A film by Paul Schrader
With: Richard Gere, Uma Thurman, Jacob Elordi, Michael Imperioli, Kristine Froseth, Penelope Mitchell, Victoria Hill, Aaron Roman Weiner, Ryan Woodle, John Way
Famed Canadian-American leftist documentary filmmaker Leonard Fife was one of sixty thousand draft evaders and deserters who fled to Canada to avoid serving in Vietnam. Now in his late seventies, Fife is dying of cancer in Montreal and has agreed to a final interview in which he is determined to bare all his secrets at last, to demythologize his mythologized life.
Our rate: ****
Paul Schrader‘s Oh Canada kicks off the Cannes competition in style. Masterful, gentle, literary and intelligent, the film explores a thousand frontiers. Reality, fiction, documentary, memory, psychology, thoughts, life paths… All this recalls Jaco Van Dormael‘s sumptuous undertaking with Mr Nobody, but from an angle stripped of all scientific considerations and grandiloquence, even formal (he now disavows his writings on transcendental style, considering himself a pretentious young researcher). Schrader experiments with a psychoanalytic medium that goes beyond mere conscious revelation. The multiple fragments of narrative undertaken, in a very confused way, by Leonard Fife (Richard Gere as both Banks’ and Schrader’s double, to whom Schrader has asked to resemble Alain Delon in terms of presence – being where you need to be to illuminate the shot) convey sensations, wanderings, doubts far more than facts, lessons or certainties. From an infinite past, Schrader (and Banks with him) decides to retain just a few snippets. The puzzle thus formed examines destiny, a man, courage and cowardice, love, sexuality and desire, as well as American history. He questions one man’s life, his fragility. Here, Schrader pays homage to his friend Russel Banks, finely adapting one of his writings and adding his own personal touch.
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