(Canada, 95 min.)
Dir. Pedro Pires and Robert Lepage, Writ. Pedro Pires
Starring: Frédérike Bédard, Lise Castonguay, Hans Piesbergen
“The ultimate creator is the human brain and God is but one
of his creations,” says Thomas (Hans Piesbergen) while recalling the mind-bending
beauty of the Sistine Chapel in Triptych.
Triptych, the latest film from Robert Lepage, is a brilliant meeting of
artistic minds. Look only to the beautiful sequence in which Thomas, a brain
surgeon, gazes up at the artistry of the Chapel’s ceiling and visualizes the
image of a brain outlining the heavenly bodies of the paintwork. To
conceptualize and to theorize art is to bring it to life, and to give life to
oneself in the process. Triptych, needless
to say, is a richly involving film.
There are significant brains behind this artistic endeavour, and the inspiring scope of Lepage’s adaptation is impressive. The filmmaker/dramatist adapts his own nine-hour epic stage production Lipsynch into this ninety-odd minute film made in collaboration with co-director Pedro Pires. The result is an evocative treatise on art, memory, and identity. If Lepage’s Possible Worlds is a wonderfully cerebral stage-to-screen affair, then the über-brainy Triptych is in a league of its own as it fuses both hemispheres of the mind as only an artist could. The film is a brilliant thesis on the way people self-identify through art, yet for all its intimidating braininess, Triptych is strikingly accessible.
The film takes a three-pronged
chorus as it presents three chapters, acts, or movements, depending on the
sweeping artistic structure with which one frames the film. Triptych presents the stories of a poet
named Marie (Frédérike Bédard), her sister Michelle (a superb Lisa Castonguay),
and Michelle’s future husband Thomas. Each of the three characters is an artist
in his or her own right, for Marie is a poet, Michelle a singer and voice
actress, and Thomas a virtuoso in the operating room and an avid aficionado of
fine art.
Triptych provocatively plays with these three art forms as each act
sees the three virtuosos grapple with their brains’ ability to fulfill their
art. Marie, a schizophrenic, loses the poet’s ability to put feelings into
words as bottles of prescription medication numb the sensations that transforms
her feelings into poetry. Meanwhile, Thomas experiences increasing tremors that
shake the smooth dexterity of his handiwork in the operating room. Michelle,
finally and most strikingly, suffers from a brain tumor that allows her to
vocalize music but unable to conceptualize or verbalize language itself. What
is a poet without feeling? What use is a painter without steady hands? What
meaning exists in a song without words?
The three act structure of Triptych identifies each of the three
characters with their unique form of art—poetry, painting, and music—but each
third of the film dabbles in theatre and sees itself brought to life by film.
Marie’s act, for example, juxtaposes fun poetry jams with self-mutilating
madness. The gradual loss of words in her story descends into physical, if not
visceral, expressions of pain and suffering that she can no longer put into
words. Her despair is provocatively rendered in the blood that drips from her
wrists onto the snazzy notebooks that Michelle buys, but Marie insists she
cannot stain with her tainted mind. Michelle, on the other hand, performs some
soulful jazz numbers—a highlight of the film that is so beautiful one forgets
that it actually appears in Thomas’s story. Her powerful uses of cadence and
inflection, however, are then struck out as Thomas picks at her brain with his unsteady
hands and she gradually loses her grasp of language. Triptych uses the intimacy of tight cinematic space to get into the
minds of the characters as they see the outlet for their creative talents stripped
away by the mere malfunctioning of their brains.
The absence of language runs as a
thread throughout Triptych as Lepage
and Pires punctuate the movements with markedly theatrical briefs in which the
characters absorb themselves in silent tableaux. Marie helps a passersby chat
in the blustery wind while Michelle examines film and cameras on the other side
of a foggy window. The most explicitly theatrical sequence appears in Thomas’s
segment, roughly around the midpoint of the film, in which he inserts himself
into an artistic rendering of Christ’s encounter with the doubting Thomas.
Thomas, the doctors, jabs his finger into Christ’s wounds as he struggles with
his loss of the ability to heal wounds. The stagy lighting of the sequence
complements the chiaroscuro painting. One art form seeps into the other, and
the movements and variations of Triptych
culminate in a beautiful ode to the malleability, virtuosity, and eternality of
art.
Each of the stagy interludes situates
them as characters in an urban opus or as performers in a city symphony in
which one is both a lover of art and an agent of it. Triptych uses the urban space of Montreal and London to realize
both the creative freedom of using artistic expression to stand out from the
metropolitan crowd and the suffocating madness that ensues when one loses one’s
creative genius and feels a kind of annihilation by blurring in with the crowd.
The questions Triptych provokes are arrestingly intellectual and existential meditations
on the way art both defines individuals and provides an outlet for the soul.
(There’s an unmistakable spirituality to Triptych
even if it puts the brain before any one higher power.) The variations of the
film culminate as words, poetry, sound, and silence all play roles in one
special project as Michelle strives to find her voice through film. The film’s
late sequences see Michelle throw herself into several ADR sessions as she
tries to insert her father’s voice onto old silent family films. The archive
becomes art; the art becomes life. The manipulation of film and technology,
aided by a healthy flash of creative genius, helps raise a ghost from the dead
as Michelle finds her voice again. It’s a work of art.
Rating: ★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)
Triptych is now available on home video
and iTunes from Les Films Séville
