“People lack imagination.” This is how controversial Quebecois celebrity author Nelly Arcan (Mylène Mackay) accounts for the public’s prurient desire to know just how much of her bestselling novel, “Putain” (“Whore”), is informed by her experiences as a call girl in Anne Émond’s sympathetic-to-a-fault deconstructed biopic “Nelly.” But imagination is the one thing that Arcan herself does not lack. Love, understanding, self-control, calm, and ultimately, tragically, the will to keep on living — all these things are in short supply. But of imagination, if anything, Nelly had a surfeit.
So much so that, writer-director Émond posits, she imagined herself into a state of fragmented identity, inventing several different personas, each to protect or conceal another in a kind of psychological shell game that eventually became too exhausting and confusing to maintain. At the age of just 36, in 2009, Arcan hanged herself. This tragic end inevitably exerts a retrospective lunar pull on the film,...
So much so that, writer-director Émond posits, she imagined herself into a state of fragmented identity, inventing several different personas, each to protect or conceal another in a kind of psychological shell game that eventually became too exhausting and confusing to maintain. At the age of just 36, in 2009, Arcan hanged herself. This tragic end inevitably exerts a retrospective lunar pull on the film,...
- 9/5/2018
- by Jessica Kiang
- Variety Film + TV
While you can debate the success of politically motivated events like 1970’s October Crisis in Quebec, Canada, you can’t question their danger removed from the cause. The media reports the carnage whether terrorist bombings or kidnappings and murder. They provide an objective account of what’s happening—in this case the Front de libération du Québec (Flq) wreaking havoc to force secession from the country and become an autonomous nation—and leave it to their viewers to understand the context. Adults can handle this because many already have an opinion one way or the other. But children don’t. Children only see their parents’ reactions and the aftermath. If they’re led to understand violence can achieve one’s goals, they might follow suit when their own backs are against the wall.
This is an interesting wrinkle many forget with rebellion proving much more palatable. Artists generally gravitate to...
This is an interesting wrinkle many forget with rebellion proving much more palatable. Artists generally gravitate to...
- 2/20/2018
- by Jared Mobarak
- The Film Stage
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