The Love Crimes of Gillian Guess

Colour, 35 mm
Canada, 2004, 93 min
Section: Focus on Canadian Films
Oficiální stránky: www.forcefour.com

Synopsis

Images of a mixed-bag of aesthetic qualities alternate on-screen – comic book animation, kitschily arranged nooks of Hollywood romance, the alienatingly mocked-up décor of diverse environments, scenes that look like authentic footage.... On top of that, there are exaggerated colours and breakneck turnarounds in the plot. One could describe the narrative style, oscillating between melodrama, musical, quasi-documentary, and a tale of biting irony, as a flamboyantly assembled picture book featuring the upheavals of a voluptuous blonde. The director uncovers the drama of heroine Gillian Guess gradually, and the starting point for his expeditions to various time planes is the bizarre and bombastically tasteless sets at the TV station where Gillian uninhibitedly participates in some kind of porno talk show. The film is dominated by an ostensibly rather simplifying psychoanalytic formula leading to the discovery that Gillian’s provocativeness and her brazen obscenities are only a reaction
to wounds suffered in the past.

About the director

Bruce McDonald (b. 1959, Kingston, Ontario) grew up and studied in Toronto. He has made short dramatic, documentary and experimental films since the beginning of the eighties; the first of these efforts, about young creators of film and graffiti, won an award for best Canadian student film. In 1989 he debuted in features with Roadkill, and his other work includes a project following a punk band on a tour of western Canada, Hard Core Logo (1996, screened in the Forum of Independents section at the 1997 KV IFF). The Love Crimes of Gillian Guess (2004), starring singer Phil Collins’ daughter, is the director’s fifth feature. Other works: Highway 61 (1991), Dance Me Outside (1994, screened at the KV IFF in 1995), Picture Claire (2001). Chance meetings play a significant role in McDonald’s films, and he likes to combine dramatic tension with a psychological interest in his characters.