La face cachée de la lune

I read nothing of this movie before going in and I'm glad I didn't. I think I would have been put off by any reviews.

This is a great story of human interaction and sibling connection while exploring the depths of the great space race and how it affected one boy's life. Beautifully filmed and containing some truly amazing dialogue, Lepage manages to create an insightful, sometimes funny story of one man's struggle with life.

Lepage is a great talent. He not only starred in but also wrote and directed this great little movie. I think many will miss this one which is really sad. Movies like this should really be part of everyone's regular viewing. We'd all be much more enlightened characters if that was the case.

8/10 Innovative, fun and entertaining.

What Konstantin Tsiolkovsky said of the moon also holds for this movie: it's the perfect escape for those who lead a heavy life. Small surprise 40-something Philippe (Robert Lepage) idolizes Tsiolkovsky, mathematician and pioneer of space exploration. Philippe is a dwarf in life, but a giant in his dreams. In one scene, we actually see him looming over his Montréal neighborhood like Gulliver in the Land of Lilliput. There's a frozen goldfish named Beethoven, a self-righteous younger brother (also Robert Lepage), and a loving mother who never speaks a single word (Anne-Marie Cadieux). The way Robert Lepage treats fact, fiction, dream, memory, and fantasy as aspects of the same, seamless reality are reminiscent of Michel Gondry, but in a minor key. "La Face Cachée" is a quiet movie, moving through the darkness with the solemn gravity of a heavenly body, in tune with the celestial harmonies of Benoît Jutras' original score. It's for you if you liked "The Science of Sleep", "Igby Going Down", "The Life Aquatic", or "The Man Who Wasn't There".

For people in the Theatre community, Lepage is a much heralded genius. But the nature of theatre is that you have to be in the right place at the right time to see his work. With this movie he has etched a beautiful masterpiece for world wide viewing (granted it gets a decent release). I'm not sure if it's just my enthusiasm from having seen the play but the story was just one that I felt I wanted to embrace again. The stage play was so cinematic that a movie seemed inevitable, and the transitions between scenes were even enhanced through the use of a camera rather than stage. This is really too biased to be a review, but if you haven't seen it, you really should.

Unlike the ancient notion that the moon is a mirror of the Earth's surface, modern space exploration and satellite imagery have revealed that the moon is a large cratered rock with the far side permanently turned away from the Earth. In Quebecois director Robert Lepage's film Far Side of the Moon, the moon's far side serves as a metaphor for the divide that separates two brothers, each with a different sexual orientation. Based on a one-man stage play by Mr. Lepage, it is both a history of man's exploration of the surface of the moon and the inner exploration of two individuals who are trying to put their life in order after the death of their mother (Anne-Marie Cadieux).

Shot in fifteen days in digital video using dissolves and CGI, the film creates a dazzling confluence of reality and fantasy that moves effortlessly between past and present utilizing delightful, surreal effects that form a bridge between the Earth and the cosmos. Philippe looks at the window of a washing machine and sees the vastness of space, a trip into the stomach of a pregnant mother turns a fetus into a tiny astronaut connected to his craft, the stacking of bottles in a restaurant becomes the launching of a space mission, and a man walking on snow becomes an explorer on the moon. The two brothers, Philippe and André, are performed in a dual role by the director. Philippe is an unhappy dreamer with no relationship and no profession.

He works as a telephone solicitor for the Montreal newspaper Le Soleil but is clearly distracted and makes personal calls to his ex-girlfriend (Céline Bonnier) and his brother that cause his employer consternation. His younger brother André, a gay man, is a weatherman for the local television station and maintains an ongoing relationship with Carl (Marco Poulin). More carefree than Philippe, he is preoccupied with disposing of his mother's possessions. Philippe is a perennial student who, at age forty, is still seeking approval for his Doctoral dissertation which argues that man's desire to explore space is built, not on discovering the mystery and wonder of the universe, but on his own narcissism - his act of self-projection.

When Philippe's thesis is again rejected by his Doctoral committee, however, he seeks other avenues for recognition but they lead only to humiliation. He is treated rudely by guards when he wants to give a copy of his paper to former Russian cosmonaut Alexi Leonov; is thrown out of a late night bar for being loud and drunk; has an embarrassing meeting with Carl at a sauna, and when he receives an invitation to present his paper at a symposium in Moscow, ridiculously forgets to adjust his watch to local time and faces an empty theater. Finally given a chance to showcase his creative talent when he is accepted as a participant in a SETI project to collect home videos to send into space, he limits his film to showing his apartment while rambling about his life and his video lacks poetry or self awareness.

As Philippe's life becomes increasingly dysfunctional, and his estrangement with André more pronounced, a suddenly discovered secret brings the two brothers together. Like the scarred far side of the moon, their lives have sustained repeated impacts which they have kept well hidden. Now that their scars are revealed, a huge burden has been lifted, and, with the aid of CGI, Philippe's weightless body can ascend into space. Far Side of the Moon is entertaining and highly imaginative and I would recommend it, yet there is little emotion in the film and, for all its transcendental motifs, I found it to be lacking a sense of the mystery and wonder of either outer or inner space.

I would have liked to have given this film a 9.99, since there were two scenes which I felt were just a bit too long. Since it is closer to a perfect ten than a perfect 9, however, I had to give it a 10.

"Far Side of The Moon" is an absolute gem of a film. Robert Lepage is another one of those depressingly competent people who writes, directs and stars in his own films. It is so enchanting that its length (under an hour and three quarters) seems even shorter than it is.

"Far Side..." is chock full of the most carefully constructed sequences I have ever seen in the cinema. There is literally not one frame that has not been carefully nurtured and coaxed into place--like a piece of a brightly colored mosaic--to create what must be one of the most seamlessly engineered set of images in film history.

There are no "stock" shots in this film. Not one shot is ever simply thrown in to get on with the plot. Each scene segues beautifully into the next, each is composed with the utmost care. This is what film making should be.

While the movie relies servilely on (often complex)special effects for the realization of its vision, these techniques are not there just for the "wow" factor; rather they are all in the service of a unified directorial vision, full of resonant symbols and painterly motifs that seem always to reach toward each other as if in a dance.

You would think that this obsessive attention to setting and color and detail would make the movie stiff and formal. But it does not. First of all, Lepage (and his character Philippe) are full of such self-deprecating irony that there are almost as many laughs as there are sighs of wonder in the movie.

But moreover, the film is a supremely dramatic and melancholic tale, . Lepage has created in his character Philippe probably the greatest sad sack since Nabokov's Pnin. You can't help but feel for the poor helpless loser, tricked by his hyperactive and poetic imagination into a failed marriage, a failed university degree, and a failed relation with the only two family members he has.

Funny, tragic, witty, and visually splendid. Why don't more moves like this get made?

Numer of car chases: 0 Number of gun shots: 0 Number of psychopathic killers: 0 Number of action heroes: 0