SUNDANCE 2015: CHORUS

Christophe (Sebastian Ricard) and Irene (Fanning Mallette) in Chorus.

Good grief

By John Esther

Shot in black and white and mostly during Canadian winter months, the look of Chorus is as dreary as its tale of woe.

A man named Jean-Pierre (Luc Senay) walks into an interrogation room and sits down across from a police official named Hervé (Didier Lucien). He does not want a lawyer. The overweight, slouching (toward Gomorrah) criminal is there to admit to another crime he committed. It happened 10 years ago and it involves an 8-year-old boy who was not very good at sports, had lost his bike key and broke the cardinal rule about getting into a car with strangers.

As Jean-Pierre continues his story, a sense of dread seeps in. This is a story which cannot end well. But, before Jean-Pierre is done telling his story, writer-director-cinematographer-editor Francois Delisle's film cuts away to the film's two protagonists, a couple filled with existential dread. Except the couple are no longer together.

Far from the cold winter of Montreal, Christophe (Sébastian Ricard) does odd jobs around the sunny shores of a Mexican beach. Other than that, he spends a lot of time in the nude, either with a woman or rolling under the ocean's breaking waves. A desire to dissolve.

Meanwhile, Irene (Fanning Mallette), who has not left Montreal, sings in a classical music chorus and helps her mom, Gabrielle (Genèvieve Bujold) out with money. Her life is essentially free of companionship or coherence. Anything -- a smell, a sound, a word, a gesture -- can send her into a tailspin of emotional nausea.
  
Both now in their early 40s, it is rather obvious that Christophe and Irene are the parents of the dead boy who could not throw a baseball (although he was quite the painter). The parents were not sure their only child was dead, but when the news comes down from the police, the couple must now moved to a different kind of grief. Guilt and uncertainty have been replaced by guilt and certainty. Closure comes as both a relief and near-unfathomable woe. How can the parents go on? They could not even master their previous form of grief. They must go on (even if Irene's father could not).

To its credit, Chorus does not just limit itself to a couple's personal grief and loss, it shows how grief becomes compounded by one heinous crime. Not only did Jean Pierre rape and kill a boy, he ruined a marriage, produced a further rifts in the family dynamic, and scarred a young boy who was friends with the dead boy. Chorus does not stop there, either. A smaller narrative in the film illustrates the fact that not only can those who act against society, like Jean Pierre, kill children, but society itself can kill children, too (well, as long as the kids are foreign).

There is also another harrowing scene where the parents must essentially do the shopping for their dead son. Their tragedy is someone else's financial gain.

Part of the World Cinema Dramatic Competition at Sundance 2015, Chorus is a gritty, emotionally honest (and draining) film about coming to grips with the horrors life can throw at you at any given moment. Yet the film is not a tearjerker nor is it the kind of film made for year-end bourgeois acting awards. It is too gritty, too relentless and too sexually graphic to be that reductive and sinister. It also has a smart soundtrack featuring medieval classics as well as the Suuns.

It is the kind of independent film one expects from an independent film festival.