(Canada, 95 min)
Written and directed by Denis Côté
Starring: Pierrette
Robitaille, Romane Bohringer, Marc-André Grondin, Marie Brassard.
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| Romane Bohringer as Flo (left) and Pierrette Robitaille as Vic (right). Photo by: Yannick Grandmont |
Denis Côté is one weird dude. The Québécois auteur is quickly becoming one of the
most original and distinct voices in Canadian cinema. After the surreal madness
of Curling and the unique
portraiture of Bestiaire comes the
noir-ish head-scratcher Vic + Flo Saw a
Bear. Vic + Flo Saw a Bear, which
boasts a hilariously misleading title since Vic and Flo don’t even see a bear (or do they?), is art-house nonsense in its finest form. Côté’s film
doesn’t really make much sense in the present tense of the film experience, but
it has one hell of a finale. Vic + Flo
is smarter than the average bear.
“I’m old enough to know that I don’t like people,” says Vic to
her younger girlfriend, Flo. Vic is a sixty-something ex-con on parole. She’s
on the tail end of a life sentence—the film never tells the audience what
for—and she decides to settle in her uncle’s old sugar shack in rural Quebec. It’s
the perfect place for someone who doesn’t like people, which might also explain
the life sentence, as it’s a quiet refuge in the boonies.
Vic, played by the Melissa Leo-ish Pierrette Robitaille, is
not the most charismatic person with whom one could spend ninety-five minutes.
She’s socially inept, as one expects from someone who has been removed from
society for years, as she revisits her now-paralyzed uncle (Georges Molnar).
She shouts at him as if her were an imbecile and she pays him little heed as she
shacks up in his place and allows the constantly shirtless neighbourboy to take
care of him instead while she freeloads.
Flo, Vic’s girlfriend from the slammer, wanders into the
backwoods hideaway just when Vic seems to be getting tired of puttering around
on a golf cart and howling into the forest. (It’s a Denis Côté film, remember?)
Flo, played by Romane Bohringer, who looks like Charlotte Gainsbourg if she
worked in a chip wagon and smoked two packs a day, isn’t nearly as hardened and
reclusive as Vic is. She is also considerably younger and, unfortunately,
considerably more reckless.
Robitaille and Bohringer give a pair of fine performances as
the two oddball ex-cons. Robitaille is especially good in bringing out a thread
of humanity underlying Vic’s tired cynicism and coldness. Vic is a woman who wants
to do better in life, but lacks the sense of how to do it. She also seems to know that
whatever she does will be too little and come too late to make any sort of
atonement for what she’s done. She has nobody to atone for, either, so all she can do is make things best for herself and Flo.
Vic gardens and Flo picks up men at the local dive during
the meandering first half of the film. Côté sets up an enigmatic little simmer as
Vic and Flo do anything and everything but see a bear during the aimless rime
that goes by in their secluded sugar shack. Amusing sights of carefree locals
whipping around the track in their Go Carts or jogging by the shack as Flo
squats by the road like a Neanderthal add some quirky charm and a
sense of the mundane. (The locals are eerily familiar to the skateboarding
kids who coloured the background of Sarah
Prefers to Run, yet the contrast in the similar use of space and action
shows Côté’s ingenuity with tone.) The tension mounts ever so slowly as things
stop being nice and pretty for Vic and Flo. Vic’s amicable parole officer,
Guillaume (Marc-André Grondin, giving a fun and dorky performance), seems content with the lifer’s progress
when she sets up camp at her uncle’s, but he becomes less impressed when the
neighbour’s remove said uncle due to neglect and when Flo starts running her
mouth off that his routine trips are messing with her shit.
Another friendly local makes the acquaintance of Vic (but
not Flo). Marina St. Jean (played by Marie Brassard in an outstanding
supporting turn) is an outgoing city worker who uses the property of the sugar shack
as a shortcut for her commute to work. Marina takes an interest in Vic’s garden
during her first visit and offers to help Vic tend to her plants in exchange
for letting her drive across the property. She’s pretty forward, Marina. Flirty
even. Maybe she’ll change Vic’s attitude should Flo become restless.
Then something happens that totally justifies why Vic
doesn’t like people. Vic + Flo takes
an ominous turn as one of the characters is revealed to be something else. A
great sense of impending doom saturates the inky Vic + Flo, lensed beautifully by DP Ian Lagarde, as the droll
weirdness of the film evolves into something dark and sinister, and the
brilliantly portentous deep chords in the score by Melissa Lavergne make the calm, deserted woods around
the sugar shack seem like the least inviting place on Earth. Déliverance, perhaps?
Just when it seems as if Vic
+ Flo could be going nowhere and doing nothing, though, Côté jolts the film
alive with a masterful reveal. Vic + Flo
Saw a Bear sends the pot flying off the stove when the slow burn of its
inscrutable simmer explodes into something deadly. It’s a grotesquely violent
and morbid finale, and an effective one at that.
Vic and Flo seem like a pair of world-weary women who know
throughout the film that they’re never going to find any kind of peace while
holing out in the sugar shack. There’s no escaping the life they had before.
The couple, Vic especially, seems to grasp that there is no way that their
fairy tale romance can end well. Côté, however, gives this subversive love story its own
taste for happily ever after with the poignant freedom that meets the friends
at the end. The closer of Vic + Flo
is beautifully poetic in its own sinister and messed up kind of way.
Rating: ★★★½ (out of ★★★★★)
Rating: ★★★½ (out of ★★★★★)
Vic + Flo Saw a Bear screens in Ottawa at The ByTowne Nov. 27 – 30.
It is currently
screening in Toronto at TIFF Bell Lightbox.
