Hubert Sauper discusses making his film We Come as Friends, creative nonfiction cinema, and the geography of colonialism. This is an excerpt from the ebook In Their Own Words: Documentary Masters Vol. 1. To read the full interview, purchase a copy of the ebook here.
[Read more…] about Director Hubert Sauper talks We Come As FriendsBest of The Seventh Row
Review: Stewart and Eisenberg elevate the shit out of American Ultra
The best thing about American Ultra, a movie about two stoners who find out the CIA is trying to kill them, is how incredibly real, lived in, and sweet their relationship is. Without the reuniting Adventureland pair Kristen Stewart and Jesse Eisenberg as the leads, the film could have easily been just another dumb stoner action film with moderate laughs.
Instead, we get one of the best recent films, along with Neighbors, about how a couple in a long-term committed relationship deal with a crisis. As a team, Eisenberg and Stewart approach being like a modern Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn, though the dialogue in the film, admittedly, isn’t at that level. It’s almost entirely in their delivery.
Eisenberg plays Mike Howell, a sweet, loving, and slightly helpless young man with a penchant for weed and a mindless job at the local Cash and Coin where he draws comics and invents stories. The excitement in his day consists largely of changing the day of the week on the sign outside the store, which advertises discounts inside. He lives with his girlfriend Phoebe (Kristen Stewart), with whom he shares a fondness for marijuana, as well as absolutely everything else.
This is one incredibly connected couple. We watch them cuddling in bed together, professing their love with complete earnestness and sharing their troubles. They’ll call each other in the middle of the day just to share a minor anecdote or idea. And they regularly cuddle on the hood of their car while Mike tells the latest story he’s come up with that he’s too laid back to consider writing down despite Phoebe’s encouragement — one of them is about Apollo Ape, the astronaut monkey [sic] who goes on adventures.
Mike would be lost without Phoebe. He’s got anxiety about many things; the film opens with him having a panic attack at the airport about the prospect of leaving town, foiling their plans for a vacation in Hawaii. Phoebe regularly calms him down, offers sensible but not condescending advice, and returns his banter tit for tat. She gets him like nobody else and vice versa. He’s so carelessly stoned that he can’t even make an omelette without almost setting the house on fire. Meanwhile, he offers her immense generosity, care, and love. But it’s also clear that they’re both far too smart to be working these jobs and wasting their minds away looking for the next high.
Two bizarre things happen to Mike on successive nights that will forever change his life. First, CIA Agent Victoria Lasseter (a kick-ass Connie Britton) pays him a visit to warn him he’s in danger and to “activate” him. It turns out he’s a sleeper CIA agent, with super-power like fighting and spy skills, but when the program was cancelled, his mind was wiped. Lasseter tries to explain what’s happening, but she uses such obfuscating language that it might as well be gibberish; Mike reacts politely with confused amusement.
The second event is that a pair of assassins stop by the store to try to kill him, but armed with no more than a spoon and some hot soup, he turns the tables and kills them, instead. Completely freaked out by his surprising dexterity — and the accidental murders he just committed — he naturally calls Phoebe for help and support. She helps him strategize, as they suddenly find themselves chased by hundreds of deadly assassins who will stop at nothing to kill them.
If you want to see a feat of great, subtle physical, acting, you need look no further than Eisenberg’s performance in these two scenes. This is what Tony Zhou is talking about when he praised Robin Williams’s performances. Most of the humour from Mike’s reactions to Lasseter’s seeming nonsense come entirely from Eisenberg’s very subtle facial movements: his eyes darting from left to right or his eyebrow twitching. Immediately after killing the two assassins, the quick, defensive movement he makes to drop the gun he can’t believe he’s holding says everything about how he’s feeling in that moment, and it’s hilarious. The juxtaposition between Mike’s ridiculous skills and his quiet demeanor is essential to the film’s brand of absurdist comedy.
Eisenberg wrongly gets a bad reputation for playing the same neurotic characters over and over again. Yet even though neurosis is one shared characteristic of all three of his roles this year, his performances couldn’t be more different, both in how he physically creates the characters and their overall personalities. As Dave Lipsky in The End of the Tour, he was a power-hungry intellectual, always conscious of how small he is. As Jonah in Louder Than Bombs, he was a sensitive academic in over his head, struggling to maintain the façade of having a perfect life. And as Mike, he’s an unassuming, warm presence who can’t believe what’s happening to him.
Of course, Kristen Stewart is every bit Eisenberg’s match, and she has to work twice as hard to infuse her character with pathos, humanity, and specificity because it’s so under-written. When they’ve been running from their assassins for some time, Phoebe refuses to let Mike make the decisions because he’s been making bad ones. The way Stewart combines small gestures with sardonic dialogue to illustrate his recent mistakes is hilarious. And she manages to do it in a way that’s supportive and gentle rather than condescending, without ever coming close to giving up any little bit of her agency. They’re a team, and she’s the brains behind the operation. By effectively playing it straight, she and Eisenberg manage to create realistic characters in a wholly unrealistic situation.
Topher Grace gets the thankless role of playing the young, entitled upstart in the CIA with questionable judgement whose job it is to foil our heroes at every step. He’s about as annoying as humanly possible, but that’s the part as written: this is like Eric Foreman at his absolute worse, except as a grown up. It’s a shame he’s not a more interesting nemesis, but then screenwriter Max Landis is following the golden rule of Sherlock Holmes: make the villain just dumb enough that our leads who occasionally lose their common sense can easily and believably foil his every move.
Much of the plot that follows is silly and predictable, as well as being, with few exceptions, shot unimaginatively: director Nima Nourizadeh effectively sets the camera up in front of the actors and shoots, with next to no thought about purposeful framing or movement, aside from trying to get it to look nice. And you know what? It’s a lot of fun, even if the film loses steam in the second half. It isn’t nearly as good as Eisenberg and Stewart deserve, but spending 90 minutes with this pair is a pretty great way to spend an evening.
More great recent performances by Jesse Eisenberg
Review of The End of the Tour
Review of Louder Than Bombs
Review of The Double
Deafening silence: Phoenix and The Look of Silence
Christian Petzold’s film Phoenix and Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Look of Silence are both about the need to face and make peace with the painful past that would seemingly be easier to ignore.
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Earlier this year, the Art Gallery of Ontario held an exhibit of Henryk Ross’s photos from the Lodz Ghetto. It was hidden in the corner of the museum, and most of us who saw it were Jews. I had enormous trouble trying to persuade my gentile friends to see it with me. They heard the words “holocaust photographs” and decided they’d rather spend their Sunday afternoon with less depressing thoughts. Yet this was no ordinary exhibit. It’s the first outside of Israel to display the only photographic evidence we have of ghettos during the holocaust that’s not only not Nazi propaganda but taken by a Jew in the ghetto.
Some images are particularly hard to look at: the deportations, starving bodies, and family photos of children that would be exterminated the next day. Everything about Ross’s photographs was heroic. He used his Statistics Department camera to surreptitiously snap forbidden photos. He documented the hardships and the good. When the Nazis destroyed the synagogue, he captured the rubble and the man who rescued the Torah from destruction. Taking and then hiding the photos was an act of bravery. But what is the point if we don’t bear witness, no matter how much we don’t want to? And if we don’t bear witness, how can we live with what’s happened and prevent it from happening again?
[clickToTweet tweet=”In PHOENIX and THE LOOK OF SILENCE, the traumas of the past are still part of the present.” quote=”In both films, the traumas of the past are still very much part of the present.”]
Facing the past when ignoring it is easier
It’s this very conundrum that the characters in Christian Petzold’s post-World War II film Phoenix struggle with. How do you face and make peace with the painful past that would seemingly be easier to ignore? It’s also the subject of Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary about the Indonesian genocide in 1965, The Look of a Silence. In both films, we see people intent on, if not forgiving (or apologizing), then forgetting. Excavating past wounds would be too painful. But no matter how much they’d like to pretend otherwise, the traumas of the past are still very much part of the present.
Listen to our podcast about Transit
When Petzold’s film Phoenix opens with the tune “Speak Low,” it’s pitch black outside. Nelly (Nina Hoss), a former nightclub singer, is en route to a hospital for facial reconstruction surgery. Recently liberated from the concentration camps, her face is bandaged from the gunshot wound she was lucky enough to survive. Everything about her demeanour is small and feeble, meek and embarrassed. Hoss hunches over, taking up as little space as possible while her hands quiver slightly at the smallest provocation.
[clickToTweet tweet=”In both films, people are intent on forgetting because excavating old wounds would be too painful.” quote=”We see people intent on forgetting because excavating past wounds would be too painful.”]
In Christian Petzold’s film Phoenix, Nelly also begins in denial
All Nelly wants is to return to her old life, to how things were before. That begins with repairing her face, though the surgeon warns her that it will never be quite the same. Her denial runs deep. She still insists she’s not a Jew. Nelly’s close friend Lene (Nina Kunzendorf) informs her that her husband Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld) sold her out to the Nazis. But Nina remains unfazed by his alleged betrayal, convinced Lene must be mistaken. She can’t wait to reunite with him. His memory, she claims, is what kept her alive through her struggles in the camps.
Nelly spends most of this atmospheric and stunningly gorgeous film as a ghost in limbo. When she leaves the hospital, she emerges amid the rubble of Berlin, tentative in every movement. She takes temporary rooms in the city while Lene prepares the paperwork for their passage to Israel. Nelly seems less than thrilled with the plan. The apartment is nice, clean, and well-maintained with good furniture but sparse. As the camera keeps its distance from Nelly, we feel emptiness. A house is not a home. Aside from the landlady, they never cross paths with anyone else. The place has the appearance of a boarding house. It’s another kind of limbo like the sterile, seemingly empty hospital.
Nelly’s husband doesn’t seem to recognize her in Christian Petzold’s film Phoenix
When she finally crosses paths with her husband, he’s changed his name and doesn’t recognize her (she never identifies herself). But he does think she looks just enough like his wife, Nelly, to help him scheme to collect her inheritance. Holed up with him in his dank, basement apartment, he gruffly teaches her how to be her former self. But there’s a warmth and tenderness behind it all. He becomes obsessed with making her resemble the old Nelly in appearance. In so doing, she finds herself again from the outside in.
But his cluelessness about the camps and disinterest in learning more is troubling. To him, they’re merely a fact, a part of history. To her, they’re vivid memories, haunting every movement. Johnny’s plan is full of fantasy. He wants her to appear to return by train, dressed to the nines and full of joy. In other words, he wants her to pretend that she hasn’t experienced the same horrors as the other returnees. He wants her to be glamorous and attract attention. It’s immaterial to him that most survivors look so run down that gentiles avert their gazes and avoid asking questions. The inauthentic plan bothers her, but Johnny knows what she doesn’t: how other German gentiles think. Nobody will notice, and nobody will ask about the camps.
[clickToTweet tweet=”There comes a point when not being able to tell her story is worse than telling her story.” quote=”There comes a point when not being able to tell her story is worse than telling her story.”]
Is Johnny also in denial?
Does Johnny know it’s her? There’s a certain kind of complicity here. So long as he thinks she’s not his wife, he can boss her around, teach her facts, and be in control. If he were to realize (or admit to himself) that she is who she is, the power dynamic would shift immediately. He’d be ashamed, beneath her. In one scene, Petzold builds the blocking around how Nelly tries to hide her forearm in a not-quite-long-sleeved dress. We know what this means and why, and she’s squirming in awkward and evasive ways.
Yet Johnny never bats an eye — nor did I, the first two times I saw the film. On re-watch, her intentions seems so obvious that I could hardly believe how subtle it seemed before. In fact, it’s easier to just think she’s squeamish as no doubt Johnny does. On some level, he must know, but it’s too hard to admit. It’s part of why he can’t hear stories of the camps.
Nina Hoss is remarkable in Christian Petzold’s film Transit
Hoss’s step-by-step transformation from trembling and small to straight-backed and ready to perform is a marvel, a fascinating performance to behold. The more Nelly gets her sense of self back from Johnny’s lessons, the more unsettling she finds his ability to sweep the war and all its horrors under the rug. Showing her a photo of their friends, he casually notes the ones that were Nazis. But to her, it’s jarring new data to process.
[clickToTweet tweet=”Hoss’s step-by-step transformation from trembling and small to straight-backed is a marvel.” quote=”Hoss’s step-by-step transformation from trembling and small to straight-backed and ready to perform is a marvel”]
She’s ready to believe the hard evidence of his betrayal at a certain point, because it fits, even if she’s still not ready to let go. There comes a point when not being able to tell her story is worse than telling her story. The more willing her friends are to treat the war as though it were in the distant past, the more alienated she becomes. Even if they weren’t directly responsible for the atrocities she experienced, they stood idly by. In the end, it’s only through a song that she can reveal herself, in a cathartic release of all that pain and emotion. It’s a heart-wrenching, beautiful ending; the final images are perfect. Surrounded by her friends’ denial, she no longer belongs. Until they can face facts, she never will again.
Acceptance doesn’t happen in Phoenix until the film’s climax
Though Nelly’s ultimate acceptance of this fact is the final, climactic moment in Phoenix, it’s a deep truth that informs and inspires the investigation of the past in The Look of Silence. Director Joshua Oppenheimer follows Adi as he confronts the men behind his brother’s slaughter with empathy and composure. Adi is a forty-year-old Indonesian optometrist whose brother was murdered in the 1965 genocide.
Perhaps “confronts” is the wrong word, for his goal is to generate a dialogue, make peace, get at the truth, and forgive, if given the opportunity. Adi was born two years after his brother, Ramli, was killed. He may not have been alive at the time, but the trauma of the coup is still fresh and present to Adi: the perpetrators are still in power. Almost everyone around him, including his neighbours, took part in the killings. They were richly rewarded for their service, too.
After The Act of Killing
In 2012, Oppenheimer released The Act of Killing, in which he interviewed war criminals, including the leaders of the death squads, who were responsible for the deaths of 1 million people when the Indonesian military overthrew the government. The historical record, a pile of lies still earnestly taught in schools, maintains that the victims were all “communists,” people without religion who deserved to be slaughtered, and chopped to pieces. In that film, the perpetrators boasted about their killings, re-enacting them in gory detail with glee, pride, and excitement.
When Oppenheimer showed the footage he’d recorded to his friend Adi, whom we see watching it on television in The Look of Silence, dumbstruck with horror, Adi concluded he needed to face these men himself. He felt that if they apologized, he could forgive them, and perhaps it would give him some closure. Oppenheimer shot The Look of Silence after he finished The Act of Killing but before it screened publicly anywhere.
Confronting perpetrators in The Look of Silence
The perpetrators they visit are all elderly men now, and Oppenheimer is very careful about how he introduces them. The first footage we see of each is of a seemingly normal, maybe even infirm old man, before a chyron flashes with an indictment. With calm, compassion, and genuine curiosity, Adi matter-of-factly asks them about their roles in the anti-communist purge. He tells them, “When I meet older people, I like to learn about the past.” Because Oppenheimer was doubtful that the men would be able to take the moral responsibility for what they had done, he doesn’t shoot these scenes as interviews. Rather, it’s an encounter between two people, where what’s most important is what goes unsaid.
Adi slowly probes the perpetrators. He asks where they were during the killings, whether they were a part of them, and if people still fear them. Surprisingly, most are anything but tight-lipped, though what they spout is a mix of party propaganda and lies, excuses for their actions. They may be able to own that they had murdered people, but not that they are culpable. As Adi refuses to accept what is so often lies, he probes them further, revealing inconsistencies with their story, and trying to have a real conversation with them.
Silence is a coping mechanism in both films: Oppenheimer’s The Look of Silence and Petzold’s Phoenix
Adi’s sense is that the men’s unwillingness to speak openly with the whole truth is indicative of just how deep their guilt runs: it’s a coping mechanism. In one scene, Adi meets with a family whom Oppenheimer knew well — he had spent months documenting the patriarch’s accounts of his slaughters. Yet they flat-out deny all accusations of his culpability or participation in the genocide. They get frustrated and angry. It’s one of the most powerful scenes in the film because it reveals what they’re incapable of saying, coping with, or facing. Ultimately, most will end up declaring, “past is past,” in an effort to end the conversation. Oppenheimer follows one instance with a gorgeous, literal image of water flowing under a bridge at night, a haunting reminder that these events are anything but.
The substance of the film is, unsurprisingly, in the silence. There’s the past that Adi’s parents won’t talk about, a deafening silence. There’s the past that the murderers are only too happy to recall — until they’re pressed about their lies. Adi gives them space, a silence to fill. Although Adi asks difficult questions, his silence is crucial, too, never issuing angry indictments, for his mission is to understand, to move forward, not to crucify. Oppenheimer tells so much in the closeups of Adi, stoically listening as the horrid words wash over him. So much is there in the faces of the men who refuse to own up to having done something wrong.
Breaking the silence in The Look of Silence
Oppenheimer’s film itself is an act of breaking that silence, bringing the past into focus where we can reckon with it. We can watch Phoenix, steeped in 1940s hairdos, jazz music, and the destroyed streets of Berlin, and convince ourselves that it was long ago, that we know better now. But The Look of Silence is proof that mass murder didn’t stop there and neither did the silence, among those involved or even indirectly culpable — essentially, anyone who wasn’t directly a victim.
The graphic descriptions of mass exterminations are horrifying to hear. When we see the pain in the faces of the victims’ families, we feel their pain, too. The streets are haunted, and Oppenheimer makes sure his imagery shows us this. The first bits of text on screen with background on the genocide overlays a nighttime video of military trucks approaching the camera, eerie and foreboding, yet the only sounds are of the crickets, not of the vehicles. Oppenheimer likens this subjective soundscape to a magical realism approach to documentary.
The Lodz Ghetto photos and The Look of Silence
Like looking through Ross’s photos of the Lodz Ghetto, there’s nothing ‘fun’ about watching The Look of Silence. But it’s important and moving and heroic. It’s a film that demands to be seen. If we don’t, we allow the record to remain unchanged, for the government’s propaganda and the poor Western reporting on the events to become the only record. Only by listening, by consenting to a broken silence, can we do anything to help the victims’ families grieve.
More films by Phoenix director Christian Petzold: Read our interview with Petzold on Transit and listen to the podcast on Transit.
Read more: Joshua Oppenheimer on the magic realist sound design of The Look of Silence >>
Maxime Giroux on his wonderful Hasidic Jew romance Felix and Meira
Québécois filmmaker Maxime Giroux discusses his TIFF-winner Felix and Meira, telling authentic stories about Hasidic Jews, and why he wanted to make the film.
In our 2019 Canadian Cinema Yearbook, we talked to Giroux about his more recent film The Great Darkened Days. The ebook is available to purchase here.
When I heard there was a new romance about Hasidic Jews in Montreal premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, I was instantly intrigued. And then it won the award for Best Canadian Film. What I hadn’t expected was that it would be such a touching, sweet, and thoughtful story of the heroine’s journey to emancipation. The film follows Meira (Hadas Yaron), a married Hasidic woman in her early twenties, who seems to be suffering from depression. Her religion no longer brings her joy, and all the patriarchal rules make her feel confined and imprisoned. Her devout husband, Shulem (Luzer Twersky), is commanding but not affectionate. He also takes little part in the care of their infant; she’s surreptitiously taking birth control pills so that she won’t be forced to have the gaggle of kids that’s expected.
When Meira encounters Félix (Martin Debreuil), a French Québécois man in her neighborhood who is grieving the loss of his father, an unexpected connection forms. He treats her like an equal with valid ideas and agency, and he offers her tenderness and understanding she’s never experienced. It’s enough to make her consider seriously leaving her community, something that’s clearly been on her mind for a while but that she hadn’t been able to act on.
Writer-director Maxime Giroux explores the ways in which all of the characters feel trapped in roles forced on them and the way they’re able to help each other find freedom and happiness. We also see the ways in which the mores and lifestyle of the French Québécois community, which is right in Meira’s neighbourhood, has started to seep into her consciousness and her view of the world. Félix and Meira is a classically shot film with long takes and many closeups, emphasizing the connection or disconnect between characters. The two-shots of Félix and Meira during their courtship reveal a real sweetness between them. I sat down with Giroux to talk about creating a realistic depiction of the Hasidic Jew community in Montreal, the predicaments of the characters, and the film’s wonderful musical choices.
Seventh Row (7R): Félix and Meira feels to me very much like a very Montreal film, like in some ways it couldn’t be set somewhere else.
Maxime Giroux (MG): For me, it is totally a Montreal film. When I present it New York or a place where there are some Hasidic people, they think that it’s universal. A lot of people think it’s a film that can be placed in a lot of different religions or a lot of different places in the world. But for me, it’s totally local. It’s my neighbourhood. It’s in French and English and Yiddish. Even in Israel, most people don’t speak Yiddish. They speak Hebrew. So you cannot be more Montreal than that: it’s cold; it’s winter-time; it’s grey; it’s depressing.
7R: I guess a lot of the main actors in Felix and Meira are not from Montreal.
MG: Hadas [Yaron who plays Meira] is from Israel and Luzer Twersky [who plays Shulem] is from Brooklyn. But the rest of the ex-Hasidic community who act in the film — there are five in total, two from New York and three from Montreal. Like, the cousin, she’s from Montreal. Those people really helped me to do this film. Without them, it would have been impossible to do this film.
I had read things in books so I knew that in the morning they had to wash their hands and pray. I knew that they had to put one foot in front of the other one and one shoe before the other one. But I never saw it in my life. I’m not there in the morning with them. So when Luzer Twersky did it, the first scene where we shot that, he was just doing what he had done for 22 years. It was pretty easy for him and maybe pretty painful also. But for me, it was the key for making that movie. It would be impossible to take normal actors for that.
7R: What language was the script in? Were there any challenges with working in multiple languages and with a cast that wasn’t fluent in all of them?
MG: First, we wrote the script in French. Then, it was translated into English, and then it was translated into Yiddish by Luzer. The second challenge was on the set because I had to speak in English with my actors most of the time. But at the same time, I discovered it’s way easier to do a film in English than in French.
English is the universal language of cinema, music, and stuff like that. You can say stuff in English that you cannot say in French, because it sounds too cheesy. For example, if I do a translation of Radiohead’s lyrics in French, it’s ridiculous. We cannot sing like that. Even Leonard Cohen, if you translate that into French, like literally, it doesn’t work. In English, it was super easy to work with the actors. It was way easier to work in English or Yiddish than in French. It’s a big reason why everywhere in the world does music in English. It’s way easier than doing music in Swedish or French.
7R: How did you decide on the costumes for Felix and Meira? Especially for Meira, I thought that you really got a sense of her personal style, even though she’s really confined in what she can actually wear. She’s very chic.
MG: Men are all the same: they all wear the same thing. But women, it’s something different, especially when they are in the house. I was surprised to see that, but there are some trends. Every year, there’s a new collection. Some women in some communities are more trendy than the others. And their clothing is super expensive. So we went to Brooklyn, and we went to some stores where they sold those kind of things. I was with Patricia, the costume designer, and together we chose the wardrobe for Meira. We had two challenges. First, trying to have some things that are accurate, that is true. But also, we had a small budget. The film was made with half a million dollars, which is nothing. We had so many people who needed to have costumes. We went with the 2013 collection.
But it’s true that, in a way, Meira is really, in French, we’d say “coquette.” She’s really cute with her clothing. And it’s something that I didn’t feel when I was not looking at them, when I was living in the neighbourhood. But now that I am interested in them, I can see that women are trying more and more to have their own personality. I guess that they are influenced by the women in the neighbourhood. They want to be cute. Those women are 18, 19, 22 years old, and I feel that more and more they look at other women. They talk to other women, non-Hasidic women. Even in the last two years, some women look at me for a few seconds, which is totally new, because ten years ago, it was impossible. So I think it’s changing also in their community.
7R: There’s no technology that marks the era. You don’t see any cell phones. You don’t see any computers. Even when they’re listening to music, they’re listening to records. So it took me a while to figure out that it was actually present day.
MG: Yes, it is in 2014. The reason that I did it like this is that Meira and her community, they really live like they were living in 1950 or 1960. They don’t watch our TV shows. They’re not supposed to go on the internet except if they are going for business. But more and more, they are going on the internet. Felix, the Québecois, he’s also a bit old school. He doesn’t accept the new way of life, which is about more competition, more money, more always. And that’s why he doesn’t feel well in his society. He is a loner. Some people can say he’s a loser. But why is he a loser? Because he doesn’t want to play that game, our game of the capitalist consumer and competition. For me, he’s an old school guy.
I still know some people who don’t really use cell phones and don’t have their Apple computer at the cafe. I still know some people like that. Especially these guys that are 40 years old. It’s true that people of 25-years old, there are no people like that anymore. But in my generation, I’m 38 now, I still know some people like that. So that’s the reason why we think it’s maybe not 2015. But at the same time, we didn’t change anything in the apartment for that. The apartment we rent for Felix, it was like this. And same thing for the father. So some people really live in those houses.
7R: There are these two songs in Felix and Meira. There’s the Wendy Rene song that plays multiple times in the movie and the Leonard Cohen song towards the end. They both have a pretty important and prominent role in the film. How did you choose those songs?
MG: For Wendy Rene, this song was in the first draft of the script. It was there from the beginning. As soon as I knew that I will do this film, and Alex Laferrière, the co-writer, knew that she will listen to “Goy music,” non-Jewish music, I decided she will go for soul music, and music from African-American black women from those eras. Those women were probably sons and daughters of slaves, and they decided to sing and even take a guitar, and play a guitar like if they were men. When I heard this song, I felt that it was what Meira felt inside of her, and I wanted to be able to express that at the end of the movie.
Same thing when she goes dancing in the Latino bar in New York. The woman is dancing and she is really free in the way that she dances. For me, it was another time it’s a woman who is just free, who just does what she wants and feels comfortable. It’s a kind of model for Meira.
Leonard Cohen came to me when we were in the editing room. I just felt that moment needed some music to give it a little bit more emotion. I liked the fact that it’s the Jewish Montrealer singer. And the story of this song, you know, that’s talking about this love triangle. This song was just perfect for that moment of the film.
7R: In the scene towards the end of Felix and Meira, when Shulem goes to see Felix, it was the first time I felt like I really got some window into how Shulem was feeling. We spend a lot of the film thinking about how Meira feels very trapped and alone. It’s kind of a sweet scene, but it’s also patriarchal. When you were writing that scene, what were you thinking about, as far as the purpose of that scene and putting it together?
MG: That scene was the most difficult one to write. It’s strange, because I think it’s the heart of the film, even if Meira is not there. Everything is in that scene. We understand that, in a way, Shulem is not as bad as we thought. I think he understands that his wife cannot live in that religion, that she cannot have those boundaries. We understand that he needs those boundaries. The story of Felix and his father is similar to that of Meira and Shulem. So when Shulem is reading the letter for Felix, he’s also reading the letter for him, you know, which is a kind of irony.
When Shulem says, “Please take care of my wife,” when we were writing that, we were like, “Oh my god, this is big. This is pretty much impossible.” But when we presented the film at the New York Jewish Film Festival a few months ago, there were a lot of ex-Hasidic members in the room. One woman came to me, and said “I’m an ex-Hasidic woman. I was cheating on my husband. At one point, I left my husband, and he went to the guy, and he said the exact same thing to him.” So I was like, “Oh my god.”
At the same time, it’s true that it’s really patriarchal. He goes to see Felix to tell [him to take care of Meira]. I was really afraid of this scene. And at one point, there was an edit without the scene. You’re always trying to cut scenes, because you think it’s too long. But now I understand that it’s the scene that is the heart of the film.
7R: To what degree do you think Shulem is happy in his religion at the end of Felix and Meira?
MG: That’s a good question. That’s the first time someone asked me this question about Shulem. They always ask me the question about Meira. But is he happy with his religion? I don’t think so. He was born into that religion. Like me, I was born French Québecois, which means, yeah, I’m happy to be a French Québecois, and I live in French. But at the same time, I would prefer to be an English person. It would be way more easier for me. But what can I do? I have to live with that all my life.
It’s the same thing for him. You know, some French Québecois, they decide to leave: they go to Toronto, New York, anywhere. Me, I decided to stay in Montreal. I will always stay in Montreal even though I would prefer to go somewhere else sometimes. But I’m afraid. I think he’s a little afraid of going somewhere else where he doesn’t have such boundaries and he has no limits, even if we do have limits in our society. He’s afraid of that. He needs those boundaries. It’s the opposite for Meira. She doesn’t want those [boundaries or limits]. She doesn’t need them. I don’t think Shulem is really happy, but I think he needs it.
7R: Is that part of what interested you in making Felix and Meira, looking at how women are treated in religion?
MG: For sure. For me, the story of Meira and her emancipation is the story of my mother. My mother is from Quebec in the 1960s, and it was really Catholic hardcore. It was really different from now. At one point, this generation became feminist, and they decided to put away the church. It’s the story of my mother. It’s the story of every woman in every country in every era, and it’s still going to be the story of the woman in 10 years. Just look at what’s happening right now with religion and women. It’s a disaster, and we’re there doing nothing. We’re just like “Yeah, freedom of religion.” Yeah, it’s true, they have the right to believe in any religion, but let’s try to be equal, women and men.
More articles about Jewish films
Review of Song of Songs at TIFF15
Review of Demon at TIFF15
Review of No Home Movie at TIFF15
Review of Phoenix
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