Memory, the construction of the self or the abyss before death are some of the ideas that surround the strange melancholy of Oh Canadain which Paul Schrader adapts The abandonmentsthe latest novel by his friend Russell Banks, whose work he already made into a film in Affliction.
Schrader says goodbye here to the antihero archetype who starred in his trilogy consisting of The reverend, The card player y The Master Gardenerbut in Oh CanadaHowever, we continue in the field of tormented masculinity under the parameters of the Bressonian staging –here delineating the pathos on the face of a sad and elusive Richard Gere–, to follow the figure of a documentary filmmaker, Leonard Fife, who, in his dying days of health, decides to grant one last interviewexplain his life and redeem himself from some sins that have been hidden for too long.
As happens when we try to recount our memories, Schrader's film is a puzzle that does not fit together, where the past (Jacob Elordi) and the present of the protagonist become confused until offering, in this attempted farewell, an elusive identity, a face to face with death in sleep.
TECHNICAL SHEET
‘Oh, Canada’
