Polytechnique (2009) — I: Villeneuve’s Philosophy
*NO SPOILERS*
Villeneueve is my favorite contemporary director and I’ll be kicking off my series on him with Polytechnique, the earliest of his films where he starts really fleshing out the style he’s become known for. This film also served as a second chance at a debut following the commercial failures of his first 2 feature films (despite winning some awards) and resultant 9-year hiatus (in which he stepped away from film but for a handful of experimental shorts). Kinda like how Community repiloted in Season 5 to establish a new format. Thus Polytechnique marks the beginning of what I will call his post-hiatus era.
He has a unifying thematic approach that threads most of his films, where the films that don’t capture every element, instead pick some part of it to explore. Much of this approach were identified by one of my favorite video essayists *Click for SPOILERS* and are applied to most of his main characters. Villeneuve’s core approach to writing a character’s journey:
A character thinks they understand how the world works before confronting some combination of the ugliness of humanity, the interests of its power structures, and the chaos of the world otherwise. They engage in a bid to control any combination of these elements before failing — their world is too big to change. Instead they must be the one to change. For them the victory is not the vanquishing of villainy; it’s a dispelling of delusion and a denial of death in a world dark and dysfunctional.
Their realizing they must change as a result of the world adds a potent layer to the age-old narrative element of a character changing as a part of their journey. Here we see the character as a human animal in context of its environment, whether that is the tangible space they occupy or the power structures to which they are subject.
And this is true in Polytechnique, stunning in the acuity of its moments of brutality and awe-inspiring in the meditative horror of the long spaces in-between as mankind is incrementally characterized. This is not a horror or action movie. It is simply feels too real to be one. Or maybe that’s where the horror of it lies. This story is based on eponymous real events and I’ll be focusing on each character’s arc in this week’s essay.
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Polytechnique Essay —
I: Villeneuve’s Philosophy
