It’s highly probable that a plot description of the new movie from French-Canadian writer-director Philippe Lesage will trigger apprehension, if not outright dread, to certain moviegoers. To wit: Albert, an aging screenwriter, drives his son Max, his daughter Aliocha, and Max’s buddy Jeff deep into the Canadian wilderness to meet up with his erstwhile collaborator, the brash Blake. Movies about moviemakers, am I right?
But while the professions of the “Who By Fire”’s male protagonists serve as explanations for their sometimes-monstrous self-importance and self-involvement, they’re otherwise incidental to the combustible character conflicts the film steeps you in. The picture opens with a long shot from behind Albert’s car, tooling down a nicely paved road bracketed by trees, as a single organ chord prefaced by a one-note lead-in plays for almost five minutes. Albert’s cheerily oblivious to the three kids in the back seat: Max, his ginger son, looks bored, Aliocha, his daughter (we will soon learn that the impossibly pretentious Albert named her after the saintliest of the Karamazov brothers), pouts vaguely, and puffy Jeff, whose close-cropped haircut does him no favors, looks as if he just lost his best friend, if indeed he ever had one.
Once installed in Blake’s roomy cabin, there’s the usual grousing about sleeping quarters from the kids, and the “it’s been too long” bonhomie between Blake and Albert is short-lived. Lesage has a simple directorial style, using a lot of long takes. This is highlighted in the spectacularly sniping dinner scenes in which, among other things, they reveal that since their glory days, Albert has gone on to writing for a children’s TV series called “Rock Lobster” and Blake has been discontentedly directing documentaries. On learning that Jeff wants to become a director, he sarcastically nicknames the kid “Spielberg” and won’t stop calling him that. (Like he has a leg to stand on: He’s unironically named his dog, who has an eventually substantial role to play—I wondered if the phrase “deus ex canis” was actually a thing—“Ingmar.”)
“Why did you two stop working together?” one of the cohort—including Blake’s hunting advisor and his pixe-ish film editor, and eventually Irène Jacob as a former colleague—asks at one of these events as if the resentments bubbling up without pause don’t provide some clue. And, in the meantime, surly Jeff, whose hormones are messing with him something awful, makes an awkward play for Aliocha and then slaps her when she balks. Eventually, one of the characters suggests a hunting outing, and you think, “Sure, give all these people guns, what could go wrong?” While Jeff’s a relentless pot-stirrer with murderous ideas, he is also equipped with boundless reserves of cowardice. Noah Parker’s work as Jeff is note-perfect creepy. At the same time, Aurélia Arandi-Longpré does exceptional, nuanced work as a character just learning the power she has over others in her life and her calibration of how much she should put it to work, if at all. While the rest of the cast is first-rate, these are the performers you won’t be able to look away from.
Lesage supplies exemplary tension and intrigue over the course of two plus hours, while at the same time suggesting to the viewer, accurately, that anything in the way of a definitive resolution is not in the cards. Hence, one is not terribly let down when the movie ends without tying the scenarios into neat bundles. That’s life, as they say. One is reminded, finally, of a line in They Might Be Giants’ classic ditty “Don’t Let’s Start:” “No one in the world ever gets what they want, and that is beautiful.”
