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A SOLITARY GROUP DANCE
01/09/2007
Presented by writer Domenico Starnone, Stéphane Lafleur’s Continental. A Film Without Guns screened today to warm applause from the audience, and was accompanied by the director and Réal Bossé and Fanny Mallette, two of its four leads, all of whom put in powerfully nuanced performances.
Described by Starnone as “an efficient film on modern efforts to have relationships that are never fully realized,” the film takes its title from the popular Canadian line dance “Continental,” in which everyone dances in a group yet is very much alone. Like the four main characters, strangers to one another and each struggling with their loneliness and sense of loss, whose lives interweave after the disappearance of a man.
Despite the film’s decidedly somber tone, Bossé admits that upon each subsequent viewing, he sees more and more humorous aspects to a story that lies “between comedy and tragedy, the grotesque and the sublime, and is thus almost Shakespearean.” Mallette added that the director immediately said her character must be flat, so that the strange aspects of her life – leaving messages to herself on her answering machine, riding a bicycle with a child’s seat although she has no children – would be a powerful counterpoint to the normalcy of her everyday life as a hotel receptionist.
However, as was pointed out during the Q&A, this independent debut feature by established Quebecois editor Lafleur shares the American angst of an affluent society that lives increasingly more on the fringes of its own emotional life, but without the explosive anger often featured in the films of its U.S. neighbors.
The conflict here is one of frustration and solitude, not violence, and even the film’s subtitle is further elaboration of this notion. Said Lafleur: “We wanted to depict a North America that is calm, although each character has their own drama that may seem like the end of the world to them. The film is also a small provocation at a moment when there is an overabundance of arms. And even though we live close to the U.S., which experiences the conflict of war as something very near to them, we’re well aware that it’s far away, across the ocean.”
Nevertheless, the film’s ending offers a hopeful future for its characters. “This kind of film is difficult,” said Lafleur, “because it’s very easy to give it a depressing ending, but I wanted to leave hope. Offering depressing endings shouldn’t be the goal of cinema.”
Natasha Senjanovic
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