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You never really know which films are going to draw a crowd at this festival. I figured I was safe only showing up a few minutes early for a Canadian film by Charles Binamé that’s adapted from a play. But of course, this one features filmmaking wunderkind Xavier Dolan in a starring role. So I had to sit on the theatre floor for about 15 minutes.
Until the first walk-outs left empty seats behind.
As you know, walkouts at press and industry screenings don’t mean much when you’ve crammed an unreasonable number of films into the line-up. Still, a high walkout rate never bodes well. I won’t venture to say how many left (not many more than normal), but as someone who stayed, I wasn’t all too riveted to my seat.
Dolan plays a mental patient who holds the secret to a doctor’s disappearance, but he never truly inhabits the character. His mannered affections came off as a Christoph Waltz imitation, and the story itself loses a lot of energy by the mid-point. Binamé knows how to move a camera in tight spaces to off-set staged exchanges, but when the mind-games grow wary, there’s little else to latch onto. Other than those comfortable arm rests I finally had.
Sincerely,
Christopher
