Rocaterrania
Brett Ingram (USA)
***
It's rare that one walks out of a movie theatre truly astonished by what one's just seen. Prepare to be astonished. Rocaterrania takes the viewer into the world of Renaldo Kuhler - an eccentric museum illustrator, at first glance. Slowly, slowly, director Brett Ingram reveals the dense fantasy world that Kuhler has been creating since he was a boy, initially to help him deal with his loneliness and his mother issues. Rocaterrania, a product of Kuhler's imagination, is a tiny country that lies along the St. Lawrence River between Canada and the U.S., populated primarily with Eastern Europeans. Kuhler's breathtaking drawings, coupled with the intricate details of Rocaterrania's history - from wars to political scandals to a thriving film industry - are remarkable. But it would be a mistake to think this documentary works solely because of its fascinating subject. Ingram skillfully pulls back the covers on Rocaterrania, making a film - and a man - you will never forget. M.L.
Granville 7: Today; Oct. 12, 12 p.m.
SCREENING TOMORROW
Bluebeard Catherine Breillat (France)
***
The celebrated French director of Romance and Fat Girl takes on the 17th-century fairy tale of the eponymous castle-dwelling ogre who marries incessantly, his wives always vanishing within the year. Enter two impoverished sisters cast out of convent school, the youngest, Marie-Catherine (Lola Créton), agreeing to marry Blackbeard (Dominique Thomas) on the understanding the union will not be consummated until she is of age, naively blind to his more deviant appetites. If seduction and temptation propel Charles Perrault's original text, the same sexual tension pulses here. Breillat even cranks it up a notch with a parallel tale set in the 1950s. Framed with a painterly eye, the images are an atmospheric delight - realism never dares intrude. And Breillat's subversive fingerprints are everywhere, from her thrillingly willful and defiant heroine, to the final breathtaking twist. F.M.
Granville 7: Oct. 11, 9:15 p.m.
I Killed My Mother
(J'ai tué ma mère)
Xavier Dolan (Canada)
***
A precocious 20-year old tripling as writer, director and star, Dolan earned critical plaudits for his film at Cannes this spring, and it's easy to see why. Set in today's Quebec, this is essentially a love/hate story between a divorced mother and her gay son. Mainly hate at the outset, as the twosome suit up for their daily shouting matches - one a high-school kid suffering from an acute case of teenage angst, the other a suburban philistine hardened to her offspring's tirades. Riveting at first, their fights threaten to dwindle into tedium, but Dolan rescues us in the third act when, without once stooping to sentimentality, he taps into the bedrock of affection beneath the volcanic anger, a love much harder to express but no less deeply felt. The result is a film rather like its young protagonist - erratic yet sensitive. R.G.
Granville 7: Oct. 11, 6:45 p.m.; Oct. 15, 1 p.m.
