Jean-Paul Colmor lives by himself, but he's hardly alone. Many lives are represented all around him in the old cars and piles of discarded objects that litter his land in Saint-Amable, near Montreal. Quietly, Colmor works at repairing what others have tossed aside, selling what he can in order to buy even more, adding to his collection and recycling the past to pay for the future. Into his peaceful and cluttered sanctuary come four teenagers with Down syndrome, who find refuge in Colmor's second-hand world.
Provocative and poetic, Denis Côté's Carcasses is a blend of fact and fiction, one of the most daring works of the filmmaker's increasingly influential career. One of the leaders of Quebec's contemporary art cinema, Côté crafts intricate, subtle movies, usually on a shoestring budget, and has helped re-establish the province's status as a hot spot for filmic innovation. Côté's observational style recalls Quebec's direct cinema roots, and by marrying this traditional approach to modern genre, he offers a collision of sensibilities rarely seen in the province's commercial movies. In Carcasses, Côté finds a kindred spirit in Colmor, who also remakes the old into something new, building an existence on the fringe and living a truly independent life. Côté finds beauty in Colmor's decaying environment, using long takes as if to suspend time amid the memories stored in the detritus of a culture. Colmor is an engaging and willing subject, equally comfortable espousing his philosophies for Côté's camera or silently working on a car with the director as voyeur, peering into what is typically a private act of restoration and recovery. By including the constructed narrative of the teens' arrival, Côté forces a social interpretation of his images, questioning how a society assesses the value of things to determine what should be kept and what should be thrown away.
Carcasses is a mature work by one of Canada's most intriguing cinematic talents. Côté is changing the face of Canadian cinema from the outside in. His influence is easily spotted in the work of contemporaries like Rafaël Ouellet, who made Le Cèdre penché in 2007 and last year's Derrière moi,and his independent spirit mirrored in the works of Carl Bessai (director of Normal, Mothers&Daughters and this year's Cole) and Rodrigue Jean (director of 2008's Lost Song). Carcasses is Côté's most urgent and effective statement for a new Canadian cinema.
Jesse Wente
Denis Côté was born in New Brunswick and studied film at Ahuntsic College in Montreal. His first short film, Des Tortues dans la pluie (97), screened at numerous international film festivals. His other short films include Mieux (98), Seconde valse (00), Mécanique de l'assassin (02) and La Sphatte (03). His first two feature films, Les États nordiques (05) and Nos vies privées (07), screened at the Festival. He followed with his third feature, Elle veut le chaos (08), which won the Silver Leopard for best director at the Locarno Film Festival. Carcasses (09), which was part of the Directors' Fortnight at this year's Cannes Film Festival, is his latest film.