"I like to build something up and then destroy it": Denis Côté on Vic + Flo Saw a Bear

Victoria (Pierrette Robitaille) goes straight to her uncle’s old sugar shack when she gets out of the pen. She was given a life sentence for some unspecified crime, so one supposes she’s lucky to be free to start over in some quiet place tucked away from the world at the age of 61. “I’m old enough to know that I hate people,” she says, though the truth is she’s good at connecting with them one on one: the shirtless adolescent who’s been taking care of her catatonic uncle; the young parole officer who seems to genuinely want the best for her; the strange, dark-haired, flirtatious woman (the great theatre artist Marie Brassard) who arrives and offers to help with the gardening. Post-penal life looks promising for Vic. Flo (Romane Bohringer), her adored girlfriend from prison, has even come to stay, though for her country life is a little too much “like death.” Little does she know that something like death does in fact lay waiting in this place, something from out of the past.

director Denis Côté with his driver

Quebec writer/director/producer Denis Côté’s eighth feature, winner of the Alfred Bauer Prize at last year’s Berlinale, seems at first to be his most conventional, a rural noir with a storyline less elliptical than even Curling, Côté’s 2010 film that almost felt audience-friendly—a film he promptly followed up with the Bestiare, shot entirely in a zoo with a cast comprised of animals. Yet Vic + Flo Saw a Bear, its title recalling both children’s books and a certain masterpiece by Jacques Rivette, is also challenging, albeit in less obvious ways than Bestiare or Côté’s 2009 documentary-fiction hybrid Carcasses. The titular lovers do not fit neatly into progressive notions of how same-sex couples should be portrayed onscreen, yet their relationship strikes me as complex and quite touching at times, while the film’s last act plunges into an unnerving tonal shift. I spoke with Côté last November. 

JB: Where did you grow up?

DC: I was born in a village in New Brunswick, but we moved to a Montréal suburb when I was two. People should think of me as Quebecois.

JB: I ask because I’m interested in the use of rural spaces in your films.

DC: It seems like every time I film the countryside there’s a sense of menace, or that I film nature in an oblique way. I think it’s because I never go there. I don’t have a car or a driver’s license. I’ve never caught a fish. If I go to the countryside it’s to shoot a film. I would never do something in the countryside for fun. For me it’s not a peaceful place. I like to tell stories there because I feel more free. Things can happen more easily. In the woods there’s going to be a maniac. In the lake there’s going to be a monster. When you work in places you’ve never been before it’s great because you see things for the first time. When I did Carcasses, about an old man collecting 4,000 cars on his property, I didn’t stay with the guy for eight months and then take out my camera. I took it out right away.

JB: You want to weave your discoveries into the film.

DC: Yes. My gaze needs to be in discovery mode. Maybe that’s why I shoot the backwoods of Quebec like that. Just for that feeling that something can happen.

JB: Is that why so many of the exteriors in Vic + Flo are photographed from a distance, with a very square frame? So people and things can move in and out? So that something can happen?

DC: I like tableau, but I always make sure there’s a character in it. I’m totally allergic to transition shots, beautiful landscapes, postcards. Things should never be comfortable or beautiful.

JB: Yet there’s lots of beauty in Vic + Flo, especially the two-shots of the title characters. There are really lovely images of these women together, sharing an intimate space.

DC: But it depends on how we use the vocabulary. “Beautiful” is not the same as “precise.” When something is well framed and rigorous we say that’s beautiful cinematography. I would say it’s precise.

JB: Perhaps the word “beautiful” also comes to mind because of the sentiment these images convey. The bond these women share is moving. Theirs is a deep, genuine camaraderie. 

DC: I was working in a really rough environment. That sugar shack is aluminium and grey. Someone told me not to waste my time filming it, because it has no identity or charm. So I knew the location was rough. I knew the events at the end of the film would be rough. I knew I had Pierrette Robitaille. She’s not exactly a beauty queen. I knew I didn’t want to use much make-up. I knew they would talk in a very rough way. So I needed some warmth. I knew in the first scene she would look like a misanthrope, so I needed to find spaces for her to become warmer. I wanted the viewer to become comfortable with these women, even if you wouldn’t want to be friends with them in real life.

JB: I kind of wanted to be friends with them.

DC: That’s the pervert thing about the story. It’s quite ugly, but you need to feel comfortable traveling in it. Right to the end. You might think it twisted, but I was looking for a happy end, for some way to make sure these women would end up together in peace and love, away from society and all its rules. I think I found it, but people get angry with me for what they see as violence against women.

JB: But the film is about women, so if there’s violence it’s probably going to involve women.

DC: I regularly get questioned about whether I’m trying to punish lesbians. People don’t like the way I portray the couple. They think they look too rough. People read it from a moral viewpoint. I worked with a parole officer who explained to me how women meet in jail, creating security couples and networks. They may not be gay per se. She also said that while some women get out of jail and are in a hurry to meet guys, it was very normal for other women to continue living with women after being released, in part because they’ve been away from men for so long. She approved of everything in my script. As for the parole offier being gay, it was more or less accidental. I wanted to close the door between him and Flo. He doesn’t “act” gay, whatever that means. He just says one thing to confirm that he has a boyfriend and that’s it. For me, these are not gay issues.

JB: For me, the more interesting moral or karmic equation has to do with the fact that they’re ex-convicts. We never learn what they were convicted of, but I found myself wondering if Vic, who we know got a life sentence, wonders if she somehow deserves her fate.

DC: I like to work with the present. I never imagine myself filming a flashback. In Curling we had some huge narrative gaps. It was a bit weird. But in this film I think we have everything we need to understand the story. I’m obsessed with society and community. How do we disconnect or reconnect? I like that Vic’s in transition. It allows me to work in the present tense. I’m also interested in fatalism. If you have to get hit by a car, it’s going to happen.

JB: That’s the film noir aspect, no? This idea that destiny is coming to get you.

DC: I had this question about whether I can create this more or less conventional story about these two women and then, bang, it slips into some kind of vengeance tale. Can I do that? I still don’t have the answer. But that was our proposal. Some people are grateful for the ending, some say we lost them with it. I’m more about experimental cinema. I’m more interested in the mechanics of storytelling than in a good story. Can you do this or that? Can we come back here or go over there? It’s not about provocation. It’s about trying things.

JB: I want to back up to something you said about Robitaille. You mentioned that she’s not exactly a great beauty, but when you have her in close-up she radiates this kind of wizened glamour.

DC: Yeah, there’s something there, in her features and her character. Though Pierrette still says that she doesn’t know what she was doing in the movie. Her background is in popular comedy. People think of her as a clown. She still thinks I played a joke on her. Even on the red carpet in Berlin she was looking at me like this was a trick. Of course, it was meant as a challenge. She’s not supposed to be in art cinema. I told her, “Honestly, everything you did before I think is crap. But you have 30 or 40 years of experience that I want to put to work on something else.” Now she’s really proud of the film. She says that people now talk to her as though there was a before and an after. That can be hard to hear when you’re 63.

JB: The other bit of casting I wanted to ask you about was Marie Brassard, whose work I adore. Early in the film, when we first hear the percussive score, especially when it’s just the single drum, I found myself thinking about certain Japanese horror films from the 60s, like Onibaba. And then you see Brassard’s face, which is so masklike in a way that reminded me of Onibaba…

DC: People say she has Asian features.

JB: And she’s playing this character that at times resembles a demon summoned from the underworld.

DC: You pick a person like that to play a bad guy. It’s very simple. We introduce her as this cute, flirtatious thing, talking about gardening, and then she shifts. Again, people were surprised by how we cast her, but it makes perfect sense.

JB: I’m an admirer of her solo theatrical work. The impish stillness of her performance in Vic + Flo seems to draw on something we see in her show The Invisible.

DC: She’s crazy as well.

JB: [Laughs] I’m sure.

DC: She could not remember any lines.

JB: Really?

DC: She’s very dreamy. But I think Jackie is perfect. Again, we’re given minimal information about her, but hopefully we have an active viewer. Vic + Flo is giving you the opportunity to remember that you’re watching a film. I don’t feel good on autopilot. I like to build something up and then destroy it. Maybe that’s why some of the films are in two parts.

JB: I think you share a sensibility with your Toronto-based contemporary Nicolás Pereda. I think he’s drawn to similar strategies, most obviously in Greatest Hits.

DC: I guess we both like hybrid cinema. Maybe we think everything has been made expect for the clashes between fiction and documentary. Maybe Nicolás is like me in that he doesn’t like people to know where he’s coming from. Maybe we just need attention! [Laughs] It’s a very immature impulse, but it can be fun to have people not know what you’re going to do next. I prefer trying over succeeding. So long as there’s at least one person in every audience hating my film, I think this is healthy.

JB: Vic + Flo is full of scenes in which people play games or with toys. They ride gokarts, play pool or horseshoes or with a remote control helicopter. It seems like a way of reminding the audience that storytelling is, in a way, a game.

DC: I’m very afraid of people taking my films too seriously. But I’m also afraid of using the word “play” in interviews. It doesn’t look good when you say you’re playing, either with the audience or with your film.  It doesn’t sound sacred.

JB: Sure, but we could say that Borges was playing a game. We could say Buñuel was playing a game.

DC: I don’t know if I want to say I’m playing with the audience, but I think we have a contract. I’m the master. I’m pulling the strings. I might have a little fun with you. Just trust me. Don’t take it too seriously. There’s a comic book energy flowing through Vic + Flo. Yes, things might get a little dark. But let’s have fun.

                                           

2012: the year in movies

The Master

A detail-saturated 65-mm epic composed most memorably of close-ups, a chronologically vast historical chamber drama, a harrowing portrait of a damage-case stumbling into an immensely peculiar found-family, an essay about the persistent desire for self-made religion in the postwar American landscape: Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, about an uneasy alliance between an alcoholic veteran and a new age guru, is haunting. Along with the next few titles it was one of the films that instantly sprang to mind when asked to consider the cinematic highlights of 2012. It’s difficult, at times unspeakably painful. It’s also a masterwork in which every contribution, the photography, the scoring, the writing and acting (from Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman most especially), feels at once maverick and rigorously devoted to a collective vision.

Tabu

Tabu, Portuguese writer/director Miguel Gomes’ inventive diptych slips from drab, ineffective current-day Lisbon to dangerous, decadent and dizzily romantic colonial Africa, from starkly composed scenes of deadpan realism to fluid, florid scenes of semi-silent melodrama, from the lonesome battiness of age to the recklessness and beauty of youth. We meet an elderly woman slowly fading into dementia and then meet that same woman 50 years earlier, precariously bored, pregnant, roped into an affair with a drummer, and handy with firearms. Tabu is formally daring, intelligent, and lyrical.

top: In the Family
bottom: Margaret

Writer, director, producer and star Patrick Wang’s quietly audacious In the Family follows Joey, a decent, hard-working and very suddenly widowed father accustomed to accommodating others and keeping his frustrations to himself. The grieving family of his deceased partner attempts to gain custody of Joey’s little boy with the utmost passive-aggressiveness, and Joey’s forced to find the resources to fight back. Did I forget to mention that Joey’s partner was a man? In the Family manages to be fiercely politicized while never even uttering the word “gay.” It is the most startlingly accomplished, tremendously moving American independent debut since Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count On Me (2000). Let’s hope Wang doesn’t have to wait as long as Lonergan to offer a follow-up—Lonergan’s cursed but exquisite character/moral study Margaret never screened anywhere in Canada to my knowledge, but you can find it now on DVD. I strongly recommend the longer, director’s cut.

The Deep Blue Sea

Speaking of follow-ups: Terence Davies’ The Deep Blue Sea, based on Terrence Rattigan’s play, seems to begin where Davies’ 2000 adaptation of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth left off: with a woman alone in a room with suicide. The trajectory is not quite as dire, but the desperation and longing are thick as London fog in this story of reckless transgression: Hester (a particularly brilliant, courageous, and sexy Rachel Weisz) is married to William (Simon Russell Beale), a judge, a mama’s boy, and tender-loving in a way that has nothing to do with passion. Hester leaves William for Freddie (Tom Hiddleston), a former RAF pilot who happens to be a war hero and, it turns out, a real cad. The film is at once raw and elegant, generous and merciless: people have their reasons, and Davies finds reasons to sympathize with everyone.

Miss Bala

Which is a feat that Mexican director Gerardo Naranjo also somehow manages to pull off in Miss Bala, his eerily first-person, claustrophobic, nerve-rattling chronicle of a young woman (a convincingly traumatized Stephanie Sigman) who haphazardly decides to enter the Miss Baja California competition and winds up becoming the pretty pawn for a gang of violent drug traffickers led by the inscrutable yet magnetic Noé Hernández, an actor who, like Sigman, we’ll hopefully be seeing more of soon.

top: Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

bottom: Keyhole

Miss Bala was only one of a trio of inspired, eccentric crime stories to grace screens in 2012: Turkey’s acclaimed atmospherist Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s philosophical police procedural Once Upon a Time in Anatolia begins with a long, maddening search for the scene of a crime, while Winnipeg master-fabulist Guy Maddin’s mythical gangster ghost story Keyhole begins at its familial hearth-crime scene and never leaves. Wildly different in tone and technique as these films are—Anatolia is mostly outdoors, earth-toned, frequently very still and meditative; Keyhole is black and white, gauzy, a happy clutter of objects, and encounters bordering on weirdo-farce—I like how both elide the generic resolutions they initially seem geared toward and how they turn meandering into a kind of beguiling form of narrative motion.

top: The Imposter

bottom: Stories We Tell

Still, no crime story generated more astonishment and post-screening conversation in my house than The Imposter, Bart Layton’s documentary thriller about the very strange case of Frédéric Bourdin, the Franco-Algerian who could barely speak English yet, at the age of 23, convinced a white rural Texan family he was their long-missing 15-year-old boy—or did he? I’ve never seen a film so fully investigate the notion of identity theft as a collective agreement or act of tacit consent. Which is to say that The Imposter is a movie about playing roles and telling stories as a group activity, which leads us directly to Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell, a sort of memoir about Polley’s attempts to uncover the true story behind old family rumours about her dead mother’s secret life and the possibility that her father might not be her father.

top: Alps

bottom: Bestiare

No film more explicitly explored the compulsion toward role-play as Yorgos Lanthimos’ loopy and inspired Alps, in which a quartet of Athenians devise a new business model that involves impersonating recently deceased individuals for the ostensible comfort of their grieving loved ones. (Now there’s a remedy for cataclysmic economic depression!) Likewise, no film more provocatively prompted questions about how the spectator identifies with and/or assigns roles to the figures s/he sees on screen that Quebecois auteur Denis Côté’s masterfully composed and ambiguous Bestiare, which makes its subject the inhabitants/inmates/objects of fascination within the Hemingford Parc Safari zoo. All this talk of role-play also gives me the perfect segue into mentioning the year’s most blessedly batshit magnum opus, Leos Carax’s unholy Holy Motors, in which Denis Levant, surely one of the greatest mutant-level all-round acting wizards in world cinema, is driven to one strange fantasy setting after another, where he transforms himself into one character after another. All in a day’s work, apparently. His job seems to involve nothing so much as merging his able body with the musings of his director’s ferociously fertile imagination.

Holy Motors

Holy Motors, like Tabu, is unapologetically a movie very much in love with the movies. But really, what could possible inspire more movie love than Mark Cousins’ hugely ambitious, iconoclastic yet authoritative 15-part documentary The Story of Film? Its understanding of the true scope of cinema’s world history—not just the history of the world’s wealthiest, most stable and shrewdest exporters—is breathtaking. And it makes peering into cinema’s future feel that much more enticing.  

     

TIFF '12: True stories of people and animals

Once Upon a Time Was I, Veronica

Hotel rooms and bars, coffee shops and offices, street corners and many different screening rooms. In long lines. Every once on a while, at my desk. Here and there, in my own warm bed. It was a good TIFF for ol’ JB, busy, largely free of the runaround, free booze, too much coffee, too little food, movies movies movies, including several very good ones, some of which will make their way toward the regular sorts of cinemas, many of which will recede into the vast film festival fog. In that former, happy category, keep your eyes peeled for an expansive post here in phantom country about something we like to call Tabu, from Portugal’s Miguel Gomes. In that latter, frustrating category, a great discovery for me was a character study entitled One Upon a Time Was I, Veronica, from another Gomes, this one a Brazilian named Marcello. It’s a sensual, wise film I knew nothing about going in. Its eponymous heroine (Hermila Guedes) is a young doctor who lives with her ailing dad, whom she loves—seemingly to the exclusion of others; the film belongs in that small niche of sensitive, complicated films about fathers and daughters, a niche which also includes Claire Denis’ 35 Rhums and Ozu’s Late Spring. Veronica has good friends, loves to swim and to dance. She has an active, often fulfilling sex life, vividly captured in several memorable scenes, often full of laughter and happy fumbling, but she feels no great urge to get serious with anyone. Using a handheld recording device she undertakes some amateur self-analysis; she conceives of a movie of her life where she gets a happy ending of her own idiosyncratic design. Refusing to force any artificial resolutions upon Veronica, Gomes helps her find that ending, which became only more satisfying to me the more I thought about it in the hours and days afterward.

Something in the Air

More likely to garner a proper theatrical run in the near future—one would hope, anyway—is Something in the Air (Après mai). Set in the early ’70s, the latest from Olivier Assayas, the prolific writer-director of Irma Vep, Summer Hours and Carlos, is an autobiographical portrait of the artist as a young dissident, trying to forge a political identity while struggling to come to terms with a calling as suspiciously bourgeois as painting (Assayas’ métier before he got into cinema). The film moves fluidly from one extended scene to another, through demonstrations, nocturnal vandalizing, ideological powwows, travels abroad, brushes with mysticism and drugs, trysts with likeminded lovers, hellos and farewells with sundry friends, art classes and film sets. Elegant and inquisitive, rich with period detail, Assayas keeps just the right distance at all times, never judging his characters, however young and zealous, never over-emphasizing a single scene to give us a false sense of sudden realization: self-discovery is an ongoing process, and Something in the Air simply lets us drift along with its teenage protagonist for a while, long enough to sense the great changes that occur both in his own psyche and in that of an entire generation trying to make sense of the world in the wake of that titular turning point of May, 1968.

Ginger and Rosa

Sally Potter’s Ginger and Rosa takes a somewhat similar tack, tracing the collapse of a friendship between two teenage Londoners in the early ’60s, one of whom (Elle Fanning) becomes increasingly devoted to the cause of nuclear disarmament, the other (Alice Englert) to finding some bohemian-traditonally domestic hybrid life with her best friend’s handsome writer father (Alessandro Nivola). The film ends rather too neatly, but the lead-up is utterly engrossing, and the supporting cast, which includes Timothy Spall, Annette Benning and Christina Hendricks, is marvelous.

Post Tenebrus Lux

Family life may seem wildly fraught in Ginger and Rosa, but those aspiring adolescent radicals and their lusty, misguided dads ain’t got nothing on the violent, neglectful, doomed patriarchs of Mexican writer/director Carlos Reygadas’ Post Tenebras Lux. Like Something in the Air and Ginger and Rosa, the film is very much grounded in autobiography, though when refracted through the prism of Reygadas’ (often beveled) lens, personal memories and anxieties blend with fantasies and dreams, visions of radiant demons carrying toolboxes (a archetypical fatherly accessory if ever there was one) and spectacular acts of self-destruction. There’s little in the chronologically amorphous Post Tenebras Lux that lends itself to easy synopsizing; let’s just say that the young family at its center, living in beautiful rural Morelos, move through a series of crises both banal and mythic: the sexual dissatisfactions of life after kids, substance abuse, betrayals, attempted thefts, and petty acts of revenge. The kids are played by Reygadas’ own children, and give some of the most natural and mesmerizing performances I’ve seen this year from humans. (See below for non-humans.) Just watch that gorgeous, eerie opening bit, where little Rut, just old enough to walk, scurries through a dusky valley where all sorts of livestock get restless and the sky darkens and thunders. Tenebras, indeed.

Bestiare

Of the Canadian titles I caught, Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell (yet another fascinating, formally engaged, autobiographical work) and Peter Mettler’s smart but deeply groovy hypno-essay film about the nature of time, The End of Time, are both strong works that will be dealt with in this here country soon enough. But my favourite Canadian film this TIFF? Bestiare, from Quebec’s ever-inventive Denis Côté, auteur of Carcasses and Curling. As the streets of downtown Toronto were stampeded by fans, stargazers and nut-jobs clamouring like wild beasts for a closer view of, say, Shia Leboeuf, I was tucked away in Lightbox, delighted and mesmerized by the many animals on display in Côté’s observational, but also witty, playful, maybe political (but probably not), quietly provocative and beautifully crafted study of four seasons of life at the Hemingford Parc Safari zoo. For all the big stars striding the red carpets in expensive clothes over the last week and a half, I confess that I was most drawn toward the hairy ones, the four-legged ones, the odorous ones, the inarticulate yet inherently cinematic stars that graced Bestiare. Here’s hoping you get a chance to see them yourself soon.