2024 Top Ten List #7 The Night Logan Woke Up (La nuit où Laurier Gaudreault s'est réveillé)

 

Director Xavier Dolan

Dolan on the set

THE NIGHT LOGAN WOKE UP (La nuit où Laurier Gaudreault s'est réveillé) – made for TV        A-           Canada  (293 mi)  2022  d: Xavier Dolan

When you die of our loving,
I will go into the garden and plant a flower that blooms in the early morning
Half metal, half paper, so it wounds my foot a little
Die of a very gentle death so that a flower may grow 

When you die of our loving,
I will compose a song with a tune of our times - a singing song for seven years
You will hear it, you will learn it, and your lips will thank me
Die of a very weary death so that I may compose it 

When you die of our loving,
the two books I shall write will be so beautiful that you can use them for your grave
And I, in turn, will lie down there, for I will die the same day
Die of a very tender death as you await them 

When you die of our loving,
I will take the key and hang myself on the hook of spoiled joys
And no one will know that we conquered those paths
Die of an exquisite death so that I may tell of them 

When you die of our loving, if too little is left of me, don’t ask me why
In the lies that follow we would be neither beautiful nor true
Die of a very lively death so that I may follow you

—Rufus Wainwright with Kate & Anna McGarrigle, 2005, Rufus Wainwright - Quand vous mourrez de nos amours YouTube (3:33)

The pandemic affected everyone differently, with Dolan sitting around with more spare time than usual, coming up with a plan to do a television mini-series, adapting French-Canadian playwright Michel Marc Bouchard’s 2019 stage production of La nuit où Laurier Gaudreault s’est reveille.  Having adapted the same playwright before in 2014 Top Ten List #7 Tom at the Farm (Tom à la ferme) (2013), Dolan places himself onscreen in both films while also using a stellar cast from the original play, creating something closer to the Hitchcock psychological thriller mode as he examines a dysfunctional family dynamic when an unspeakable event traumatizes Val-des-Chutes, a small town in Québec, with reverberations swirling around their lives afterwards, set simultaneously in 2019 and 1991, freely moving back and forth between times.  Few directors have made a series of films as personally compelling as Dolan, 2010 Top Ten Films of the Year: #7 I Killed My Mother (J’ai Tue Ma Mere) (2009), 2010 Top Ten Films of the Year: #4 Heartbeats (Les Amours Imaginaires) (2010), 2013 Top Ten List #2 Laurence Anyways (2012), 2014 Top Ten List #7 Tom at the Farm (Tom à la ferme) (2013), 2015 Top Ten List #1 Mommy (2014), 2018 Top Ten List #6 It's Only the End of the World (Juste la fin du monde) (2016), 2020 Top Ten List #3 The Death and Life of John F. Donovan (2018), 2020 Top Ten List #7 Matthias & Maxime (Matthias et Maxime) (2019), many of them still flying under the radar, as outside of MOMMY (2014), none have been released commercially in the United States.  2020 Top Ten List #3 The Death and Life of John F. Donovan (2018) was supposed to be the English language film that broke into American markets, but negative media postings about problems behind the scenes created adverse publicity, as actress Jessica Chastain, originally announced as one of the film’s leads, was cut completely from the final version, so that American release never happened, with critics lambasting the film with negative reviews, a startling point of view that is undeserved.  Dolan was deemed a wunderkind and child prodigy, making critically acclaimed films as a teenager, typically writing, directing, acting, producing, editing, and even serving as the costume designer, while also subtitling his films into English, having an immediate impact at the Cannes Film Festival where he was lauded with praise, having more films play at the festival over ten years than most directors will experience in their lifetimes, until the advent of social media finally turned on him with a vengeance, including incessant tweets of polarizing reactions, some of which turned condescending and viciously personal, becoming an onslaught of relentless attacks, where it wasn’t his films so much as his personality they didn’t like.  Unafraid to speak out against LGBTQ prejudice and homophobia and in support of marriage equality in Canada, the media suddenly read his films as arrogance, self-indulgence, and narcissistic entitlement, describing him as a “spoiled child.”  Yet his emotional acceptance speech at Cannes after winning the Jury Prize for MOMMY surprised many with its intelligence, eloquence, and heartfelt authenticity, paying a personal tribute to Jury President Jane Campion, whose poetic films have had a profound influence on his work, where their touching embrace remains one of the memorable moments of the festival.  

Dolan has always been more popular internationally than he is at home in Québec, where he became in right-leaning circles the face of unprofitable cinema and wasteful government spending, yet his talents as a filmmaker are undeniable, where his signature style exaggerates color and music, often changing film speeds, tinkering with melodrama, while utilizing eclectic musical choices ranging from classic to pop music, often providing the emotional heart and soul of his films, accentuating a strongly aesthetic approach, where his cinema is a whirlwind of unrestrained emotions putting us in closer touch with our deepest and most intimate feelings.  Dolan is probably overdue for a renewed evaluation, as this new generation has yet to see his films, and there have been no traveling film retrospectives delving into his career, but he’s only thirty-five, so his future is still wide open.  Besides a long-term collaboration with his cinematographer André Turpin, obviously playing a significant role in his visual aesthetic, Dolan has also utilized a coterie of recurring actresses and actors who have now become associated with him, most notably Anne Dorval and Suzanne Clément, with Dorval having a profound influence on yet another film (their 6th together) as the Larouche family matriarch, Madeleine, or “Maddy,” whose death in the opening segment sets the wheels in motion, where deeply buried secrets that have been long repressed for decades suddenly resurface.  Dolan provides a dizzying, stream-of-conscious narrative that continually goes back and forth in time, where writing for a 5-part, 5-hour television series is a very different style, perhaps modeled after David Lynch’s quirky small town drama Twin Peaks (1990-91), but like all his other films, extremely impactful.  While the action of the play takes place entirely in a funeral home, with the family gathered around, Dolan added the different time periods, characters, and locations in writing the adaption.  It’s like he’s layering 5 or 6 different storylines, just dropping little hints as we go, continually keeping viewers off-balance while building momentum and suspense, mixing elements of horror, humor, and drama, where it’s a unique experience, to say the least, and in a shockingly good way.  As an actor himself, Dolan has a talent for directing other actors, as it’s one of his biggest strengths, where this film seems to emphasize his fascination with strong female actresses who are truly exceptional.  Even the opening sequence that repeats in each episode is an absolute delight, with rousing music written by Hans Zimmer and David Fleming evoking a feeling of anticipated dread, The Night Logan Woke Up (Original Series Soundtrack) YouTube (1:20), setting the stage for a bit of droll fun and amusement, like a private eye whodunit, but it plays out quite differently, capturing the complex personalities of an ensemble family unit in two distinct time periods, becoming a before and after saga with profound implications.  In that regard it resembles Robert Altman’s superb adaptation of Ed Graczyk’s play, Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982), both driven by powerful performances, where Dolan’s films are about outsiders trying to fit in, while also carrying a traumatic image of latent homophobia in a conservative society that emerges over decades.

While this is Dolan’s television directorial debut, he tells deeply human stories with a unique voice, and this extended format allows him an opportunity to develop complex relationships in this edgy character study, literally breathing life into each one, where the different chapter headings allow for a teasing aspect to develop, as intentional cliffhangers are placed at the end of each episode, spurring interest to see what happens in the next serial installment.  Each segment opens with an innovative and cleverly imagined moment of dramatic intensity before the opening credits roll, like an appetizer before the main course, but it sets the stage in establishing mood and atmosphere, as Dolan literally drenches the screen with ominous overtones, plunging us into a world of darkness.  The family is nearly always depicted in a closely confined, claustrophobic setting, with a muted color palette casting a suffocating shadow over the household, while elements of surreal horror amplify daydream sequences, or instantaneous flashbacks, which are treated as an inescapable aspect of existing realities.  As Maddy lays on her death bed, she is surrounded by family and an attending nurse.  Slowly, each of the characters are introduced, each dealing with their own demons, as we come to realize these men are brothers, the oldest Julien (Patrick Hivon), arguably the most tortured, a former alcoholic who has returned to take college classes, Denis (Éric Bruneau), who seems to have a calming influence, though from a distance, while the youngest, Elliot, is played by Dolan himself, literally embodying the role of a man just released from a drug rehab center earlier in the day in order to be there, seen with red marks on his neck, perhaps signs of earlier suicide attempts.  Also seen in the foreground is Julien’s wife Chantal (Magalie Lépine-Blondeau in her third Dolan film), who is like a breath of fresh air in defying her husband’s callous indifference, while exhibiting astonishing range.  But there’s a moment before any of the family have arrived when Maddy is alone, as her attendant is out temporarily having a smoke, so she struggles in an effort to move on her own, but is seen answering the phone.  While we don’t hear the call, it produces devastating results, as she frantically searches through mementos from 1991, and is discovered in a disheveled heap on the floor in an agitated state, which later leads to the summoning of the family, as the end is near, but not before a flashback sequence takes us to happier times, suddenly quickening the pace, giving the film a fresher look and a brighter color palette.  14-year old sister Mireille, aka “Mimi” (Jasmine Lemée) and brother Julien (Elijah Patrice-Baudelot) are best friends with the neighbor next door, Logan Goodyear (Pier-Gabriel Lajoie), as both are on the same baseball team that just won the regional championship, while Mimi dreams of them one day running off to the United States together and “get the hell outta here.”  But Maddy is running for mayor (often referred to as the mayor that wasn’t), supposedly setting a moral example, while Mimi has insomnia, with a notorious habit of sneaking into the house next door at night, supposedly out of curiosity, yet it could lead to disastrous results, which, of course, it does, where the ominous implications recall Boo Radley, the mysteriously haunting next door neighbor in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1962).

At Maddy’s bedside, she openly pushes Julien’s hand away, not by accident, but intentionally, which makes little sense at the time, causing him immeasurable grief, especially because it comes at the very moment before her death, as if she’s literally scared to death by his presence.  In the empty quiet of the moment, Dolan produces what is arguably the most impactful scene of the film, using music as only he can, Rufus Wainwright - Quand vous mourrez de nos amours YouTube (3:33), which resonates long afterwards, creating a poetic sequence of staggering emotional devastation, reminiscent of a similar moment in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (1999), where each one finds themselves alone afterwards, lost in their own memories, somehow feeling alienated and disconnected from the world around them.  Then in something of an unexpected surprise, Mireille (Julie Le Breton), who’s been absent for nearly thirty years, suddenly walks into the funeral home to announce she intends to embalm their mother’s body.  End of chapter one.  Now that is drama.  One of the most extraordinary movies ever made for television remains Maurice Pialat’s The House in the Woods (La Maison des Bois) (1971), a 7-episode, six hour film that carries the depth and weight of a novel and remains an unforgettable experience.  It’s a similar feeling here watching the exact same opening and closing credit sequences, hearing the same music each time, as it recalls how it felt to let the density of Pialat’s film sink in, where you have a chance to catch your breath and reflect for a moment before the next chapter begins.  A very precarious balance is broken with the return of Mireille, not just for the family, who are not exactly friendly, people with multiple disorders, from drug and alcohol addiction to unhealthy or unorthodox sexuality, but also inflames the vitriol of the small-town community at large, as it brings to the surface painful memories, where lingering anger and distressing rumors still persist.  But it is Xavier Dolan’s virtuoso camera that plunges us into the past, as his attention to detail is exemplary, exploring old family conflicts, wasted ambitions, and unforgivable betrayals.  By masterfully linking the past with the present, the storyline gradually reveals the ambivalence of the characters, their regrets, and possibly even a path to redemption.  Dolan surrounded himself with an exceptional group of actors, with Patrick Hivon, Éric Bruneau, Julie Le Breton, and Magalie Lépine-Blondeau reprising their stage roles, adding Dolan’s favorite actress in the always amazing Anne Dorval, who is nothing short of bubbly in her role, and the director himself as a young man in an extremely fragile state of mind, as well as a talented group of young actors to play the featured characters as much wilder teenagers.  Given time to explore human complexity in all its hidden places, Dolan’s film literally bristles with life from start to finish in this intensely realized series, where there are dozens of stand-out moments that just jump off the screen, where some of the most compelling feature the music of Céline Dion - Regarde-moi (Live à Paris 1995) - YouTube (3:50) and James Blake’s adaptation of the Joy Division song Atmosphere YouTube (3:58), reaffirming that he’s one of the most talented directors of the 21st century, where the guy just doesn’t make anything that isn’t dazzlingly good.

The Night Logan Woke Up - YouTube (6:43)  Xavier Dolan and cast members Julie Le Breton and Elijah Patrice-Baudelot describe the experience of making the film

Xavier Dolan Picks 10 Greatest Films Of All Time

Universal Language (Une Langue Universelle)

 

Québec premier François Legault

Director Matthew Rankin

Matthew Rankin as Groucho Marx in 1988

UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE (Une Langue Universelle)      B                                             Canada  (89 mi)  2024  d: Matthew Rankin

We were looking for ourselves in each other.                                                                                —a line from Sergei Parajanov’s The Color of Pomegranates (1969) that was crucial for this film’s creation according to the press notes, where Matthew Rankin also hilariously interviews himself, A Film by Matthew Rankin PRESSKIT 

Among the more original films you can see, described by the director as a “surrealist comedy” and an “autobiographical hallucination,” raising questions of identity, displacement, and cultural intersections, where anyone who can appreciate the absurdity of Guy Maddin’s MY WINNIPEG (2007) can appreciate the hilarious irreverence of this film.  Existing in a netherworld between Winnipeg, Tehran, and the social realist aesthetic of Iranian films, yet also Montreal after the 1995 Quebec referendum, when the French-speaking province attempted to break away from the rest of Canada, but  lost, refusing to let it go, still immersed in a hotbed of Québécois nationalism, exacerbating a continual dispute between Anglo and Francophone culture, so it’s hard to tell just exactly where we are at any given moment, as this appears to be more of a state of mind film, a somewhat demented adaptation of the director’s own life, where he plays the central character Matthew, a rather passive, melancholic, absurdly Kafkaesque Josef K figure who leaves the cultural comforts of Montreal for the wintry wasteland that is Winnipeg.  Perhaps the biggest surprise is that the entire film is filtered through the Iranian Farsi language, supposedly “in the name of friendship,” as an early title card reads, inspired by Iranian films of the 1970’s, which were largely humanistic children’s fables, with an opening dedication to a fictional Winnipeg Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, otherwise known as Kanoon (Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children & ...), a real-life Iranian entity associated with the early works of Abbas Kiarostami, an open tribute to the first installment of his famous Koker trilogy, WHERE IS THE FRIEND’S HOUSE (1987), with its blending of fiction with reality/documentary, exactly as Rankin did in an early short from 2008, Self-Portrait M.Rankin YouTube (2:56), yet somehow it’s all transferred into Canada of the present, reimagined where Persian and French are the two official languages, and English is non-existent.  Something of a mishmash of recurring vignettes and set pieces, with the director acknowledging “Iranian cinema emerges from 1000 years of poetry, while Canadian cinema emerges from 40 years of discounted furniture ads,” the film is full of sight gags, deadpan Tatiesque humor, weirdly eccentric characters, like a man dressed as a Christmas tree, and plenty of wild turkeys!  Premiering in Director’s Fortnight at Cannes where it won the first ever Audience Choice Award, this breezy, light-hearted film is easy to like, shot in a beautifully grainy 16mm look from Isabelle Stachtchenko, using almost entirely non-professionals, while shot on a shoestring budget, where despite the whimsical spirit, there’s a deep sense of loneliness embedded beneath the surface.  The director was present during the screening, and he’s extremely witty in person, filled with hilarious rants and caustic observations, where he’s especially critical of the Québec film industry, believing they make dreadfully anguishing existential films that plunge us into the depths of despair and simply exist in their own soulless purgatory.  This parallel universe appears to be an uplifting remedy, supposedly drawn from the director’s own “meaningless” life, with no real main character, but several stories told in parallel, taking us into a world of omnipresent snow with a Stalinist landscape of colorless brick and concrete buildings (the director’s favorite) or highway overpasses with trucks rolling by and endless traffic noise, where somewhere in this labyrinthean maze of dead ends exists the human soul.    

Taking a page out of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s About Dry Grasses (Kuru Otlar Üstüne) (2023), the film opens under a blanket of snow with a French immersion teacher Mr. Bilodeau (Mani Soleymanlou) arriving late before berating his primary school classroom for numerous offenses, such as the noisy outbursts they were making before he arrived, “Please, would you at least have the decency to misbehave in French?,” yet when he asks what their future careers will look like in a Woody Allen Annie Hall (1977) moment, where we discover a student dressed like Groucho Marx (the director reports he did this as a child), or a budding donkey breeder, he concludes that “all of you will fail,” offering little hope for human survival before having them read a sentence on the blackboard, “We are lost forever in this world.”  That is our introductory moment into this film, where the name of the Robert H. Smith school is written in Persian lettering, a theme that continues for the duration of the film, with all the men referred to as “agha,” a Farsi term of endearment, like addressing someone as sir.  On their way home from school, two young female grade school students, Negin (Rojina Esmaeili) and her sister Nazgol (Saba Vahedyousefi), happen upon a 500 riel bill (a play on Iranian rial currency) frozen under the ice, asking a nearby man in purple earmuffs, Massoud (Pirouz Nemati), if he can help, but he steers them to a friend in a nearby turkey store to borrow an axe to chip away the ice, steadfastly deferring their requests that he go borrow the axe, since it’s his friend, but the man insists that he stay, sending them on a wild goose chase through Winnipeg’s shopping neighborhoods, named appropriately beige, brown, and grey districts, each looking eerily the same, the washed out colors blending indistinctly into the other, where it’s hard to tell the difference.  The kids are turned away at every turn, with no one offering a hint of interest, leaving them to navigate this maze of corridors and barren alleyways that all seem to lead to nowhere.  By the time they actually have success, it has grown dark outside and the riel note has already been chipped out of the ice, where the kids are thwarted in their quest, with a deceiving Massoud the likely suspect in outwitting these kids.  A continuously surprising meditation on being away from home and then being unable to find one’s way back, as nothing is remotely the same, having been transformed in our absence, this outrageously eccentric satire hits buttons we’ve never even imagined until brought to light in this outlandish manner.  The origin of this film may be the director’s early fascination with foreign films, as they spoke to him in a way that few English-language films ever had, and even traveled to Iran at one point, where the beauty of the experience was seeing the world differently, where we recognize ourselves in each other, sharing common interests, becoming a wacky, off-kilter exploration of cultural identity, where there’s even an appearance of a memorable song from the 60’s, These eyes - The Guess Who (1969) YouTube (3:58), but the object of affection here is a prized turkey!  Placing an emphasis on human connections and intercultural coexistence, a recurring motif is misdirection and random miscommunication, as characters continually seek ways to connect to each other, becoming part of a larger human collective, but when they lose that interconnectedness and sense of community, they can become lost and disoriented in a baffling mix of muddled confusion.  In a strange twist of fate, Omid (Sobhan Javadi), the son of Massoud loses his glasses, but when one of the girls retrieves them and he puts them back on near the end, the roles of Matthew and Massoud mysteriously switch, signaling how easily we misinterpret the world around us because we lack the correct perspective.     

In a parallel story of alienation and a longing for identity, we see Matthew playing a version of himself as he resigns his menial civil servant position in the Québec government to move back home to Winnipeg to visit his ailing mother.  Taking place in a giant room under a large portrait of Québec premier François Legault, a lone table sits off to the side in the corner where a government official steers Matthew away from making any criticisms of the Québec government, indicating he may make positive or neutral remarks, but nothing negative, causing him to utter with the utmost sincerity, “My time here was by far the most neutral experience of my life.”  Ironically, in a nearby cubicle, a man can be heard and occasionally seen sobbing profusely, obviously a sign of extreme unhappiness, yet the cause remains a mystery.  On the bus to Manitoba a woman passenger complains bitterly that a prized live turkey is given its own seat next to her, yet the driver informs her that this special bird has won avian beauty contests and is a paying customer.  Throughout this film various people contend they clearly supported Quebec’s right to independence in the referendum vote, where it’s likely more people say that after the vote, as if in hindsight that’s politically correct, at least in Québec, though it’s hardly an indicator of how they actually voted.  Once back in Winnipeg, Matthew is forced to idle his afternoon time away at a Tim Horton’s (Always Fresh! transformed into an Arabic teahouse with donuts) while awaiting a designated appointment with someone after work, as he’s blindsided by the discovery that his mother has moved to a different address and is now living with a total stranger that she mistakenly believes is him, no longer recognizing him anymore.  In a bemused portrait of an alternative universe, we see a series of strange and mysterious happenings, among which include a barrage of cheesy television ads from Hafez Ghamghosar (Bahram Nabatian), a singing turkey expert in a pink cowboy hat, claiming he has the best turkeys anywhere, anytime, with a look that’s right out of the VHS era of the 1970’s, a surreal glimpse into a Kleenex repository, a lavish all-hours bingo parlor, a shop that sells only birthday cakes, or a billboard bearing Justin Trudeau’s face and the slogan “a strong economy helps to prevent feelings of worthlessness.”  Yet we also follow the baffling exploits of Massoud in the purple earmuffs as a self-appointed Winnipeg tour guide, where he leads a small following who gripe their way through an endless cold and windswept journey to some of the most unglamorous and drably uninteresting sites imaginable, like tall windowless buildings, parking lots, and abandoned shopping centers, where they discover “the Great Parallel Parking Incident of 1958,” a memorial to Métis leader Louis Riel, founder of the province of Manitoba (executed by the government for his role in the North-West Rebellion), which is basically a snow pile located between a freeway and an exit ramp, a deserted shopping mall fountain with no running water, meaning “All wishes are canceled,” suggesting residents are hoping for the water to someday return, or a “Forgotten Briefcase” left behind decades ago on a bus stop bench that no one has touched, thinking the owner may still come to retrieve it, becoming a UNESCO World Heritage site and “a monument to absolute inter-human solidarity, even at its most basic and banal,” where a sense of Canadian mediocrity exists around every corner.  Written by Ila Firouzabadi (who plays a bus driver), Pirouz Nemati, and Matthew Rankin, nothing ordinary happens here, as it’s all simply imagined from the deranged mind of Rankin who clearly has a thing for movies, as this will take you on an amusement park roller coaster ride the likes of which you’ve never seen.  And in case you didn’t know it before, laughter is a universal language.