Julien Poulin is outstanding in Camion
In a way, Camion is a remarkably simple film. A truck driver is involved in a terrible accident and his grown-up sons come back home to help him through his depression. That’s it, that’s all.
But that Reader’s Digest condensed version of the story does nothing to convey the power of this remarkable new feature from Mont- real writer-director Rafaël Ouellet. This is a minimalist ode to the strength of the ties that bind a father and his sons, of the bonds between brothers, no matter how different they are.
It has a similar feel to last year’s brilliant Sébastien Pilote film, Le Vendeur, and as was the case with that film, Camion rests solidly on the shoulders of one monster performance. Gilbert Sicotte won the Jutra Award as best actor for his turn as a melancholic aging car salesman in Le Vendeur and you read it here first that Julien Poulin will win the same prize at the Jutras next year for his tour-de-force role in Camion as a melancholic aging trucker. And Patrice Dubois and Stéphane Breton are none too shabby as his sons either.
Those three performances are a big part of the reason Camion is such a pleasure to watch — and it’s handy they’re all so good because there isn’t a frame of the film that doesn’t feature at least one of them.
The film opens with a bang — a car smashes head-on into Germain’s truck on a highway in Quebec somewhere near the border with New Brunswick and the sixtysomething trucker is, understandably, in a state of shock. “I never saw him coming,” he mutters to the cops.
“But is he going to live, at least?” he goes on to ask.
Well, the driver of the car, a woman from Maine, doesn’t survive and that has Germain in some kind of a bad state.
He calls his son Samuel (Dubois), who works as a cleaner in a highrise in a big city that looks not un- like Montreal. Samuel hits the road, heading to Saint John to pick up his brother Alain (Breton), a wannabe poet and songwriter who’s holed up in a cheap motel and appears to spend most of his waking hours cruising women in bars.
They head home together to see what’s going on with their dad. There is little in the way of high drama here, with the exception of one scene in the final reel when they’re hunting in the woods.
Ouellet has an uncanny knack for nailing the little moments in life. Like when Samuel finds the music Alain’s playing in the car too depressing or when Samuel creates a major awkward moment by showing up at the home of his teenage sweetheart, who’s now a married mom.
As always with Ouellet, the music plays a key role and the rootsy, acoustic tracks from Robin-Joël Cool and Viviane Audet from the band Mentana add greatly to the atmosphere.