In Oh, CanadaPaul Schrader deconstructs in small, incisive touches the concept of “the man behind the artist”. Both elegiac and lucid, the film has as its protagonist a dying documentary filmmaker who is taking stock of the end of his life… in front of the camera of his former students. His name is Leonard Fife and he is an emblematic figure of the left. However, his reputation is based on a lie, as he confesses in close-up. Unveiled in official competition in Cannes, Oh, Canada marks the reunion between Schrader and Richard Gere, star of his 1980 hit, American Gigolo (The American gigolo).
The film is based on the penultimate novel by Russell Banks, an author whose work Paul Schrader had already visited with the remarkable Afflictionin 1997. In what stands out as one of the director’s fine late vintages, Richard Gere delivers a performance that is by turns poignant and fascinating: easily one of the best of his long career.
It must be said that Schrader, basically an immense screenwriter (Taxi Driver / Taxi driver ; Raging Bull / Like a wild bull), spoils him when it comes to partition.
Full of contradictions (an idol of the left who lives in a mansion), Leonard is a man on the run: on the run from his past lives, on the run from himself… According to the official story, he once emigrated clandestinely to Canada in order to not to go fight in Vietnam. A man of convictions. Really ?
However, well before this episode, Leonard was already fleeing… but who? What ?
Built entirely of flashbacks and fragmentary memories, the structure sees the elderly protagonist (Gere) emerge in his reminiscences, observing with detachment the young man he was (Jacob Elordi). Sometimes, this Leonard of the present completely replaces that of the past: a way for Paul Schrader to show that Leonard is fleeing, precisely, and literally, into his memories.
It is only at the very end that Leonard will stop hiding and face this deception that once transformed his existence into a vast deception.
Completely alone
Paradoxically, while Leonard sets out to debunk his own myth, some refuse to do so: we care about our heroes, even if it turns out that they are anything but heroic. Pleading that Leonard perhaps no longer has all his faculties, Emma (Uma Thurman), his third wife (the film takes care to specify), would prefer to send the documentarians home. But Leonard insists: he will tell the truth, for the first time, for the last time.
Regarding this third marriage: Leonard’s volatile temperament is established during various flash-backlike the one showing him having an affair with his best friend’s partner (the film takes care to specify this, bis), spouse played again by Uma Thurman. Decades later, did Leonard fall in love with Emma because of her resemblance to this former lover? This is one of the many secondary considerations that the dense storyline raises.
-Whatever the case, in front of the camera which has come to immortalize his confidences, Leonard is completely alone. This, like the majority of his predecessors at Paul Schrader, for whom the man locked in solitude is more than a recurring figure, but a trademark, as the main interested party confided to us in an interview.
Knowing that we are never as alone as when facing death, Oh, Canada perhaps constitutes the final opus of the single “Schraderian” man.
Penetrating gaze
One thing is certain, unlike his dying antihero, Paul Schrader displays rejoicing “cinematic health” at 78 years old. This, after almost succumbing to COVID just before tackling Oh, Canadashot in a hurry with a tiny budget, again, dixit the filmmaker.
Merging his formal audacity from the 1980s (Cat People / The feline ; Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters ; The Comfort of Strangers / Strange seduction) to the “Bressionian” stripping of his most recent films (First Reformed / Dialogue with God ; The Card Counter ; Master Gardener), Schrader further assigns to each era or memory stratum its own image ratio (1.33:1, 2.39:1…) and its own chromatic palette. So that, in Leonard’s meandering memorials, we are never lost.
Not everything works perfectly, like the sudden, momentary shift in focus to Leonard’s son. Note: the presence of Quebecois Caroline Dhavernas, self-effacing and all the more accurate in the role of Leonard’s nurse.
Here and there, Schrader quotes his masters. Besides Bresson, we spot Dreyer, Welles (ah, that shot and that whisper, at the very end)… Cinephiles have plenty to keep themselves busy. And so with a penetrating look, but not devoid of empathy, Schrader exposes a great artist behind whom hid a very small man.
