Polytechnique
I give the creative crew for this film credit, they had a tough job, and I think they worked wonders. Telling a story like this on film must have been torture, considering the events surrounding Marc Lepine’s murder of 14 women at Montreal’s Ecole Polytechnique.
Despite the fact that the film, naturally, must reenact the events of that day, director Denis Villeneuve takes a perfect approach to setting up the core of the film. He singles out a single character, one of the women who survives the shooting, and explores the profound effect the events had on her life. He actually shows how what Lepine intended for his victims actually worked in reverse for this one woman. I thought it was a brilliant analogy.
The entire film is shot in black and white, possibly to lessen the visceral imagery of blood from the shooting (although that’s just an assumption on my part). The shooting itself was disturbing, but not because of the actual violence. It was the calculated way in which Lepine centers out women only, walking right past men in the halls.
I think this is an important piece of Canadian filmmaking, and one that will be talked about for a long time to come.
