Polytechnique

Black and white, 35 mm
Canada, 2009, 77 min
Section: Tribute to Denis Villeneuve

Synopsis

For seven long years he has been planning an attack against young women who want to become engineers, entering a world that in his mind is reserved only for men. Just when he is heading toward the building of the Montreal Polytechnique with a loaded gun, student Valérie is being interviewed for an internship; to succeed she must keep quiet about her plans to start a family. When the killer reaches the classroom, the professor is lecturing on entropy, explaining that every system subject to pressure from its external environment undergoes a conversion that results in imbalance and a transfer of energy. The violence that follows is a perfect illustration of this definition. While Valérie is going through hell, her schoolmate Jean-François misses his chance to become a hero. This black-and-white film, based on a real event and shot in the actual places where the massacre took place in December 1989, has a theme similar to Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, but diverges from it in many ways. Villeneuve does not explore what brought the unnamed killer to such misogyny but, like a documentarist, he first records his deeds and then asks the question we are used to hearing in connection with war and holocaust: how can the survivors continue their lives? In this unspectacular but very impressive film, in which Pablo Picasso’s Guernica also plays a symbolic role, people hardly communicate, the cheerless school corridors induce feelings of alienation, and the viewer, watching the snow falling endlessly, almost forgets that the setting is a big city. The film won nine Genie Awards.