There is a cinema institute in Montreal ("Institut National de L'Image et
du Son") which preserves videos and publications related to French-Canadian cinema and TV shows. Even there, one cannot find native son Denis
Villeneuve's first two films _August 32nd on Earth_ and _Maelstrom_. Surprising, given how many awards the films received at the time, how much favorable press Villeneuve is receiving, and all the prestige studio
projects he is working on (among them, the remake of _Dune_).

_August 32nd_ and _Maelstrom_ star Pascale Bussieres and Marie-Josee Croze,
the two greatest French-Canadian actresses of their respective generation.
I only had the pleasure of seeing the second during its initial theatrical;
I bought the costly out-of-print DVD for a refresher course. It was worth it;_Maelstrom_ remains by far the best Villeneuve film I've seen. The youthful director has created something brash, irreverent, and wildly creative; the
film brims with mischievous energy, wicked humor, and provocative elements, which are delicately balanced against classical world cinema traditions.
Part of it is notoriously narrated by a fish about to be gutted! But the most special effect is undoubtedly the feral energy that Croze, who has mostly
acted in television, brings to the central character. The hedonistic, promiscuous Bibiane staggers out of an abortion clinic and drinks herself to oblivion at a party. On her way home her BMW accidentally runs over a Norwegian fisherman and immigrant. His sons flies in and meets Bibiane at
the hospitial. The remorseful anti-heroine claims to be his dying father's neighbor; she spends the night with him, preventing him from catching a plane, and that saves him from the subsequent plane crash. She confesses and they reconcile, scattering ashes in the North Sea in the last scene.

The cinematography is staggering, miles ahead of another Villeneuve has achieved since. Whether it is by color filter or post-processing, most
interior scenes are shot in incandescent blue. This emphasizes Croze's piercing eye color, like in a sea dream (the film is mostly from her
subjective point of view); it also makes every hair on her body glow in
eerie green. No one will come away from the film without vivid memory of closeups of the actress. Both leads meet the same Kieslowski-like
bystander (in a subway station and in a bar), who dispenses pragmatic
morality advice. The water motif is ever present; he works as a diver
while she drives her BMW into the St. Lawrence River. And then there are
the talking fishes … The story skirts sexism and cynicism but self-corrects towards an unlikely redemptive humanism. Croze cements her cinematic
persona as a deeply compromised heroine, eventually to win best actress
prizes at Cannes; she is also the oldest actress to have been honored
with the Romy Schneider award. (Who will be the next Montreal cinematic
icon to follow in her footsteps? Caroline Dhavernas is as enigmatic
as the young Geneviere Bujold -- she even plays the title character in
a series called "Mary Kills People" -- but she has mostly stayed in TV.)

It would be another 9 years before Villeneuve made his idiosyncratic and award-winning black-and-white fictionalized account of mass-killing (_Polytechnique_). After that, his films has become more mainstream and
bereft of his former unique vision. _Incendies_ is your basic art-house torture porn transcribed to the Middle East, with enough lurid incest and torture to make Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon-ho blush. _Enemy_
is a deeply misogynist adaptation of a Portuguese Nobel Prize winner's work, noteworthy mainly for managing to make Melanie Laurent icy and repulsive.
Its monochromatic color palette has nothing on the visual explosion that is _Maelstrom_. _Sicario_ glorifies revenge, _Blade Runner 2049_ is as unimaginative as its brawn-over-brains replicants, and _The Arrival_ is a
cheap knock-off of _Dune_, over-simplifing and sentimentalizing the ability
to see the future (which makes me nervous about his _Dune_). It is time _Maelstrom_ gets a rerelease; perhaps that would remind Villeneueve what
made him special in the first place.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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