MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Straight for the Heart’ Charts Emotional Landscape

Early in French-Canadian filmmaker Lea Pool’s “Straight for the Heart” (Monica 4-Plex) a renowned photojournalist (Matthias Habich), just back from Nicaragua, is talking with his agent in a Montreal high-rise. Looking out the window and discussing how he next wants to photograph urban decay, he locks glances with a young window washer descending a platform elevator outside. It’s just a moment, then the young man disappears. But in retrospect, that image provides the linchpin for the entire movie.

The moment takes us outside the psyche of the profoundly depressed Pierre and takes the edge off what would otherwise be a somber study of emotional anguish.

It’s safe to say that the photographer Pierre doesn’t recall the moment, and you may discover you haven’t either, until he crosses paths with the window washer Quentin (Jean-Francois Pichette) once again to try to deflect him from his despair. On his return from Nicaragua, Pierre is devastated to learn that the man and woman with whom he had been engaged in a decade-long menage a trois have moved out on him.

However, Quentin, a deaf mute, has not forgotten Pierre, and when they have a chance encounter in a bar, a relationship begins. It’s brief, but both passionate and tender, and it’s the young man’s devotion that shakes Pierre out of his egocentric despondency.

As in Pool’s earlier “Anne Trister,” which told of a young Swiss artist shaken by her father’s death, the director is once again dealing with loss and longing and how artists’ work, unconsciously or otherwise, expresses their view of themselves and their predicaments.

However, “Straight for the Heart” (Times-rated Mature for adult themes and situations), which Pool and Marcel Beaulieu adapted from Yves Navarre’s novel “Kurwenal,” is even more ambitious and stylized than the earlier film, and in the lean, intense Habich, familiar from his various German films, she has found the perfect actor for Pierre.

‘STRAIGHT FOR THE HEART’

(‘A CORPS PERDU’)

An L.W. Blair Films release of a Canadian-Swiss co-production: Les Films Telescene and Xanadu Films, a.g. Producers Denise Robert, Robin Spry. Director Lea Pool. Screenplay Pool, Marcel Beaulieu; based on the novel “Kurwenal” by Yves Navarre. Camera Pierre Mignot. Music Osvaldo Montes. Stills Luc Chessex. Art director Vianney Gauthier. Costumes Louise Jobin. Film editor Michel Arcand. With Matthias Habich, Johanne-Marie Tremblay, Michel Voita, Jean-Francois Pichette. In French, with English subtitles.

Running time: 1 hour, 32 minutes.

Times-rated: Mature.