‘Felix et Meira’: mood, setting and visual metaphor

One of the films opening today at the Magic Lantern is a French-Canadian study in culture clash. I reviewed the film for Spokane Public Radio, and a transcription of that review follows:

The best cinema takes us places we’ve never been. Sometimes that means literally a place. In some cases, it means a time. In many instances, it may mean a mere emotion.

In his film “Felix and Meira,” French-Canadian filmmaker Maxime Giroux doesn’t plow any new ground in terms of plot. We’ve all seen movies that attempt to examine the clash of two very different cultures, especially when the clash involves two disaffected characters who risk everything to seek out solace in each other’s presence.

In Giroux’s case though, the quality of his work isn’t so much about where he takes us as how he arranges the virtual trek.

Giroux sets his film between two cultures that – though both are situated in Montreal – couldn’t be much more different. In one, Meira – married into an Orthodox Jewish community and the mother of a baby girl – is feeling isolated and suffocated by the strict rules under which she is forced to live – rules that dictate when and how electricity can be used, that forbid the playing of music that doesn’t fit her community’s mores and that demand, whatever her own wishes, she deliver her husband as many children as she can bear.

In the other, Felix is a 40-something Quebecois who, when we first meet him, greets the father he hasn’t seen in 10 years. A father who, on his deathbed, can’t even recognize his own son. Which explains a lot about Felix, about why he seems so footloose, dependent on his sister and uninterested in doing anything specific with the inheritance she promises to share with him.

The two meet, somewhat cute, and gradually – and not particularly plausibly – develop a relationship that threatens both her marriage and community identity. Yet Giroux isn’t interested in remaking Romeo and Juliet, and he doesn’t spend a lot of time and effort constructing that kind of doomed romance. What he does spend time and effort on is developing mood, setting and visual metaphor. And that makes all the difference.

Scenes develop patiently, whether we’re talking about Giroux’s camera moving down a dinner table or following Felix through an open doorway. Lighting is natural, underscoring the story’s somber tone. Sound is important, whether it involves Meira’s playing with a mousetrap or Leonard Cohen crooning his song “Famous Blue Raincoat,” but so are silences, whether they are used as backdrop to a hotel-room scene where Felix removes Meira’s wig or the two sharing a gondola ride in a Venetian canal with Meira’s baby.

Patience is Giroux’s key and his chief stylistic tool. He may throw in scenes that for whatever reason throw us off-balance – an African-American spiritual, for example, or a pair of secondary characters complaining that Felix “dances like a vacuum cleaner” – and he’s not above using irony: Felix is given his father’s last, moving message by the least likely character possible.

But, again, patience. Giroux doesn’t tie up all his story’s loose ends. And he doesn’t promise anything remotely mainstream as eternal happiness. All he does is suggest the possibility. And that’s more than enough.