WHO BY FIRE: Well-Tread Material

When we think of clichés, the word is often used to describe mainstream cinema, particularly Hollywood, where tropes and narrative arcs and twists are well-worn and repeated. The word doesn’t get used enough I don’t think to describe festival material however. Films, especially ones that are European, that feature prominently in festival ‘official selections’ are often given the kind of ‘pass’ that they don’t necessarily deserve, mainly because they are either made by a serious filmmaker or are naturalistic or made with a modest budget, or, in the case of something like Phillipe Lesage’s Who By Fire, something totally character-driven. There’s something about the force subtlety, the naturalistic approach, the lack of movement in the film’s world beyond what a character says or does, that mesmerizes critics into forgetting the fact that they’ve seen at least a dozen or so of this exact kind of movie, with these exact same beats, at festivals past.

Source: Be For Films

A Basic Premise

Starting off with a long tracking shot of a car barreling down a road, we cut to the interior and immediately get a sense of what the central dynamic between the main character Jeff (Noah Parker) and his best friend Max’s (Antoine Marchand Gagnon) sister Alyocha (Aurelia Arandi-Longpré) is. He subtly tries to move closer to her in the car and stares longingly in her direction but she barely notices. Through the rest of the movie, their connection to one another frays and repairs. The film feels refreshing in the way that it portrays its main young character as a naïve and youthfully selfish and vindictive character. Immediately after not getting what he wants in Alyocha’s reciprocal affection, he decides to reveal a secret to her dad (Paul Ahmarani) about his best friend, a famous film director, Blake Cadieu (Arieh Worthalter). Throughout the movie human dynamics through long conversations around wine and food form the thrust of this narrative.

We’ve Seen This Before

There is a lot of filler material here however. The dinner scenes, while impressively orchestrating a single-shot sequence where the camera glides around slowly like the opening of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flowers of Shanghai, feature circular conversations and arguments that rise and fall in a rather anti-climactic manner. I’ve joked before that such dinner scenes are part and parcel of every European arthouse film, from Christian Petzold’s Afire to Xavier Dolan’s It’s Only the End of the World to Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days to Joachim Lafosse’s After Love. The latter has perhaps the most in coming with Lesage’s film, where the narrative tension and secrets between characters all happen in predictable beats while eating and drinking, we get 3 different dance sequences or musical interludes where someone strums a guitar to fill up time, and brooding moments of silence where our main character Jeff is contemplating how his life could be worse.

Source: Be For Films

Conclusion

Who By Fire feels like a movie made up of other movies. This is again something that you’d never see attributed to a movie orchestrated in such a pared-down prestigious manner. No, that descriptor is always reserved for the self-reflexive pulp-nerds like Tarantino and Guy Ritchie. But Lesage’s film is constructed of scenes we’ve all seen in these kinds of movies before. There aren’t any stylistic flairs he brings to the table that differentiate his film from the prototypical coming-of-age movie. It’s a good repeatable premise however – pick a single location, isolated, and make the characters reveal their secrets to each other. It’s worked a dozen times before, but with Who By Fire, I only wished it did even one thing more adventurous than its countless predecessors.

Who By Fire is releasing in select U.S. theaters on March 14th.