Canadian Front, 2008

March 13-20

The eight films having their New York premieres during MoMA’s annual survey of new Canadian cinema resort alternately to personal drama, political satire, or clever genre manipulation, but propose a consistently cynical outlook.

Two entries explore working-class strife, with characters compensating for socio-economic impotence by exercising agency in the ring. The series’ headlining film – Poor Boy’s Game by director Clement Virgo – stars Danny Glover and Rossif Sutherland (Kiefer’s half brother). The film follows violent outbursts between lower-class black and white communities in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Honoring boxing movie conventions, Virgo’s film is all about men, their bruised egos and quests for affirmation through physical domination. Though more sophisticated than most boxing films, its final image of multiracial camaraderie predictably excludes women.

Le Ring (Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette’s first feature) follows hardheaded twelve year-old Jessy (Maxime Desjardins-Tremblay) growing up in Montreal’s roughest neighborhood. As his family falls apart, Jessy looks to amateur wrestling as an outlet for his anger, but discovers the matches are rigged. Le Ring ingeniously subverts the boxing trope used in Poor Boy’s Game. When it turns out the rules inside the ring are as unfair and arbitrary as those outside, Jessy looks for more durable solutions than cathartic violence.

The biggest film in Canadian Front, 2008 – except maybe the split screen psychodrama The Tracey Fragments starring Juno’s Ellen Page – Denys Arcand’s Days of Darkness is also about a Montrealer coping without hitting. Jean-Marc (Marc Labrèche), the middle-aged peon in a monolithic bureaucracy, daydreams of fame while his family plugs into blackberries and iPods. This archetypal middle-class white man’s anxieties over becoming obsolete produce terrific satire, and some silly set pieces.

This preview appears in the March 12 issue of The L Magazine, and can be read here.