Reply to a review of the movie A Year in the Death of Jack Richards

A Year in the Death of Jack Richards

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	spedersen@ wrote:
	A Year In the Death of Jack Richards is not only a psychological portrait in film of a professor of theology in his 50s who is mortally entangled in his own psychodrama, but a film about film itself. As a story it smudges the conventions of narrative. As a film it questions the conventions of film-making. Jack Richards is portrayed with powerful subtlety by veteran Canadian film character actor Vlasta Vrana. Much of the storytelling resolves into tight closeups of his expressive face, lined and gouged by a lifetime habit of kindness in adversity. His eyes do not threaten but are riveting none the less. Jacks interior life is obsessive to the point of mental breakdown and has been for at least two decades. However, on the outside, his eyes, deep-set beneath bushy eyebrows, never lose their compassionate expression. In taped interviews with mental health specialists voiced over a still shot of Richards in his thirties where his long-hair and beard suggest the face of Christ, we learn that he believes obsessively that his daughter Jessica has been abducted by a cult. The information is delivered clinically by the doctors voice on the tape, and the clicks and whirs of the tape being rewound and replayed is amplified. At 50-something, Jack decides at last that death is preferable to self-pity and resolves to commit suicide by allowing himself to be abducted by a cult, whose members will treat him as a king for one year, providing him with a "castle, " "concubines" and "gifts, " and then, when the year is up, will murder him for their sins. But the "cult" never manifests itself in an objective wayonly in Jacks eyes. He applies for a job as super in an old-fashioned, once-elegant apartment building called The Grosvenor. He is interviewed by the manager of the building, and installed in a roomy apartment with hardly any furniture in it. He meets the tenants who are without exception kind, and in the case of two young women in the next apartment to him, kind to the point of deliberate flirtatiousness. He discovers that a painting in the apartment covers a hole in the wall between the two apartments. When he investigates he is shocked to observe that the women are naked. He retreats in alarm. During the year he meets Julie (Micheline Lanctot), a woman from his past, whose troubled life means she is also currently single. A romance seems to be possible. But again Jack withdraws from intimacy just as it is heating up. Jacks state of mind is projected into the films narrative style by a surreal treatment of conventional reality. His conversations with his boss and his tenants are mostly small-talkgreetings at the door, exchanges of care-taking details but the conversational rhythm is rendered remote by pauses between what is said to Jack and what he says in reply, during which Vranas face fills the frame, and his eyes, while remaining neutral, convey a sense that he has to examine every detail of what is said to him like a small child examining a new toy. The film is shot mostly (but not entirely) in black and white. With uncanny skill, director-screenwriter Benjamin Paquette treads the line between consensus reality and Jacks reality, holding them in continual balance, unfocused, so that we are fairly sure but never certain that what is taking place in the story is reliable. Our belief is suspended without ever being totally ruptured. The use of black and white with its greater abstraction over colour in the matter of detail is an essential technique in telling Jacks ambiguous story. Its a striking achievement. Paquette is a throwback to the "auteur" style, like so many film-makers were, particularly in France, during the late 60s and early 70s. Not quite irrelevant comparisons run through our minds in my case, Rose-marys Baby (because of The Grosvenor but otherwise totally irrelevant), and Last Year At Marianbad (because of the surreal style) This is a film to see with film buffs and friends and is meant to be heatedly discussed afterwards over coffee. While what it means and how it was achieved are likely to arouse the biggest differences of opinion, on one thing, all are likely to agree: Vlasta Vranas extraordinary performance. It is a tour-de-force by an actor who knows the camera better than he knows his own mirror. (8/10)
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