed by survival actions, Hunting or canoeing in wild waters. The aging man is obsessed with his own masculinity. The kind how he uses the weakness of others for his benefit is close to what Konkona Sensharma calls toxic masculinity referring to her likely gloomy film A Death in the Gunj.
Even though the film appears like a quiet volcano, the more the film proceeds, one awaits its eruption at any moment. There is as well an uneven duel between Jeff and Cadieux, the boy once idolized. Jeff, thinks that Aliosha has an erotic relationship to the older Cadieux. A photograph (we do not see) is his proof. The film neither confirms Jeff´s suspiction nor does it denies it. Even though the film takes place at an isolated place as it is surrounded by a mighty wild natural landscape, the protagonists are much too busy with themselves. Even without much dramatic twists, the film slides slowly into a tenacious sticky undefinable nightmare.
From the promise of some exciting days (especially for Jeff and his hope to come closer to Aliosha) almost nothing has left except a hangover of loneliness, tiredness, disappointment and melancholia. In its excellent Cinemascope photography and in masterful composed images, it is one of the richest films I saw this year and it reminds me in some films of another great master from French-Canadian film history, Jean-Pierre Lefebre. Its unusual long takes create a subtle but constant suspense. It is quite a heartbreaking contrast between the film´s rich and cultivated cinematic language (the film is a visual fest on the big screen) and the heavy melancholia it leaves us with. As a film lover, I am sure I have seen one of the finest films at this year´s Berlinale, as a human being I think it is also the saddest film I saw this year.
Rüdiger Tomczak
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