Tous les garçons et les filles
On the basis of Les démons (2015) and his latest film Genèse—I haven’t caught up yet with Copenhague, a Love Story (2016) or his documentaries—Saint-Apagit-born writer-director Philippe Lesage is already one of the strongest stylists in Canadian cinema, cultivating, in collaboration with the gifted cinematographer Nicolas Canniccioni, a distanced, gliding camera style that echoes of contemporary fest-circuit heavyweights (including Haneke and Östlund) but imbued with its own palpable aesthetic and dramatic rationale. Both Les démons and Genèse—which premiered in Locarno in August before seemingly being bypassed in favour of who knows what by TIFF—have been reliably described by reviewers as semi-autobiographical coming-of-age stories: studies, respectively, of adolescent fear (via Les démons’ horror-inflected atmospherics) and desire, in Genèse’s parallel goodbye-first-love narratives.
This taxonomy is true enough, but it’s also reductive. There are coming-of-age films that shamelessly play to festival-programmer and viewer expectations, and those that try for some sort of end-around. I’d say that Lesage is in the second category, and that his focus is somewhat more refined than the basic theme of “growing pains.” He’shis or her peer group—a relationship that is especially trepidatious during periods of transition and isn’t necessarily reconciled over time. His films’ long takes convey stasis, but their subject is flux, and their already characteristic cycling between impassive, quasi-ethnographic panoramas of young people at play—swarming herdlike through playgrounds, forests, and nightclub dance floors—and a more intimate form of individual portraiture isn’t just a stylistic tic. Rather, it’s an eloquent means of signalling that these stories and their protagonists are begging to be read in both specific and allegorical terms.
