{"id":2943,"date":"2011-11-01T19:13:25","date_gmt":"2011-11-01T18:13:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olivierpere.wordpress.com\/?p=2943"},"modified":"2016-01-20T19:00:05","modified_gmt":"2016-01-20T18:00:05","slug":"curling-by-denis-cote","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.arte.tv\/sites\/olivierpere\/2011\/11\/01\/curling-by-denis-cote\/","title":{"rendered":"Curling by Denis C\u00f4t\u00e9"},"content":{"rendered":"

Curling<\/em> (Pardo for Best Director and Best Male Actor Awards at the Festival del film Locarno 2010) was released in France on Wednesday, by the distributor Capricci. This is a feat in itself since it has taken until October 2011 for a film by Denis C\u00f4t\u00e9 to be seen in French cinemas, when this Quebecois director is already onto his sixth feature and from his very first, Les Etats nordiques<\/em>, his work has attracted attention from festivals all over the world and the international film community. Should we attribute this anomaly \u2013 in a country known for its cinephiliac curiosity and support for contemporary auteur cinema \u2013 to Qu\u00e9bec\u2019s lack of exoticism, so less exciting to Western critics than Thailand, Argentina, or South Korea? Curling<\/em> offers an excellent introduction to the world of Denis C\u00f4t\u00e9 since, following Les Etats Nordique<\/em> (2005), Nos vies priv\u00e9es<\/em> (2007), Elle veut le chaos<\/em> (2008) and Carcasses<\/em> (all shown and often winning awards at the Festival del film Locarno, apart from Carcasses<\/em> which I screened at the Directors\u2019 Fortnight at Cannes in 2009), it is undoubtedly his best film, the most accomplished and the most \u201caccessible\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n

Initially a film critic, C\u00f4t\u00e9 sees film as both formalist and open to the world, and characterised by a rejection of traditional narrative. Denis C\u00f4t\u00e9 is against a particular kind of linear cinema, against the tyranny of the script, and enjoys establishing shadow zones in his fiction films, unexplained images or actions, fractures of meaning, yawning gaps into which the viewer falls, a waking dream. C\u00f4t\u00e9\u2019s films are indeed deceptively realistic films of the imaginary. Observation of reality always leads onto situations at the borderline of the dreamlike or the fantastic, even in a more overtly documentary film essay such as Carcasses<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Curling<\/em> recounts the story of a strange couple \u2013 a father and his daughter \u2013 in rural Canada. Jean-Fran\u00e7ois is the maintenance man at a motel and bowling alley, while his teenage daughter Julyvonne spends her time at home doing nothing much at all. Jean-Fran\u00e7ois, a solitary and unsophisticated man, refuses to send his daughter to school, and keeps her away from the world, apparently in order to protect her. On one of her rare ventures into the outside world, Julyvonne sees a tiger in a snowy field, and frozen cadavers in the undergrowth. From the naturalism of the film\u2019s beginning (reinforced by the fact that the actors Emmanuel and Philom\u00e8ne Bilodeau are also father and daughter in real life) we are subtly taken into a form of social unreality, in which the main characters\u2019 instability and isolation lead to a disturbed perception of the world. We are entitled to consider Julyvonne\u2019s macabre discoveries as purely mental visions, related to a morbid state of mind fuelled by her father\u2019s neuroses about human relationships and the outside world. As for Jean-Fran\u00e7ois, he notices some disturbing bloodstains in a motel room a client has just left, yet this discovery is left totally uninvestigated \u2026 Later, he sees a corpse on the roadside and rather than inform the police he decides to hide it, as if he was the murderer.<\/span><\/p>\n

The film abounds in red herrings, misleading directions, doors that open onto the bizarre, hints of stories that are cut short by something new that happens.<\/span><\/p>\n

Some have made some highly superficial comparisons between C\u00f4t\u00e9\u2019s films and those of Lynch, but it is more productive to think of Resnais and Hitchcock in order to find signs and clues with which to decipher a film like Curling<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n

In a truly inspired review in \u201cLe Monde\u201d, Jean-Fran\u00e7ois Rauger recognised Curling<\/em>\u2019s hidden affiliation to a seminal film in cinema history, Alfred Hitchcock\u2019s\u00a0Psycho<\/em>: a motel, a bloody bathroom, a body that must be disposed of, a shy and timid man, alluring women, fear of the\u00a0 police\u2026 These are the ingredients of Hitchcock\u2019s film that Denis C\u00f4t\u00e9, as the good cin\u00e9phile and filmmaker that he is, reworks in his own way, not to mention the way that he floats the suggestion of incest throughout the film. Jean-Fran\u00e7ois is in the mould of both Norman Bates and the latter\u2019s phantom mother, since he sequesters his daughter and has a terrorising influence over her.<\/span><\/p>\n

To which one might add that despite its depressive dimensions and claustrophobic atmosphere, the film is full of humour (icy, black, though not purely so) and tenderness, and that it allows us to hear again two songs from the 80s that had hitherto seemed forever lost in our teenage sense-memories.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Curling<\/a>

Curling<\/em> (2010)<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Curling (Pardo for Best Director and Best Male Actor Awards at the Festival del film Locarno 2010) was released in\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":116,"featured_media":13990,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\nCurling by Denis C\u00f4t\u00e9 - Olivier P\u00e8re<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.arte.tv\/sites\/olivierpere\/2011\/11\/01\/curling-by-denis-cote\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"fr_FR\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Curling by Denis C\u00f4t\u00e9 - Olivier P\u00e8re\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Curling (Pardo for Best Director and Best Male Actor Awards at the Festival del film Locarno 2010) was released in\u2026\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.arte.tv\/sites\/olivierpere\/2011\/11\/01\/curling-by-denis-cote\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Olivier P\u00e8re\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2011-11-01T18:13:25+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2016-01-20T18:00:05+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.arte.tv\/sites\/olivierpere\/files\/7_New-Image6.JPG.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1600\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"1063\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Olivier P\u00e8re\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"\u00c9crit par\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Olivier P\u00e8re\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Dur\u00e9e de lecture estim\u00e9e\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"4 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.arte.tv\/sites\/olivierpere\/2011\/11\/01\/curling-by-denis-cote\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.arte.tv\/sites\/olivierpere\/2011\/11\/01\/curling-by-denis-cote\/\",\"name\":\"Curling by Denis C\u00f4t\u00e9 - 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