‘Oh, Canada’: Cannes Review

Dir. Paul Schrader. US 2024. 95mins

Following an eccentric, erratic career stretch, veteran US writer-director Paul Schrader recaptured the film world’s attention with intense 2017 drama First Reformed. Follow-ups The Card Counter and Master Gardener confirmed him as an auteur finding a new burst of energy – especially since the three films showed a continuity of theme, with their stories of male lost souls seeking redemption. Schrader’s Cannes competition title Oh, Canada is somewhat different in mood and ambition, but displays a consistency of thought and seriousness, plus imposing formal ambition. Strong  performances by Richard Gere (Schrader’s lead in 1980’s American Gigolo), Uma Thurman and Jacob Elordi should give this uncompromisingly adult drama some commercial punch following its Cannes competition premiere.

Amid the formal fluidity, the forceful acting keeps us hooked

The film is adapted from a novel by the late Russell Banks (to whom the film is dedicated), whose work also inspired Schrader’s fine 1998 feature Affliction. Unashamedly literary and self-reflexively cinematic, Oh, Canada presents itself as the prologue to the death of an esteemed American-born documentary-maker, Leonard Fife (Gere). Terminally ill with cancer, Fife has decided to give a substantial filmed interview, which – proving to be a final confession – provides the framework for the film.

Fife and his wife and producer Emma (Uma Thurman) are visited in their baronial-style Montreal home by Oscar-winning documentarist duo, Malcolm and Diana (Michael Imperioli, Victoria Hill); they, like Emma, are former students of Leonard. As a political documentarist in a verité tradition, Leonard sets great store by honesty. But as he testily insists on telling the unvarnished truth about his life – to Emma’s increasing discomfort – he proves to be neither entirely straight with himself nor in control of his story. He makes mistakes, loses his thread and generally weaves a contradictory web of partial memories.

His story begins in the 60s as a saga of youthful idealism, ambition and yearning, with Elordi playing Leonard in his late teens and 20s as a would-be novelist and adventurer. As the young husband of southern heiress Alicia (Kristine Froseth), he resists an invitation to take a lucrative post in her family’s business – and stages just one of the getaways that will be a recurrent theme in his life.

With the older Leonard’s narration captured both in voice-over and in the documentary makers’ viewfinder, sometimes in extreme close-up, his life is a jigsaw that alternately comes together and falls apart as we watch – the effect all the more disorienting as Gere sometimes replaces Elordi in the younger man’s story. Other tricks of casting add to the blurring, with the overall dramatisation of scrambled memory somewhat recalling Alain Resnais’s Providence. Use of different film styles and ratios adds to this effect, with Schrader also drawing on cinema history: along with brief pastiches of documentary styles, Citizen Kane and Cries And Whispers (a blood-red café wall) get knowing winks. It could be argued that the fragmented structure makes for lack of clarity and final-act catharsis – but then, that is somewhat the point.

It is also striking that, along with its gradual deconstruction of its grand old man as flawed protagonist, the film also questions the idea that young Americans who resisted the Vietnam draft were heroic rebels. It’s a proposition out of kilter with a revered tenet of the era, and it takes a seasoned sceptic like Schrader to get away with it. And – with a clear allusion to Errol Morris in the interview method designed by Leonard to elicit truth – anyone sentimental about the reliability of documentary will also find some fond certainties challenged.

Amid the formal fluidity, the forceful acting keeps us hooked. Elordi, continuing to reveal new depths since his roles in Priscilla and The Sweet East, evokes young Leonard’s fecklessness and would-be bohemian self-importance. Gere, getting to grips with the themes of fragility and mortality, digs progressively deeper below the peppery cantankerous of Leonard’s surface.

DoP Andrew Wonder and editor Benjamin Rodriguez Jr adeptly ring the changes on tones, textures and period styles, while poignantly downbeat neo-country songs by Matthew Houck, aka. Phosphorescent, contribute a post-Dylan poetry that suits both the feel of retrospective contemplation and the evocation of a mythical 60s that is substantially demythified here.