“Who through fire”, an amazing new Canadian film

One could be awarded to confuse Philippe Lesage's opening scenes Who through fire For the beginning of a horror film. The film begins with a long Looong On the soundtrack, a car plays on a remote, winding road that drives as a booming melody. The quiet close -ups of the people in the vehicle are subtly worrying, while a beautiful, forbidden landscape is rolling around them. Completely with lengthy, threatening resolutions, it really feels like a tribute to Stanley Kubrick The epidemic.

Lesages hypnotic film is now playing in New York (and hopefully in the coming weeks) and is not a horror film at all – it is a drama, even though it is sometimes a comedy – but the director of Quebecois understands excitement and anticipation. Who through fire Follow a few people who gather in a hut in the forest together with the emotional rubble. It has neither a typical story nor does it have the kind of clearly defined topics and structure that would normally tell us what we are looking for and what to think about, who we hate and whom we should admire.

What it has are characters that the author director likes to bounce into sequences that feel like concentrated routes in real life. Evening talks take up and become controversial confrontations, which are often captured in individual shots. Some dialog exchanges even lead to the realm of cringe comedy without ever making a complete apatow. People wander into the night and then on. The scenes of Lesage extend far beyond the conventional borders. Find 155 minutes, Who through fire is not short. But it catches the inaccurate language and the unbreakable rhythms of reality so well that they lose the feeling of time. After seeing it for the first time last year at the New York Film Festival, I would have believed them if they tell me that the film was for 90 minutes. I would also have believed that if you say it was four hours.

The cabin in question is well equipped that belongs to a celebrated filmmaker, Blake Cadieux (Arieh Worthalter), who has awards on the shelf and a serious for outdoory activities such as bug hunt and fly fishing and rafting of Weißwasser. His old friend and writing partner Albert Gary (Paul Ahmmarani) visit him, an anxious intellectual who arrives with his daughter Aliocha (Aurélia Arandi-Longpré). His son Max (Antoine Marchand Gagnon); and Max 'friend Jeff (Noah Parker). We understand that Albert and Blake have not seen each other for some time, and old resentments gradually arise through their wine courses interactions when Blakes Macho Theater collides with Albert's defensive difficulty. In the meantime, Jeff falls quite taken with Aliocha, whose friendliness and physical ease around him initially for romantic interest. His submerged adoration collides with its advised non -readability. The adults are confused in bitter memories of the past, while the children seem to be forging themselves into a future bitterness.

But that's also a way to describe something slippery and alive. Since reading does not have his story through, we are even more driving than usual. And despite his sloppy, almost formless nature, Who through fire It's never boring, because reading and his actors fill every scene with surprise and excitement. An exchange could dance through buried crimes and then explode in a stream of little bit. An informal comment could cause a terrible wound while a brave statement is shaken up.

The director repairs his lens to these people and observes them carefully, sometimes with long, closed static pours like a scientist in a laboratory, but without the antiseptic ruthlessness that suggests. The style of Lesage hovers somewhere between the work of John Cassavetes and Michael Haneke, two extremes that they think would be incompatible. The results are demanding, but ambiguous. And also immersive: Who through fire was partly shot with Panavision lenses from the 1970s, and broad image photography is alive and beautiful, with warm interiors, rich outer and shimmering night scenes.

At a point in this opening sequence mentioned above, we see close -ups of Aliakha and Jeff's hands before we meet the characters, which are just so close enough to touch them. It seems so easy to move in their direction; Your reached the book that she keeps a little tighter. The camera stays on our hands and we think about these almost imperceptible movements. They could not mean anything, or they could mean the world. All of Who through fire Existed in this space, which makes it so exciting, so unpredictable. We keep waiting for something terrible. That turns out something as life.