Troubled dad, troubled teen, troubled film
Great performances can’t save bad script
La Garde
μ Starring: Paul Doucet, Antoine L’Écuyer, Sandrine
Bisson Directed by: Sylvain
Archambault Running time: 89 minutes
Parents’ guide: For all Review of La Garde If in doubt, blame the bureaucrats!
That’s always a good idea, but a particularly brilliant one when it comes to laying blame for the moribund state of Québécois cinema right at this second.
I came out of the screening of director Sylvain Archambault’s La Garde with but one thought — how had the functionaries at the public funding agencies given the greenlight to this project?
There might well be a good film lurking in here somewhere but it’s several major rewrites away. So you wonder: Why didn’t the folks who control the pursestrings ask screenwriters Ian Lauzon, Daniel Diaz and Ludovic Huot to go back to the drawing board and come up with something more compelling?
The funding agency poobahs are always on about how Quebec cinema has to produce a wide variety of genres of films, including accessible dramas, comedies, thrillers, teen films and, yes, auteur films. But it’s not happening. It seems like every couple of days I’m sitting in a screening room watching a film about a guy — and it’s always a guy, by the way, never a gal — who’s super-depressed, potentially suicidal and hasn’t had a positive thought in decades.
The bottom line is that if you’re gonna go that dark auteur route, your film better be a five-star effort that will wow folks in spite of its weighty themes. La Garde is, alas, not that film.
Look, I couldn’t agree more with Archambault’s director’s note in the press kit. He writes that one of the taboo subjects in Quebec society is the distress of fathers who’ve lost the custody of their kids. That is indeed a terrific starting point for a film.
But La Garde offers little insight into this.
Luc (Paul Doucet) is a mess. He’s lost the right to see his teenage son, Sam (Antoine L’Écuyer), in part because he once beat him up (or at least that’s the way the courts see it). So Sam, who is a bit of a mess himself, is being raised by his mother (Sandrine Bisson) and she’s finding it mighty hard to deal with this troubled kid.
Unsurprisingly, Luc ignores the court order, picks up his son after school one day and before you can say, ‘Hey haven’t I seen this storyline somewhere else?’ the father and his estranged son are in the woods for a not-so-friendly hunting trip. Of course things go terribly wrong.
Suffice it to say that maybe it’s not the best of ideas to kidnap a teenager with anger management issues and then give him a rifle.
The best thing about La Garde is the two lead actors, who both deliver standout performances. Doucet — who was astonishing in Funkytown — is great again here, making Luc’s sense of helplessness so real and yet always making clear that there remains a depth of force in this beaten-down man.
L’Écuyer is just as good, as a teen boy so full of rage but with an angelic face that belies his anger.