(Canada, 101 min.)
Written and directed by Anne Émond
Starring: Mylène Mackay, Mylia Corbeil-Gavreau, Mickaël
Gouin, Francis Leplay
Programme: Vanguard (World Premiere)
[This image has been removed due to Google censorship. Clearly, the kids at Google are terrified of seeing a woman in a dress.. But if you want to see the offending picture deemed "adult content," you can see it here thanks to Google Images!]
Anne Émond’s Nelly will haunt
you. The director of Nuit #1 and Les êtres chers returns with her most
provocative film yet. Nelly brings
together themes and tendencies of Émond’s previous films in a singular work as she
envisions an avant-garde biography of late writer Nelly Arcan in a dark,
tempestuous illustration of the author’s fractured psyche. It’s a hypnotic
portrait of a complicated and elusive figure.
Stylistically, Nelly is more in the vein of Nuit #1 with its edginess and seductive atmosphere, but the complex screenplay recalls the haunting interplay between past and present within the family tragedy of Les êtres chers. Nelly is a spellbinding reverie as Émond dives deep into her character’s subconscious with beguiling mise en scène that imperceptibly transports the author between different realities while the cinematography by Josée Deshaies seduces the viewer with its dark and lush imagination of Arcan’s carefully composed lives.
Émond explores Arcan’s tormented mind by crosscutting the various
characters of the author’s persona. There’s Arcan the writer, who shoots to
fame when her 2001 book Putain (Whore) becomes a runaway bestseller for
its dark and salacious tale of a prostitute named Cynthia. Nelly says in the
film that some elements of the book draw upon her own experiences, and Émond
plays with the elements of art and life that intersect within Arcan’s prose as
she introduces Cynthia, the saucy prostitute of the book, who doubles as Arcan’s
own experience as a sex worker. Other aspects of Arcan’s biography and fiction
appear in competing storylines with the writer at the age of a budding pre-adolescent
dreamer and as a haggard white trash junkie who personifies the darkest corners
of Arcan’s mind. Elements of Arcan’s fiction overlap into her life and vice
versa as fiction and reality become indistinguishable as actions in one story
mirror another and the film culminates with tragic ends for all parties.
TIFF Rising Star Mylène Mackay plays all these characters (save
for the youngest) in a tour de force performance.
She is sultry, poised, and an image of graceful elegance as the author, who
flirtatiously commands a press conference like a Hollywood starlet. As Cynthia,
she is saucy and strong, a woman who owns her sexuality with confidence and,
unlike Arcan, doesn’t give two fucks about the way the world perceives her. The
same icy and detached woman exists beneath the surface of all of Nelly’s
personas, though, as Mackay’s entrancing performance shows that no person can
entirely re-write her identity. Nelly cannot escape herself as her insecurities
plague the characters in each thread of the film. Mackay has incredible screen
presence and is undoubtedly destined for stardom with the impressive range of
characters she creates in Nelly.
Nelly Arcan is every one of these women and none of them at the
same time as MacKay creates a complex, multifaceted woman who loses herself in
the tragedy of her characters and in the all-consuming drive of the creative
process. Spending so much time in one’s own head is a dark and dangerous endeavour,
and Émond’s hypnotic puzzle pieces these shards together to create a woman
whose identity exists within the various fragments of herself that she gives
away to readers. As the shards of Arcan’s tragic life collide, it’s impossible to
leave without the impact of Nelly
embedded in one’s mind, haunted for days to come.
Nelly opens January 20, 2017 from Les Films Séville.
Find more TIFF coverage here.
