The Québécois director Philippe Lesage started making documentaries within the early two-thousands. He has since switched to narrative options, however they’ve been meaningfully formed by his nonfiction work, in methods each plain and thrilling to see. In “The Demons” (2015), set through the nineteen-eighties, Lesage anatomized the quiet terrors and looming uncertainties of his personal preadolescence with an unsettling, extremely disciplined watchfulness. He studied his characters up shut but additionally from afar, usually by way of a hard and fast digicam, and he allowed sequences to play out at size, with out interrupting the motion or hurrying it alongside. His type relaxed and ripened a bit in “Genesis” (2018), a wrenching trio of tales set in movement by the unruly and sometimes unrequited yearnings of youth. However even there the drama was powered by an eerie depth of commentary and once more displayed a reluctance to look away too quickly.
And so it feels notable that one of many characters in “Who by Fireplace,” Lesage’s affected person, emotionally roiling new movie, is a middle-aged Canadian director who has basically adopted his creator’s trajectory in reverse. The director, Blake Cadieux (Arieh Worthalter), had early success directing fiction movies—he even received an Oscar—however he has since retreated from the mainstream and now works in documentaries. “Who by Fireplace” unfolds over a number of days and nights in a distant, mountainous stretch of Quebec, the place Blake, who owns a lodge within the space, has invited a handful of pals and colleagues to remain. It’s by no means clear precisely when the story is ready, although cellphones are visibly absent, and never simply due to high-altitude Wi-Fi points; one customer, who’s writing a novel, has introduced alongside a handbook typewriter.
Because the movie opens, one of many friends, a screenwriter named Albert Gary (Paul Ahmarani), is driving to satisfy Blake, and has introduced alongside his college-aged daughter, Aliocha (Aurélia Arandi-Longpré); his son, Max (Antoine Marchand-Gagnon); and Max’s good friend, Jeff (Noah Parker). The boys are of their late teenagers, and Jeff, who goals of changing into a filmmaker, is keen to ingratiate himself with Blake, who will choose them up in a seaplane and take them to the lodge. His pleasure at assembly the director is matched—and, finally, surpassed—by his pleasure at proximity to Aliocha. We’re clued in to these emotions virtually instantly, when Jeff, nervously sitting subsequent to her at the back of the automobile, slips his hand into the seat crevice between his leg and hers. You possibly can virtually see his hand considering, so intently does the digicam linger on its each fidget and hesitation. It’s possible you’ll bear in mind this closeup later, when Jeff’s hand is put to extra aggressive use after Aliocha rebuffs his clumsy come-on.
Lesage is attentive to such bursts of emotional whiplash; in regular buildups and abrupt releases of pressure, he exhibits how rapidly superficial boundaries of politeness can fall away. Not lengthy after Jeff meets Blake, he mentions a semi-autobiographical movie of Blake’s after which poses a too-forward query about his household historical past. “You don’t maintain again,” Blake replies. However he doesn’t maintain again, both, and Worthalter, who made a fiery defendant within the nice French courtroom drama “The Goldman Case” (2023), peels again Blake’s pleasant, smiling layers to disclose an smug alpha beneath.
Blake and Albert are outdated pals and former collaborators—the movies they labored on collectively have been their biggest profession successes—and it’s clear, even earlier than they get to the lodge, that they’re in for a bumpy reunion. The very first thing Blake does after they meet is topic Albert to a seemingly innocent prank, one which Albert, a little bit of a joker himself, simply laughs off, although the hostility that underpins it’s barely disguised. Later, on the lodge, there’s an unnervingly humorous sequence during which Blake overpowers Albert, wrestles him onto a mattress, and, amid exasperated protests, kisses his uncovered paunch. It’s a rambunctious show of male bonding whose performative exaggeration is revealing, blurring the road the place affection ends and aggression begins.
After all, it’s aggression that quickly involves the fore. “Who by Fireplace” is structured round three skillfully modulated dinner sequences, every of which is filmed in an uninterrupted take that makes very good use of the movie’s capacious wide-screen compositions. (The cinematographer is Balthazar Lab.) Blake and Albert, their tongues loosened by wine, reopen after which scratch viciously at outdated wounds, calling out private failures {and professional} betrayals. Blake is accused of getting drifted into high-toned seriousness; Albert, now writing for tv, is branded a sellout. The digicam watches and watches, its calm, unblinking stasis amplifying each nervousness.
There are others at dinner, too, and though they largely hover on the periphery, shifting of their seats and exchanging uncomfortable glances, their presence tells a narrative of its personal. There may be Blake’s editor, Millie (Sophie Desmarais), a quietly soothing presence; a chef, Ferran (Guillaume Laurin); and the lodge’s “non secular information,” Barney (Carlo Harrietha). In time, they are going to be joined on the desk by Blake’s actress good friend, Hélène, who’s performed by Irène Jacob—greatest identified for her work in Krzysztof Kieślowski’s “The Double Life of Véronique” (1991) and “Three Colours: Crimson” (1994)—and is accompanied by her accomplice, Eddy (Laurent Lucas). As the times and nights put on on, these different pals of Blake’s, by design or not, get drawn into the rivalry with Albert. Additionally they serve to remind him, by way of their easygoing jollity with their host, that the previous could be very a lot the previous, and this journey down reminiscence lane can be remembered as a short, ugly blip. Blake has moved on.
Lesage, who’s in his late forties, has usually gravitated towards turbulent tales of youth, rooted in autobiographical inspirations. In current interviews, he’s famous that, whereas “The Demons” and “Genesis” have been impressed by private occasions, “Who by Fireplace” was loosely drawn from an expertise recounted to him by his older brother, Jean-François Lesage, a documentary filmmaker. That will clarify why it’s initially tough to get a deal with on the story’s level of emotional identification; the youthful Lesage’s sympathies really feel extra ambiguously unfold out than typical, extra evenly dispersed throughout the body. That is the primary of the director’s options I’ve seen with a really intergenerational focus, during which older characters register as extra than simply distant, inattentive figures. Regardless of its constricted, remoted setting, the movie feels extra psychologically expansive than its predecessors; the characters are frequently, and sometimes surprisingly, repositioned in relation to at least one one other, and at any time when the strain threatens to show claustrophobic, the good outdoor beckon.
It takes a little bit of time, then, for Jeff to emerge because the closest factor the movie has to a protagonist, and tellingly, almost all these moments of revelation happen in nature. After his ill-advised go at Aliocha, Jeff flees into the darkness of the encircling forest, will get misplaced, and spends the night time at an deserted cabin—a doubtlessly chastening expertise, however one from which Jeff, annoyed and petulant, learns virtually nothing. Many times, he’s propelled into motion by a flamable mixture of lust and anger—each all the time near the floor of Parker’s fiercely expressive efficiency—solely to search out himself in a survival thriller of kinds, confronted with the unyielding fury of the weather and the inadequacy of his personal physique. At numerous factors, Blake takes his friends fly-fishing, canoeing, and searching—and, each time, has to rescue Jeff from himself. In essentially the most heightened of those interventions, the 2 of them, each superb at behaving badly, flip their very own rage towards one another.
When the film was screened on the New York Movie Competition, in October, the critic Beatrice Loayza, writing in Film Comment, astutely identified that Jeff’s “emotional ups and downs appear to find out the movie’s shifting types—it’s as if he have been already behind the digicam, utilizing cinema to articulate what he might by no means say aloud.” If “Who by Fireplace” will be learn as an indictment of male fragility, then Lesage, in aligning himself with Jeff, can not assist but additionally indict himself. He might even be acknowledging some inherent cruelty within the inventive impulse, a minimum of because it’s skilled by males; Albert, a screenwriter, is hardly exempted from this circle of poisonous manhood. In contrast, there’s Aliocha, an aspiring novelist, who emerges, in Arandi-Longpré’s supremely watchful efficiency, because the movie’s least predictable character and maybe essentially the most fascinating. Hardly unaware of her capability to scale back males to blithering idiots, Aliocha follows her personal impulses and wishes, leaps into motion because the event calls for, and, in a single haunting interlude, sings a quavering model of John Grant’s “Marz”—a bittersweet expression of nostalgia for earlier, extra harmless days of youth.
As in his earlier movies, Lesage makes use of music to impressed, typically incongruously highly effective impact; somebody places on the B-52’s “Rock Lobster” and an impromptu dance celebration erupts, during which everybody’s pent-up anxieties discover a joyous, if momentary, launch. The conspicuously absent tune right here is the one that offers the film its title. Leonard Cohen’s “Who by Fireplace” ruminates on the inevitability and unpredictability of dying, and its absence from the soundtrack solely underscores the creeping insidiousness of these themes within the movie, during which rage and remorse are finally uncovered as flimsy bulwarks towards an inescapable finish. Lesage hasn’t misplaced his affinity for youth and its limitless sense of chance. However right here, amid towering cliffs and treacherous rivers, he leaves his characters, and the viewers, astride an abyss. ♦
