La Coupure
½*/****
starring Valérie Cantin, Marc Marans, Marie-Christine Perreault, Manon Brunelle
written and directed by Jean Châteauvert
by Bill Chambers As much as I'd love to jump on the C.R.A.Z.Y. bandwagon, I found its characters repellent and its soundtrack selections laughably pedestrian. (The picture's recycling of FM staples like "Space Oddity" and "Sympathy for the Devil" doesn't achieve suture so much as it makes the director, an alleged vinylphile, look like a philistine with an awfully small record collection.) Still, I can't deny that it marks a sort of progress for Canadian film in that it at least gropes for joy, has relatively healthy attitudes about sex, and isn't without peripheral vision. While it's still too soon to determine if C.R.A.Z.Y. will go down as a trailblazer or an anomaly, Torn Apart (La Coupure), which hails from the same province (Québec), nevertheless feels like a giant step backwards. The movie opens with soccer mom Christine (Valérie Cantin) doing the horizontal mambo with her lover Christophe (Marc Marans) in an apartment with the shades incriminatingly drawn. When she returns home, her mother (Marie-Christine Perreault) says something to the effect of, "How was your visit with your brother Christophe?" Mom seems to know that their relationship is incestuous, as do Christine's adolescent children–son and daughter effigies of Christophe and Christine–and the cuckold, Mario (Michael Kelly), but why should they seek catharsis when they can torture themselves with this intel? A suffocatingly insular Moebius strip of masochism, Torn Apart (the French title's literal translation is "The Cut") exists solely to maintain the cinematic status quo. It doesn't look like much, either. PROGRAMME: Canada First!
