Several Gems in Festival of New Quebec Films

Among the offerings in the second Festival of New Quebec Films at the Monica 4-Plex Friday through Nov. 17 are several standouts. They are Francis Mankiewicz’s “The Revolving Doors” (Friday at 7, again on Nov. 17 at 9), Lea Pool’s “Straight for the Heart” (Friday at 9:15, again on Nov. 15 at 9:10) and Robin Spry’s “Obsessed” (Saturday at 9, again on Sunday at 4). There’s merit in Richard Boutet’s “The War to End All Wars,” a French-Canadian “Oh, What a Lovely War,” but you can pretty safely skip the others.

The festival opens with Francis Mankiewicz’s irresistible “The Revolving Doors,” in which a moody painter (Gabriel Arcand), estranged from his French wife (Miou Miou), receives a suitcase full of diaries and mementoes from the mother he never knew. Once again the director of “Good Riddance,” one of Canada’s finest films, reveals his special gift in illuminating parent-child relationships. As the painter and his young son (Francois Methe) start examining the contents of the suitcase, this exquisite film flashes back to the youth of the painter’s mother. A beautiful country girl (Monique Spaziani), she was swept away with the romance of the movies when she landed a job as a pianist accompanying silent pictures at a small-town theater. “The Revolving Doors,” which is period-perfect in its flashbacks, evokes the potency of the silent cinema and proceeds to reconcile past and present in a thoroughly unexpected manner. “The Revolving Doors,” which Mankiewicz (a distant relation of the famous Hollywood clan) and Jacques Savoie adapted from Savoie’s novel, is a softer film than “Good Riddance” but a winner all the same.

“Straight for the Heart” is another stunner from Lea Pool, whose somber, delicately nuanced drama “Anne Trister” was a highlight of both last year’s Quebec Festival and the 1987 Gay and Lesbian Film/Video Festival. “Straight From the Heart” is even more ambitious and stylized, a keenly observant study in anguish centering on a renowned photojournalist (played by the lean, intense West German actor Matthias Habich) who returns to Montreal from an assignment in Nicaragua to discover that the woman (Johanne-Marie Tremblay) and the man (Michel Voita), with whom he has enjoyed a passionate 10-year menage a trois have deserted him. The woman is pregnant by the other man, and they have discovered that they have become a couple. Habich is extraordinarily affecting as a highly successful man confronted with a devastating double loss.

With admirable rigor Pool keeps the focus on the photographer: what’s important is what he is discovering about himself so painfully--and never mind that the two who have left him seem so unsympathetic in our brief glimpses of them, for this is not their story. The level of awareness and understanding Pool brings to the photographer and his plight is consistently and astonishly acute. Pool is fast emerging as a major film maker.

Equally impressive in an entirely different way, “Obsessed” (Saturday at 9, again on Sunday at 4) keeps you on the edge of your seat from start to finish, thanks to the skillfulness of director Robin Spry and writer Douglas Bowie, whose story was suggested by Tom Alderman’s novel “Hit and Run.” The less revealed about this film, the most “commercial” production in the festival, the better, so as not to spoil its considerable impact. Let’s just say that it has to do with an estranged Montreal couple (Kerrie Keane, Daniel Pilon) who have an overwhelming and urgent reason to try to bring an American (Saul Rubinek) to justice. The superbly sustained and ever-mounting tension, the ingenuity of the script, shot through with irony, and the acting cannot be praised enough.

Pilon and especially Keane are terrific, but the picture belongs to Rubinek, one of Canada’s most versatile young actors. Rubinek offers us an indelible portrait of cowardice at its most implacable, yet we have a hard time hating him as much as we want to because he makes us see ourselves in him.

For further information and full schedule: (213) 394-9741, (213) 478-1041.