"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.

                                           

At times a drag, at others, more than a drag

The third feature from Montréal writer-director Xavier Dolan is a truly ambitious, truly modern love story and a definite improvement on its predecessor, the facile and overly derivative Heartbeats, but Laurence Anyways’ 168-minute runtime and incessant detours into slow motion florid fantasy at times feel like audacity for audacity’s sake, an emphasis on décor that neglects emotional depth. Because there is a quieter, more impressive sort of audacity at work in Dolan’s approach to notions of self-determination, of gender, sexual preference and sexual identification most especially, that easily rivals and in some way betters the gender-bending philosophical currents running through the equally lengthy, overbearing and similarly long view-taking Cloud Atlas. Precious few films are so broad as Laurence Anyways in their ideas of who we fundamentally are, how we come together and how we drift apart. Likewise, few films meander through the worlds they create with such jejune patience-trying pretension.

With the arrival of his 35^th birthday, high school teacher and budding writer Laurence (France’s Melvil Poupaud) decides he’s really a woman and needs to dress the part, at the very least. Understandably, his girlfriend Fred (Suzanne Clément) has a hard time with this, yet she’s supportive, encouraging him to don eye shadow and ladies wear when he goes to work. Laurence and Fred have a cocoon-like relationship, a rare level of shared life and experience and sense of fun that precariously resembles codependence. There is some initial giddiness to Laurence’s radical shift in optics, spurred by an even more radical shift in internal self-awareness, yet his personal and professional status quo is undeniably rocked, and the couple’s life quickly gets complicated and imperiled. Thus begins an on-again/off-again love story spanning over ten years and promising to go on for many, many more.

As with Heartbeats, Dolan’s narrative and camerawork overwhelmingly favours the woman; Clément, a tremendously resourceful actor, does the emotional heavy lifting, while Poupand’s Laurence seems mostly pretty, and pretty vacuous, in comparison. There are some truly arresting scenes of relationship meltdown and moving moments of intimacy, but so much of Laurence Anyways, set in a 23-year-old’s idea of the 1980s, feels like music video or perfume ad pastiche. Dolan’s embracing of high style is welcome in theory; in execution it feels like a mish-mash. Best to focus on the hearts beating underneath all the directorial overstatement; it’s in the heart department that Dolan may yet prove to be a genuine wunderkind. 

       

Curling: enigmas lovingly dusted with snow

Alone within the precise, fixed frame of Curling’s opening shot, her face sprayed with freckles, her gaze almost blank yet somehow touching, Julyvonne (Philomène Bilodeau) is visiting the optometrist. There’s something wrong with her eyes, she’s told, or hasn’t she noticed? She hasn’t. Julyvonne’s 12 years old, home-schooled, and her interaction with the world beyond the rural Quebec bungalow she shares with her father, Jean-Francois (Emmanuel Bilodeau), has been minimal. But she leaves the optometrist’s with her first pair of glasses, and what follows, at least within her share of Curling, is a story about seeing things for the first time. Some of these things may not be real. Maybe.

Jean-Francois is a shy, fearful man with a weathered, angular face. He has two jobs: he works maintenance at a bowling alley and cleans rooms at a motel. Kennedy (Roc LaFortune, a real card), his superior at the bowling alley, calls Jean-Francois “Moustache,” perhaps because the broom-thicket of hair below Jean-Francois’ hooked nose seems to take up so much of his face, perhaps because Jean-Francois’ reserve is so unnerving that the boss, a fan of obscure euphemisms is any case, just needs something to endow his only employee with a little character. At one point in Curling, after making a chilling discovery one night on a desolate road, Jean-Francois does something in secret that would barely seem pardonable in a child, much less a 40ish single father. Yet I think we’re inclined to believe the best in him because he’s gentle, and because he so clearly loves Julyvonne, however misguidedly that love manifests.

Curling is the most recent film from the Quebecois writer-director Denis Côté, whose 2009 film Carcasses, which shifted from something like a documentary about a junk collector to the weirdest variation on the home invasion thriller I’ve ever come across, ranks as one of the freshest and most remarkable Canadian hybrids of the last decade. Though frequently visiting rather antiseptic interiors, Curling contains many beautiful images, of snow blowing across a barren highway, an inflatable Santa descending a ladder, of a tiger inexplicably lazing in the white countryside. Though its characters find themselves in morbid and bizarre situations, their responses are comprehendible: there’s a coherent psychology at work here, even while we’re immersed in strangeness.

I emphasize Curling’s relative accessibility partly just out of annoyance with some other reviews and features I’ve found (cough-cough, Globe and Mail, cough-cough) that paint the film as perversely opaque. To be sure, there are mysteries: that pool of blood on a motel room bed, the tiger (obviously), the frozen carcasses dusted with snow, who become something akin to Julyvonne’s imaginary friends. (Are they imaginary?) It’s true that Côté doesn’t like to explain things. For example: Why are they playing ten-pin with whose itty-bitty bowling balls? Why do Jean-Francois and Julyvonne listen to ‘I Think We’re Alone Now’ on music nights? Perplexing! Yet somehow we make it through. In fact, Curling (sorry, Côté) is almost a heartwarming comedy. It’s about an overprotective father learning to let his daughter grow up. It’s about a middle-aged man learning to emerge from his shell. It’s about silly costumes, and, indeed, the odd allure of curling. And it does, in its way, urge us to reach out, even in the frozen darkness.

Reflections in a hollow eye: Four by Hitchcock

Alfred Hitchcock was prolific enough that though he’s the most famous director in history the breadth of his filmography remains unseen to all but the most ardent admirers. One of the pleasures of Hitchcock comes from tracing the obsessions, variations and attempts at reinvention found throughout the corpus. In the latest of their economically priced packages, Turner Classic Movies has smartly curated a quartet of films under the no-nonsense title of TCM Greatest Classic Films Collection: Hitchcock Thrillers. Only one of these rests firmly in the essential canon, but the others are consistently fascinating, complex, often deliciously queer, and above all revealing glimpses into the filmmaker’s psyche. Two of these find Hitchcock deliberately working against established strengths, embracing unfamiliar styles while simultaneously imbuing the films with an unusual abundance of personal content. Not to mention casting actors in roles that ignite a compelling frisson between their star images and private lives.

Joan Fontaine meets Cary Grant on a train. He gropes her in the darkness of a tunnel, inserting himself in her cabin once she fits the bill for his bump to first-class. This is a kind of romance, but Suspicion (1941) is choked with psychological trauma. Grant’s an opportunist, a no-good bon vivant, his ruthlessness disguised by boyish charm, his words of love accompanied by no strenuous efforts at sincerity. Like Gloria Grahame in In a Lonely Place (50) Fontaine spends the film’s duration wondering what violence her beloved is capable of, but in Suspicion the ambiguity never ends—even the final scene feels less like resolution than yet another of Grant’s quick-saves. Though the story was cobbled on compromise—the source novel ends very differently—the result is something marvelous, a pitch-black metaphor for everlasting romantic love. It is everlasting because it can never grow stale from comfort.

Another train, another chance meeting. What strikes me most when I revisit Strangers on a Train, many years after my first awed teenage viewings, is just how utterly homoerotic—perhaps homophobic—the picture truly is. Based on Patricia Highsmith’s novel, this story of men who meet by accident and agree, however tacitly, to swap murders, is most rewarding when read as one of male-to-male seduction, a sort of gay Fatal Attraction (87), where Robert Taylor’s mama’s boy pseudo-aesthete genuinely does seem to act on the hero’s behalf, strangling the hero’s conniving wife, her glasses tumbling into the grass, bearing witness to their owner’s death as he silently lays her down and puts her to sleep. That hunky Farley Granger seems not entirely convincing as the tennis-playing hero trying to marry a senator’s daughter serves the film splendidly. Hitchcock, who’d already deftly exploited Granger’s homosexuality in Rope (48), clearly doesn’t believe his hero’s innocence and neither do we, tainting the ostensible resolution with palpable unease, greatly improving what might have felt like a triumph of closeted blandness over perverse insight.

I hadn’t seen I Confess (53) and always assumed it was a flawed curiosity. I didn’t expect it to be so boldly laced with uncertainty and so gorgeously photographed. Nor was I prepared for Montgomery Clift as the Québécois priest accused of murder. Clift’s performance is itself the most elegantly ambiguity-laden thing in the film, tormented, and conspicuously cagey. I Confess is a film of architecture and faces, mainly, of looming steeples and nerve-wracked gazes. The establishing shots seize the Quebec City exteriors in high contrast, tilted images that upset purely on a design level. Again, Hitchcock’s hero has privileged knowledge of a murder, the killer, somewhat nonsensically, taking him into his confidence, playing out some experiment in loyalty between male outsiders. The killer’s hilariously endowed not only with Hitchcock’s fear of authority but also given a wife with the same name as Hitchcock’s: Alma (Spanish for soul). Again, Hitchcock uses his star’s sexual ambivalence brilliantly. Did the beautiful, troubled Clift abandon romance and enter the priesthood because he’s secretly gay? By the end, Clift’s married ex-girlfriend spills her guts, Alma spills her guts, the killer spills his guts. Everything we need to know about the murder’s been explained. But we never learn what’s really up with Monty. The film’s hero is by far its greatest mystery.

An even more serious, less glamorous film, The Wrong Man (56) finds Hitchcock suspended somewhere between the poles of noir and neorealism. There’s an oft-told anecdote about how Hitchcock’s father had his five-year-old son imprisoned on a lark, and Hitchcock saw his anxieties about police reflected in the strange but true story of Manny Balestrero, a Queens bassist fingered for robberies he didn’t commit. In the wake of McCarthyism Hitchcock conjured his most Kafkaesque vision of America, where the assignation of guilt has the potential to impose guilt upon you. This nightmare scenario unfolds through a hybrid of dream-like artifice—a long, weird dissolve suggests that Manny’s prayers to Jesus are instantly answered by his double, walking a lonely street somewhere—and in some of the most realistic settings in Hitchcock. The subway rumbles past the windows of apartments and offices, through the shops where the cops escort Balestrero and, in a bizarrely malevolent procedure, force him to revisit the scenes of his ostensible crimes. Henry Fonda is perfectly cast as Manny, the jazz musician who neither drinks not does drugs and is always on time. He was the everyman who could be any man. It’s a shame he’d never work with Hitchcock again.

The heart and lungs: The Necessities of Life

Of all the diverse sounds that intermingle in its vibrant, wordless opening scenes, we hear two things in particular near the start of The Necessities of Life (Ce qu’il faut pour vivre). The wheezing breath of Tivii and the foghorn of a distant ship emerge from the aural foliage, portending not only to the imminent cultural conflicts but also to the tone of this muted, often lovely and very moving film. It’s 1952, and Tivii, diagnosed with tuberculosis, is taken from his wife and children and Baffin Island home by a passing ship of government medical inspectors. Three months later Tivii finds himself at a Quebec sanatorium. He receives a shave and a haircut, some strange clothing, and painful treatment from people with whom he cannot communicate other than through grunts and gestures. He worries that he’ll soon die. Caught in a puzzling place more crowded than anywhere he’s ever known yet lonelier than he’s ever felt, there’s the eerie sense that he’s slipped into some sort of purgatory.

Written by Bernard Émond and directed by Benoît Pilon, The Necessities of Life is a fairly simple story that reflects a much larger one, that of the growing pains of Canadian multiculturalism. Tivii shares with his caretakers no language, customs, diet, social mores or system of belief, just residency within the same vast nation and access to its developing health care system. The sanatorium staff are rendered neither resentful, racist villains nor endlessly patient, enlightened altruists, though there is one nurse so touched by Tivii’s plight—and, presumably, senses that his weakened mental health threatens to exacerbate the effects of his disease—that she makes significant efforts to reach out to him. Tivii is profoundly confused. He’s gentle, but not always generous, and will need to plumb the depths of despair and self-pity before he can recover and ultimately attain some sense of reconciliation with the white people who have disrupted his life so as to save it.

Pilon never rushes things, but he’s sly about where he places Émond’s turning points. The music of Robert Marcel Lepage remains always quiet enough to make room for wind or feet crunching on hardened snow. Photographed by Michel La Veaux, the film retains a sensitivity to the contrasting light and colours of the exterior and interior worlds, the tension between the two being essential to understanding Tivii’s particular strain of homesickness. But it is Tivii himself, or rather Natar Ungalaaq, the truly remarkable actor who plays him, that seems to be the grounding force upon which all the major aesthetic choices are made. His presence, his rhythms, the curious variations on surprise, joy and resignation that he conveys through the slightest smile, narrowing of the eyes, or peculiar hesitation, imbue The Necessities of Life with its emotional textures. Ungalaaq’s charismatic visage will be familiar to those who’ve seen him as the titular hero in the magisterial Atanarjuat (2001) or as Nuqallaq in The Journals of Knud Rasmussen (06). He’s in danger of becoming the exclusive face of the Inuit in the movies, but until there’s room for more, I can’t imagine a better face to be focused on, learning from, and having a good time with.

Haunted by memories of sea, snow, asbestos and orphans: Criterion reminds Canada that its cinema is worth celebrating

I’ve always been more than happy to reside in a country whose citizenry is, by any standard, not especially nationalistic. Yet a frustrating byproduct of our collective patriotic shrug, our amiable reluctance to self-congratulate, is a chronic habit of failing to recognize homegrown talent until celebrated elsewhere—and even then! This is certainly the case with regards to our endlessly maligned—or more to the point, shat on—national cinema: how else to explain the US-based Criterion Collection’s new gorgeously packaged, smartly supplemented prestige releases of, first, arguably one of the finest, if not the finest Canadian film of all time, one that was previously difficult to get hold of on DVD, and that most moviegoers, at least in English Canada, have never seen, and second, one of the very best recent works from a guy who we might at least describe as Canada’s most deliriously distinctive, decidedly demented auteur, one whose work is lauded to a far greater degree in the US and Europe than in his own country?

The first, which a few of you smartypanty Canadian film students may have guessed, is Claude Jutra’s Mon Oncle Antoine (1971), a hauntingly lyrical child’s eye view of eros, community dynamics, corruption and death in 1940s rural Quebec, a work that bears comparison to the best of Louis Malle. Drawn from the childhood memories of co-scripter Clément Perron—relayed to Jutra during an extended drinking session meant to assuage Perron’s hurt feelings over Jutra’s rejection of another screenplay—the film sparkles with details that spill forth from the firmament of deep memory: rosary beards being tangled free from a dead man’s unforgiving fingers; shelves lined with packaged products from some alien, more sophisticated world; an exotic notary’s wife entering a crowded store as an explosion erupts from the mine some distance behind her. This film’s greatness so clearly goes against the oft-farted about notion that Canadian films must generalize their settings to be accessible to a global public: the enduring splendour of Jutra’s lost world lies firmly in its specificity and faithfulness.

Set in a village where the Anglo-owned asbestos mine has coated the landscape and lungs of its citizenry with poison, the story revolves around a pair of deaths, the first of which effects little more than morbid thrills in young Benoit (the brilliantly artless Jacques Gagnon), while the second ushers him toward a more intimate understanding of human frailty, confusion, and, during his uncle’s drunken confession of despair over a coffin accidentally dropped in the snowy woods, a very Quebecois tendency toward despair coated in workingman’s strident joviality. Yet Mon Oncle Antoine could never be mistaken for a somber, unhappy film. It’s rife with the wonder of trespassing into adult realms of lust, and Jean Cousineau’s beautiful, stately score for violin and accordion envelops the richly hued imagery, courtesy of legendary cinematographer Michel Brault—like Jutra, sufficiently well versed in documentary to know how to capture the hidden magic of the everyday—with a delicate, wistful ache.

Criterion’s two-disc set is designed as much as a primer on Jutra as anything else, its highlight being Claude Jutra: An Unfinished Story, a 2002 documentary by Jutra’s friend and colleague Paule Baillargeon, featuring intimate interviews with Brault, Bernardo Bertolucci, Geneviève Bujold and Saul Rubinek. Though Baillargeon’s approach is at times precious—especially her whispery voice-over—her weaving together of Jutra’s own work with testimonies from collaborators and critics culminates in something absolutely heartbreaking. While still in his 50s, this poet of memory, obsessed throughout his life with the mysteries of water, was afflicted with Alzheimer’s. He disappeared one day, and was eventually found washed up on the banks of the St. Lawrence. A piece of paper tucked into his clothing read: “I am Claude Jutra.”

I’ll say less about the second film, if only because it's more recent and has gotten plenty of commentary from the likes of me already. Concerning a young man’s return to the lighthouse orphanage where he grew up under an oppressive, all-seeing matriarch and zombified inventor dad, Guy Maddin’s Brand Upon the Brain! (2006), a hysterical hybrid of silent movie aesthetics, grand guignol, teen detective novels and lovingly embellished autobiography, dazzled audiences the world over in theatrically accented screenings featuring live orchestra, foley, and narration from a dizzying variety of celebrity voices. In Criterion’s gorgeous transfer, it’s still pretty damn good even on your TV, where you can choose to have either Maddin, Isabella Rossellini, Laurie Anderson, John Ashbery, Crispin Glover, Louis Negin or Eli Wallach be your aural guide.

The extras are also great, especially Dennis Lim’s essay and ‘Footsteps,’ Maddin’s short doc that captures the foley artists at work in their studio, rifling through plastic baskets of chains, antlers, shoes and phones. These adventuresome audioaholics, clad in white lab coats, turn big wheels, splash water, ride sawhorses and kiss a horse’s ass to simulate a woman kissing a man’s ass. This job looks like too much fun! Even better however is 97 Percent True, a new doc that’s half about the making of Brand and half just about Maddin’s development as an artist, featuring expansive, top shelf quottage from the always witty Maddin and his co-scripter George Toles. It easily betters the previously released Maddin profile Waiting for Twilight (1997).