Podz does justice to L’Affaire Dumont
But without Marc-andré Grondin, the film just wouldn’t work
L’Affaire Dumont is an oddly frustrating movie. It has so much going for it, beginning with a stunning performance by Marc-André Grondin as a man wrongly convicted of rape. It’s by far the best thing this happening Montreal actor has done since C.R.A.Z.Y. back in 2005. (And he’s done some mighty good things in those seven years!).
Without Grondin, the film just wouldn’t work. Michel Dumont is a not-so-articulate, self-effacing guy without a lot of pluses in his life, and in lesser hands you’d really have a tough time identifying with him. But Grondin forces you to care. Oddly he somehow makes this dépanneur delivery man charismatic … albeit in a muted fashion.
You also have the signature style of director Podz (a.k.a. Daniel Grou), who is developing a distinctive noir approach to filmmaking, specializing in dark tales shot in gritty fashion.
But there’s still something missing. At the start of this drama based on real events, there’s an onscreen note saying all of the courtroom testimony is based on court transcripts and maybe that’s part of the problem. It just doesn’t transcend the source material.
The true story is, as Podz quite rightly calls it, a reallife horror movie. Michel Dumont was arrested for rape in late 1990 and then convicted a few months later following, if the film is to be believed, a seriously messed-up trial. He served nearly three years before being freed. The same year he began serving his sentence, the victim told authorities she bumped into someone on the street who looked exactly like Dumont and that she was having doubts that the convicted man was the guy who assaulted her.
The issue is that this drama unfolds exactly as you expect it to. You know from the getgo that this is a miscarriage-of-justice film and neither Podz nor screenwriter Danielle Dansereau, a veteran TV scribe, bring us anywhere surprising.
They do a great job of capturing the grim sub-workingclass milieu that Dumont called home, neatly underlining that he was already a prisoner before the police arrested him. It’s just an unbearably depressing portrait.
But it’s not without at least a glimmer of hope, provided by the force of nature that is Solange (Marilyn Castonguay), the young single mother who falls in love with Michel, marries him in prison and nearly singlehandedly manages to rescue him from this living hell. Castonguay is just as convincing as Grondin, both delivering standout turns. Grondin is near unrecognizable, with his big tinted glasses, bushy moustache and a quétaine mullet hairdo.
Like Podz’s earlier film, 10½, L’Affaire Dumont is powered by a rage at the injustices of our social system, at a world that lets down a guy like Dumont, and it’s great to see a filmmaker with that kind of anger, something in such short supply among contemporary Québécois directors.