When the flow of words comes to an end
Meetings With a Young Poet tackles the daunting task of effectively portraying writer’s block on the big screen
Meetings with a Young Poet
Starring: Vincent Hoss-Desmarais, Maria de Medeiros, Stephen McHattie, Arthur Holden Directed by: Rudy Barichello Running time: 86 minutes
A film about Samuel Beckett? Yikes. Don’t tell Vince Guzzo about this one. Guzzo — who runs the movie theatres of the same name — has been telling anyone that will listen that Quebec filmmakers make too many dark, depressing movies, and that they have to start producing more audience-friendly films.
I’m thinking he hasn’t been dreaming of a film about a Nobel Prize-winning author whose most famous work, Waiting for Godot, was memorably described as a play in which “nothing happens, twice.” It’s theatre of the absurd at its most absurd and, like so much of Beck- ett’s oeuvre, it’s a remarkably bleak portrait of humanity. In comparison, most of our dark Quebec auteur films are positively cheery.
But Guzzo — and many others — will probably be happy to learn that Meetings with a Young Poet is not a Beckett bio-pic. The author of Waiting for Godot and Happy Days — no, not the TV series! — is indeed a character in this film written by Rudy Barichello and Marcel Beaulieu, and directed by Barichello.
But he’s not the main character. That would be Paul Susser (Vincent Hoss-Desmarais), the poet referred to in the title. This is a work of fiction featuring a real literary figure — the central conceit is that this Montreal writer meets Beckett (Stephen McHattie) in a café in the small town in France where Beckett lives and they develop an unlikely friendship.
That relationship spans a couple of decades, right up to Beckett’s death, but it’s not the only story here. At the same time, the film cuts back-and-forth between their conversations — usually over whiskey and chess games — to a parallel tale in Montreal. An actress, Lucia Martell (Maria de Medeiros), desperately wants to stage and star in a production of Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape and she needs Susser’s permission to do this. (Beckett made Susser the man in charge of his work following his death.)
They have these tense meetings, a kind of game of cat and mouse as they each circle the other. “Are you always so tightly wound?” she asks.
Martell also gets off maybe the best line of the film — “To each his own Beckett.”
She begins to wonder if his relationship with Beckett is what stopped him from continuing to write. He’s only published one slim volume of poetry.
That underlines what should be one of the main themes here — what drives an author to write or to stop writing — and one of the problems is the film never really goes too deep into this. The fact is it’s never been easy to make movies about writing. On the Road was only the most recent example of how hard it is to capture the creative process on film. And making a film about writer’s block isn’t any easier. Barton Fink nailed it, but few other films have.
McHattie looks uncannily like Beckett and the seasoned Canadian actor — you remember him as Canadiens coach Dick Irvin Sr. in Maurice Richard — has just the right mix of quirk and grit to pull off the performance. Hoss-Desmarais is also good as this nervous wordsmith, as is de Medeiros as the insistent suitor. Arthur Holden is memorable in a supporting role as Martell’s sidekick.