FILMS/
IT’S NOT ME, I SWEAR!
C’est pas moi, je le jure!
World Cinema
Canada, 2008, 110 minutes
SHOWTIMES
Fri, Apr 24 / 5:45 / Kabuki / ITSN24K
Sat, Apr 25 / 2:45 / Kabuki / ITSN25K
Tue, Apr 28 / 1:00 / Kabuki / ITSN28K
CREDITS
- prod
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Luc Déry, Kim McCraw
- scr
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Philippe Falardeau
- cam
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André Turpin
- editor
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Frédérique Broos
- mus
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Patrick Watson
- cast
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Antoine L’Écuyer, Suzanne Clément, Daniel Brière, Catherine Faucher
- source
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Films Distribution, 34, rue du Louvre, Paris 75001, France. FAX: 33 1 53 10 33 98. EMAIL: caraux@filmsdistribution.com.
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CAUSES
Family Issues, Youth
Wave to ten-year-old Léon Doré and he’d as soon flip you the bird as wave back. Léon’s idea of fun is “sleeping in the pool,” one of several attempted-suicide ploys, and when he visits the neighbors, it’s what we’d call breaking and entering. Even in 1968, that cultural watershed, this behavior goes unappreciated in the Montreal suburb where Léon lives with his artist mother, human rights attorney father and hapless brother, who wants nothing more than a normal family. Not a chance. His mother, in fact, acts as Léon’s enabler (“It’s bad to lie, but it’s worse to lie badly”), until she abruptly departs for Greece to find freedom (in a dictatorship). When you are the identified problem in a dysfunctional family you should make the most of it, and this Léon (a marvelous performance by Antoine L’Écuyer) does in increasingly risky acts performed with a studied intelligence masking the fact that he’s dangerously out of control. When he pairs up with a neighbor, Lea, the only friend who will have him (and we soon find out why), what is billed as a comedy admits that it is a poignant exploration of abandonment. (Did we mention that Léon is obsessed with tunnels, starting with the birth canal?) In adapting two popular books by Bruno Hébert, Philippe Falardeau has re-created the late ’60s milieu with an obsession bordering on the neurotic to inquire, as a child of those uncertain times, just what there is to be nostalgic for.
—Judy Bloch
In French with English subtitles.
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