2004-01-21

Canadian Film Festival, Day Two, Evening

A Problem With Fear

As soon as this movie was over, the first words out of my mouth were, "What a MESS."

I loved Gary Burns' waydowntown. I thought his grotesque exaggeration of office culture and suffocating agoraphobia was hilarious. Therefore, I was really looking forward to seeing his newest effort, A Problem With Fear, at the festival.

The plot seemed promising: set in an odd futuristic version of Calgary, a Big Brother-type company is marketing security bracelets that are supposed to alert you of imminent danger. However, there seems to be a glitch in the system that is actually turning people's worst fears into reality. One young man named Laurie, who seems to suffer from every phobia under the sun, is starting to wonder if it's his fears in particular which are causing these bizarre accidents to happen.

I liked the concept of the movie very much, and I still think that there's a good film buried somewhere deep inside it, trying desperately to get out. However, it's buried under many, many layers of incomprehensibility and, well, crap, for lack of a better word. For the first half-hour of the movie, I had no idea what the hell was going on. It was very frustrating. The film was just a jumble of ideas and images. The pacing was awful--it dragged and dragged and there was absolutely no sense of dramatic tension. Don't even get me started about the characters--I could not have cared less about any of them. They were nothing but weird caricatures and were all equally irritating. I remember in my review of Yellowknife, my least favourite festival movie last year, I said that I couldn't have cared less if any of the characters had died. Well, in A Problem With Fear I was actively hoping that one of them would die so that maybe the movie would end.

I literally cannot finish this review because it makes me so irritated to think that I spent 92 minutes of my life watching this directionless mess. Gary Burns, please go back to making funny movies like Kitchen Party and waydowntown. You can win back my love if you try, Gary. I know you can.

I give A Problem With Fear one plummeting elevator out of five.

The Barbarian Invasions

The Barbarian Invasions is an extremely well-made film. It is filled with characters who are affecting but not affected, and the acting is superb. The dialogue is so good that its humour and poignancy shone through for me even through the sometimes-unkind filter of translation and subtitles.

The story revolves around Remy, an aging satyr who, having lived his entire life never denying his stomach, his intellect, or his libido, now finds that he is dying. Nothing could be more dissatisfying for him. He chafes against his illness, unable to believe that he, of all people, is growing weaker by the day and there is nothing he or anyone else can do about it. Remy is a curmudgeon who says what he thinks with little consideration of who he will offend. He is a passionate leftist and has only scorn for those who are, in his eyes, blinded to the ills of our free-market capitalist society. At the same time, he is a total crank who grumbles about Canada's publicly funded medical system, even though, as he grumpily admits, he did vote for it. Listening to Remy is always entertaining, and Remy Girard, the actor who plays Remy, obviously has great affection for him as a character.

Although the movie involves an end-of-life reunion with Remy's closest friends (the academics from Decline of the American Empire), the main relationship the movie explores is the rather fractured one between Remy and his son, Sebastien. Sebastien is a powerful businessman who works in the insurance industry and lives in London. When his mother calls from Montreal to tell him that his father is dying, Sebastien is irritated--how inconvenient this all is!--but gets on a plane with his fiancee and flies back to Canada to his father's bedside.

Although Sebastien is not on good terms with his father, he feels a responsibility to make sure that his dying days are comfortable. Therefore, whenever he encounters a problem, he uses his money and influence to make sure that it gets fixed. Usually this is not too hard, but he does become stumped (only temporarily) when his friend, who is a doctor, tells him over the phone that the one drug that would numb his father's pain most effectively is heroin. The scene where Sebastien sets out to find some heroin in the most logical way he can think of is absolutely hilarious.

Eventually, his quest for heroin leads him to the daughter of one of his father's former mistresses. Nathalie (Marie-Josee Croze, who won an award at Cannes for this role) works in publishing during the day but has a nasty heroin habit at night. She reluctantly agrees to help Sebastien procure some drugs for his father and administer them to him every day, and in the end, becomes Remy's angel of mercy.

Remy also has a daughter who is in the middle of the ocean and cannot return in time to bid her father goodbye. However, when she finds out about her father's impending death, she records two farewell messages for him on her webcam and sends them back for Remy. I loved Isabelle Blais, the actress who plays Remy's daughter; she is natural, appealing, and unaffected. Her grief and love shine through so clearly in these scenes that they were the only times in the movie where I found myself choking up.

While I suppose the idea of death is always kind of scary, Remy's death seems to be what I think most people would ask for if they could: it is death on Remy's terms, free from pain (thanks to the drugs), surrounded by family and friends, and most of all, after a life lived with gusto and very few regrets. I give The Barbarian Invasions four and a half stolen laptops out of five.

Posted by polarcanuck at 9:04 p.m.

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