Polytechnique

Since I'm really really looking forward to seeing Dune in the future, I felt like checking out this early film from Denis Villeneuve's filmography. This movie's based on a real-life tragedy that occurred at the Polytechnique Montreal engineering school in 1989, and it dramatizes the event in a way that feels very humanistic. It doesn't make any comments or draw conclusions about the event and still leaves you feeling for most of the people involved. It does a great job of being ambiguous, something Villeneuve has mastered throughout his filmography. My heart goes out to the survivors, and my thanks go out to Villeneuve for being so great at making films like this.

In contrast to the perpetrator's actions at the École Polytechnique in 1989, Denis Villeneuve's interpretation of the events is graceful, tactful and meaningful. Filmed in black and white, ostensibly in order to give the presence of blood a less invading quality, Polytechnique begins in the hours leading up to the attack and parallelly follows the killer and three of the affected students: two female victims and one male bystander who desperately tries to find the right course of action in the midst of the chaos. The film is narratively economical and passes no judgement explicitly. Instead Villeneuve lets the characters' actions speak volumes, and he gives his picture an extra zest by including some subtle jumps between timelines. An artistically fulfilled movie with a hard-hitting subject matter which would be Villeneuve's first stepping-stone towards larger projects.

A tense early Denis Villenueve film based on a mass shooting at Montreal's Ecole Polytechnique in 1989. Villenueve's fictionalized account follows the killer (never named; played by actor Maxim Gaudette) and three students on the day of the massacre. The shooter was an incel-like anti-feminist who specifically targeted the female students.

POLYTECHNIQUE isn't a by the numbers school shooting account. It flits from the day of the shooting to flashbacks and even a flash-forward. It's a highly stylized, almost impressionistic presentation. The three principal students are two female roommates, Valerie (Karine Vanasee; very good) and Stephanie (Evelyne Brochu), and Valerie's male friend Jean-Francois (Sébastien Huberdea). They are fairly quickly introduced and sketched out before the main events play out.

Shooting on Black & White film gives it a stark look, but Pierre Gill's camera glides and slides along gracefully. It's composed in the very widescreen aspect ratio of 2:35 (as opposed to the standard 1:85). The combination of the movements and the elongated monochrome frame gives the whole film the added haunting dimension. The music (Benoît Charest) is similarly against type for a crime picture. Simple and plaintive.

Villenueve's treatment (he collaborated with two others on the script) isn't exploitative, but, it's still very difficult to watch at times. His almost matter of fact direction of the central sequence is shocking without showy montage. The most chilling shot is of the killer calmly reloading as his victims lie dead or dying.

It's a relief in a way that the film is only 77 minutes long, but, it also adds to the general intensity. Villenueve's next film, the brilliant Oscar Nominated INCENDIES, really put him on the map (leading to his Hollywood career (SICARIO, PRISONERS, BLADE RUNNER 2049), but POLYTECHNIQE is, in its own compressed way, a significant achievement of its own.

P.S. The French-Canadian production shot simultaneously in French and in English. I saw the English language version, but the dialogue is so relatively sparse, it doesn't appear as if seeing the Quebecois version would be much different.

It's heartbreaking that this actually happend. The characters, for the film, were fictionalised, but Polytechnique shows a glimpse of what those innocent young people would have gone through. And it's truly saddening.

Handled as delicately as possible as the subject matter dictates, Denis Villeneuve's film is a haunting, and a deeply moving account, of an event in close history, that should never have taken place.

As a piece of cinema, this is truly a sight to behold. The filming is beautiful in its ability to tell the story of a horrific shooting in Montreal in 1989. The black and white filming and the direction remind of the "Dekalog" by Krzysztof Kieslowski.

The acting is exceptional. The performance by a young Karine Vanasse is powerful in its understated subtlety.

The story is deeply moving. This type of plot isn't for everyone, but if realistic drama is enjoyable to you, as it is to me, then you will be impressed by the quality of this movie.