by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I eventually did get out and we went to the Mars film screening in Golden Hill — which
was a bit too long because the person in charge of it insists on showing at
least an hour’s worth of trailers for other movies, home-grown videos from the
Internet (including an absolutely hilarious one showing a kids’ musical version
of the original Star Trek) and
episodes of a serial — in this case the next-to-last one of a film called Project
One, which despite a piss-poor budget is a
quite effective tale in which a Russian family during the 1980’s (when the
Soviet Union was still a going concern) was sent to Mars by a secret rocket
program, lived there for over two decades and then sent back their son, whose
spacecraft crash-landed in Canada and was scooped up by the Canadian air force,
which in collaboration with the U.S. put a quarantine around the base while
they were waiting for the man to come to — and also put out a cover story about
the incident that blamed it on a terrorist attack. As a result I was already
feeling pretty worn down by the time the feature started, which turned out to
be an interesting and quirky movie even though I found it rather uneven. It was
called Mars et Avril — the title
is a double pun because Mars in
French means both the planet Mars and the month March (a pun that was also made
in last month’s Mars movie!) —
and though I had had the impression going in that the movie had been made in
France, it was really a Canadian production, though it seemed like a French movie, not only because all the
dialogue was in French but because the plot had the sort of refreshing
frankness about people’s sexual needs and drives one gets in French movies and
almost never in U.S. ones.
The film, written as well as directed by Martin
Villenueve, is set in 2154 and centers around German astronomer Johannes
Kepler’s notion that the universe was musical — something he wrote about in his
book Harmonie der Welt (“The
Harmonies of the World”) — and an elderly but still popular musician named
Jacob Obus (Jacques Languiraud) who leads a band that specializes in a sort of
jazz-trance music featuring specially built instruments designed by Eugène
Spaak (his head is played by Robert Lepage — yes, the same person who designed
and directed that weird Ring
cycle currently being played at the Met — and his body is played by Jean
Asselin, because part of the plot gimmick is he’s rendered himself immortal by
having himself changed into a holographic head on top of a robot body) and his
(normally living) son Arthur (Paul Ahmarani, a kind of dorky-looking guy with a
nice head of helmet-shaped hair, the sort of actor who gets cast in movies like
this and then is replaced by a drop-dead gorgeous movie-star type if the film
is remade in the U.S., much the way homely but decent-looking Donatas Banionis,
the leading man of the marvelous Russian Solaris from 1972, was replaced by George Clooney in the far
inferior Hollywood remake). The story centers around the rivalry between Jacob
Obus and Arthur Spaak over the love of Avril (Caroline Dhavemas), which happens
to be going on while the world space authority is launching a spacecraft to
travel from humanity’s already well-established base on the moon to Mars. In a
weirdly quirky scene in a movie that is full of weirdly quirky scenes, Avril insists on
photographing Jacob Obus’s group with an old-style press camera, then agrees to
go home with Arthur and model for the band’s latest lead instrument (they’re
all designed in the images of actual people and one gets the impression that
the band needs a new lead instrument for every gig they perform) as long as he
agrees to be photographed by her first — and she makes him stand naked in front
of her camera (she has him strip even though all she’s going to photograph is
his face) for hours while she does a run-out to Obus’s latest concert.
The film
was based on a graphic novel (i.e., a full-length comic book, though the French
credits list it as a “photo-roman,” which could mean a long-form comic or one of those stories in
which the plot is told in photos with word balloons and descriptions added),
whose model for Avril, Marie-Josée Croze, was originally supposed to do the
movie as well but left due to scheduling conflicts. It reaches its high point
plot-wise when Jacob and Avril get into a teleportation booth together — this
is one of those quirky views of the future in which some aspects are indeed
well advanced from today’s technology (like teleportation machines being part
of Montreal’s public transit system — indeed, the filmmaker got the same person
who actually recorded the announcements for Montreal’s subways, Khanh Hua, to
record the announcements for the teleporter) while others are well behind (the
characters listen to music on LP’s and make phone calls on hard-wired landline
phones) — despite the solemn warnings that only one person is supposed to use
it at a time. As a result, Jacob and Avril get separated and he ends up where
he intended to go — the Champ de Mars station near the club where he was
supposed to play — while she ends
up on the planet Mars, where the
three “Marsonautes” (Emanuel Hoss-Desmarais, Pierre Leblanc and Richard
Robitaille, who at least to my mind bore a remarkable resemblance to the Three
Stooges) have just built a teleporter in order that scientists from their
mission control center can visit them on the planet. (If they could put a
teleporter on Mars, why did they need a rocket to go there in the first place,
one wonders — only it turns out that the teleporter can only be operated from outside, meaning that as long as there’s a person on the
outside to push the switch it will function, so it can be used to go anywhere
humans already live but not to
boldly go where no one has gone before. But that still doesn’t answer how
ordinary humans are able to work the teleporter from inside it to go from one Earth destination to another.)
At
one point Villenueve throws us a ringer — the three Marsonautes tell Avril (and
us) that they never went to Mars at all; they’re still on earth and the footage
shown internationally on TV of them on their way and actually on the Red Planet
was all faked in a studio (a bit of paranoia a lot of people believe about the
U.S. space program!) — but it’s not clear whether we’re supposed to believe
that, especially since the ending involves all three of the principals turning
up on Mars after Jacob and Arthur have got there by following a stream of wind
moving through the cosmos powering the musical instrument that is the universe,
at least according to Kepler’s theories. Mars et Avril is one of those maddening movies that runs so
totally against audience expectations from the get-go that it can’t offer any
real sense of surprise, and yet I liked it better than I like most such films
because at least it had real characterizations (though exactly what attracts Avril to a man three times her age is never
quite spelled out — and one genuine surprise that is moving is when Jacob tells her, and us, that though
he’s talked about a wide swath of
female conquests he’s never actually had sex in his life before until their
first time together), we actually care about the fate of the characters, and
the whole thing is well done from that standpoint even though there are the
usual lacunae in which one gets
the impression things are happening in this movie simply because the plot is so
free-form literally anything can
happen. I suspect I would have liked this movie better if I had got to see it
in a better-resolution image (either film or high-def digital video), since
Villenueve’s visual virtuosity is the most entertaining part of the film and it
would be nice to see it in something better than an ordinary DVD run through a
projector and onto a screen big enough where you really could see the finite elements. As it was, it was
refreshing, a bit ponderous at times and not quite as clever as Villenueve and
his colleagues clearly thought it was — but it’s still worth seeing and a lot
of fun, and I’m certainly going to respect a movie that’s trying so hard to be “different” even if it doesn’t always
succeed. And I’m also going to respect a film that is so honest about human
sexuality!
