CURLING - MIFF 2011

Living together with his daughter Julyvonne in what looks to be a freezing part of French-speaking Canada, Jean-Francois struggles to get by doing odd jobs at both, a bowling alley and at a motel.  His former wife is in prison, and as such he has become incredibly protective of his only daughter, to the point that he is barely letting her live at all.  She doesn’t go to school, she’s rarely allowed out of the house, and she has no friends.  However, maybe Jean-Francois has a good reason to be scared for his daughter because a lot of strange things have been happening in this town.  First Julyvonne finds a caged tiger abandoned in the woods, and then she stumbles across a number of dead bodies piled together, frozen by the ice, also in the woods near her house.  She isn’t the only one who sees weird things, as her father comes across a body of his own which he hides under one of the motel rooms (which is soon to be closed down).  It’s all very weird and never fully explained.  However, after visiting his wife in prison, Jean-Francois begins to think that maybe he is smothering his daughter and goes about trying to let go and let her breathe and live, while improving both their lives for the better.

This was definitely one of those “film festival” films.  You enjoy it while you watch it, but once it is over you forget it, and you know that you will never think of it again.  I thought that the lead performance from Emmanuel Bilodeau as Jean-Francois was outstanding, and was the main reason I got what I did out of this film.  The other thing that struck me was the location and the extreme coldness of it.  There is a scene right at the beginning of the film, with the two of them walking down the road, and you can just feel the coldness of it all, with the powerful wind blowing them and the snow across the road.  While the film ends on an optimistic note, I’m not sure that I picked up on everything because as I was leaving a screening, I heard a man say to his wife “so he was a serial killer”, indicating that Jean-Francois was responsible for all those bodies in the woods.  Personally I never thought this once while watching the film, but would be interested in knowing if this theory was correct.

3 Stars.