Movies Reviews

Curling – Movie Review

By Ron Wilkinson Mar 19, 2011, 14:15 GMT

Father and daughter confront their frozen emotions in this cozy slow-burner.

Denis Côté’s fifth feature film, the understated “Curling,” screened at this year’s New Directors New Films festival in New York City. The film follows a considerable string of early successes for the new director.

His debut feature film “Drifting States” won the Golden Leopard award at Locarno and his “All That She Wants” took the Silver Leopard for best directing three years later. This story is an adventure in self-realization. A father and daughter leverage their love of each other, and their imprisoned wife and mother, to emerge from their emotional winter.

The film is the story of Jean-Francois and his daughter Julyvonne in the wintry plains of Canada. The director is from New Brunswick and the one of his muses for the film was a news story about a gang murder where the bodies were left on the Alberta plains, frozen into unrecognizable mounds.

Putting the two together he came up with a film that makes you freezing cold just for viewing it. Cinematographer Josee Deshaies earned his commission filming this in what appears to be the dead of winter in Quebec. The snow blows in those smoky wisps, dry and light as the air itself. There is no hiding on those harsh, stark plains.

The father and daughter live outside of a small city surrounded by frozen desolation. The seclusion they feel is barely exceeded by the seclusion of the almost inhabitable corner of the earth where they live.

Similar to the Daniel Day-Lewis film “The Ballard of Jack and Rose” (2005), Jean-Francois is paranoid about what lies in wait for his daughter at the hands of the world when she leaves his protection.

After all, he was forced to witness the crumbling of his wife, Julyvonne’s mother, into a drug-addicted criminal who has been imprisoned. He has a right to be afraid, but Julyvonne’s inevitable emergence as a young adult has him taking another look. The daughter paves the way for her father to complete his transformation into a whole person.

The film starts with a social worker inquiring about Julyvonne’s astigmatism and why it was never diagnosed before. The reason is that she is home-schooled, to a degree, and the subject just never came up. The social worker does not push it but the implication is that she is opening her eyes in more ways than one.

Her father tries to write the incident off, but he sees the handwriting on the wall. His daughter may cause him the most terrifying time of his life---his realization of the outside world.

Their quiet world begins to crack open when Julyvonne stumbles upon several bodies lying in a field in the frozen tundra. Apparently victims of a gang conflict, the girl is amazed and mesmerized by the bodies, barely even understanding what they are. As she returns to the site to be a part of that world she is forced to recognize that the rest of the world awaits her as well.

Emmanuel Bilodeau is an experienced actor (he won the Jutra award for Best Supporting Actor (Meilleur Acteur de Soutien) for 2001’s “Soft Shell Man.” His real life daughter Philomène plays his daughter in the film. This is her first film and her acting skills are undeveloped. The problem is that her father’s skills do not take up the slack in order to produce scenes that get with the program.

Understandably enough, the elder Bilodeau’s script is halting and tedious because his character is halting and tedious.

However, this will be little comfort to the audience that has to sit through 80% of 92 minutes wherein daddy is trying to determine what planet he lives on. Luckily, the character has a self-revelation towards the end of the film and proceeds to do the right thing. This generates a heart-warming ending.

In addition, there are the scenes of the curling. The washed out black and white of the blowing, bone-dry snow and never-ending sub-zero temperatures outside gradually give way to the warmth and color of the curling club center.

Funny enough in themselves, the curling sequences take on a surrealistic air when the emerging Jean-Francois sees the ice-rink as his new, unfolding, universe. You might even learn a thing or two about the sport.

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Director: Denis Côté
Writer: Denis Côté (screenplay)
Starring: Emmanuel and Philomène Bilodeau and Roc LaFortune  
Release Date: New Directors New Films Festival---New York
MPAA: Not Rated
Runtime: 92 minutes
Country: Canada
Language: French
Color: Color