‘Oh, Canada’ review: Paul Schrader’s latest is his personal work

A story that happens at the door of death, Oh, Canada it’s a thoughtful, reflective work from Paul Schrader, if occasionally rushed. Whether or not its fast-paced approach is a feature — it plays like one, as if there was plenty of time to wrap it up before the reaper comes calling — it also results in a deeper representation of what’s on Schrader’s mind. when it was made.

The story of a film producer on his deathbed who becomes the subject of the camera, the film is based on the 2021 novel. Forward by Russell Banks. (Schrader has previously adapted Bank’s novel Suffering in 1997.) The author would tragically die in January 2023, a few months before filming began, and shortly after Schrader himself had a brush with death from COVID-19.

This proximity to grief, and to the grave, informs us Oh Canadatelling a story, which plays like a reminder of regret. Its plot and narrative POV shift in tricky ways, as if the film’s main character – played by two actors of different ages – was on a quest to free himself from sin. Along the way, he confuses and collapses his many confessions into a single, jumbled tale that keeps changing in an elliptical arrangement, as if to reflect the character’s confused state of mind. The details may be unreliable, but his story is laced with powerful emotional truths, born of lifelong regret.

What Oh, Canada about?

Now confined to hospice care, Canadian filmmaker Leonard Fife (Richard Gere) agrees to a conversation between his former film students, Malcolm (Michael Imperioli) and Diana (Victoria Hill), during his last weeks of life. Cancer has taken over his body, and his treatment has made him tired, but as an artist who always uses the camera to reveal the truths of people, he hopes that the lens of Malcolm and Diana will do the same for him, and help him lighten the burden like his wife. , Emma (Uma Thurman), watches.

Many details of Leonard’s life are publicly known, especially his conviction in Vietnam because of his conscience, after which he left the US for the Great White North as political protection. However, as much of his story remains shrouded in mystery, he is now releasing it as a last resort. In flashbacks set in the ’60s and ’70s, Leonard is played by Jacob Elordi (of Priscilla fame), although sometimes, Gere himself goes through the scenes where Elordi should be, an exchange that takes place in direct cuts, or at intervals. Texas Switch.

The seamlessness with which the older Leonard replaces his younger self has an eerie effect, as if something is wrong with his story. As he reveals some of the family’s most embarrassing and terrible secrets, Emma constantly denies his revelations and insists that Leonard must be confused by the details. In a way, you are given an overlap between events and characters who remember, but all these revelations come from a place of deep pain and oppression. Whether they’re true or not, Gere makes their emotional truth sound undeniable with a sublime, work-defining performance as a man afraid and willing to stare at the camera and be seen by it, as he struggles to exorcise his own demons. which has been eating away at his soul for a long time.

Paul Schrader brings a thoughtful eye to filmmaking Oh, Canada.

Credit: Cannes Film Festival

In all of them Oh, CanadaLeonard’s remorse is enhanced by Schrader’s investigative filmmaking, based on many documentary techniques. The film in which he gives his personal testimony – about his life, and his work as an anti-war activist after crossing the border illegally – takes the form of a traditional dialogue, although it has an aesthetic twist that reveals many surprising intimacy. – up.

To pay Leonard, his students photographed him using a camera he invented. In fact, this is Interrotron developed by The Thin Blue Line director Errol Morris; a teleprompter that allows the subject to meet the interviewer’s eye (or rather, its reflection) while looking down through the camera lens. By placing the tool on the fake Leonard, Schrader creates a double-edged sword. The program has long given Leonard the luxury of sitting behind a video monitor, rather than meeting his subjects directly. But now, as the subject of his personal camera, his confession takes place in a dark, deserted room.

There are people nearby, like the filmmakers, and Leonard’s wife, Emma, ​​who appears to be on a teleprompter, but we only see this briefly. For the most part, Schrader locks us into Leonard’s closing sequence with three angles (two profiles, one direct), from Malcolm and Diana’s joint video screens, and their angles. Schrader often cuts in half. This framing of the triptych makes the cameras feel incredibly invasive, and by almost never cutting away from Leonard, Schrader forces us to view his self-reflection as the aging artist sees it. The faces of his interviewers may be visible to him on the screen, but you see his filmmaking facade, and you know how lonely he is, here at the end of his life.

This loneliness takes on a dramatic form in Leonard’s time, too. In isolated moments, Elordi and Gere’s attention sometimes drifts away from the characters they are talking to, and their gaze falls on nothing in particular, as if they know they are stuck in a framing device. People from other points in the story sometimes appear where they shouldn’t, and sometimes, a white light consumes the frame, as if hypoxia (or the kiss of death) threatened to give Leonard a break from his confession.

The question remains: Does Leonard want to die without revealing the worst parts of himself?

Schrader’s dynamic narrative does Oh, Canada complete self-reflection.

Like Schrader’s later works – especially First Reformed, Card Counteragain Garden Managerthe same confessional trilogy – Oh, Canada always uses voiceover. But in the aforementioned films, this narration took the form of a diary entry by each of the main characters, while in the latter, the framing device is not only the camera in this case, but one that is not in Leonard’s control.

At times, the movie’s voiceover includes excerpts from Leonard’s recorded confessions. Sometimes, it is based on a passionate inner monologue. And at other times, the voiceover is spoken by a completely different character, portrayed as someone who feels deeply betrayed by Leonard. In a practical sense, this juxtaposition of perspectives helps unravel Leonard’s story from multiple perspectives, as Schrader dissects both the man and the legends surrounding him.

However, this dynamic POV also serves a spiritual purpose. In short, it combines the known and the imagined, and plays as if Leonard is in a daze, slowly coming out of and gaining sympathy from someone he has deeply – perhaps deliberately – wronged.

Credit: Cannes Film Festival

Oh, Canada it’s a deep case work that bubbles to the surface, and while its story is mostly fiction, Schrader’s presentation takes on a remarkably personal form. On the other hand, the elderly Leonard is called to resemble Banks – a friend of Schrader for many years, who asked the filmmaker to adapt. Forward before he died — but in many ways, this man with short, gray hair and an ill-fitting beard resembles Schrader himself, making the film at a time when it looked like the nearly 80-year-old filmmaker might not win his long battle with COVID again. pneumonia. (He was hospitalized, and had difficulty breathing afterward.)

But there’s another personal element to the movie, too, one that’s made very little visible on screen. At the time of Banks’ death and Schrader’s illness, the director also he moved and entered assisted living facility with his wife, Mary Beth Hurt, whose Alzheimer’s disease was getting worse. Oh, Canada is a film as much about death and mysterious truths as it is about memory and its fleeting nature, and it’s hard to read the visual manifestation of Leonard’s confusion like Schrader’s depiction of his wife’s condition.

In addition, it shows the filmmaker that his confession to his wife – a woman who knows him better than anyone, but who does not know his worst moments – does not seem to stick, both because of his illness and his inability to explain himself well. . Although Schrader’s avatar suffers from memory distortion in the film, and is aided by his wife, the opposite is true in reality. The idea of ​​a man not being able to give himself fully to the woman he loves because of the endless state of memory is a painful result, regardless. While Oh, Canada discusses (but quickly skips over) many of these central themes — en route to a conclusion that folds quickly, and very neatly — it stands as one of Schrader’s most personal, most moving, and most influential films.

Oh, Canada is expected to hit theaters this December.

Update: Sep. 25, 2024, 4:44 pm EDT Oh, Canada was updated on May 30, 2024, at the Cannes Film Festival. This post has been updated to first review the New York Film Festival.