All You Can Eat Buddha (2017)

(In French, On TV, January 2022) Even by the standards of arthouse French-Canadian movies, writer-director Ian Lagarde’s All You Can Eat Buddha is a weird one. The opening credits of the film waste no time in setting up the off-putting nature of what will follow, as shots of a calm blue sea are overlaid over a fat man, tentacles and dissonant musical stings. What’s in store after that? Plenty, even if it may not make much sense. Taking place at a low-end vacation resort, the film revolves around an overweight, diabetic man who decides that he’d rather stay at the resort than go back home. Which is really curious considering that he doesn’t do much more than eat and look forlorn, not even taking part in the resort’s activities. But the weirdness accumulates: As the world outside the resort steadily degrades, he manages to cure a young woman of her anorexia, make friends with an octopus, have sex with a maid, and befriend the rest of the staff. (Except for the resort owner, who’s driven crazy in trying to understand why people like the protagonist so much.)  Lengthy silences and enigmatic events constantly remind viewers that this is a low-budget art film, not meant to be understood as much as taken in. It all climaxes by what I’m guessing is karmic retribution, as the role of the eater reverts and balance is brought back to another cycle. I wisely gave up early on making sense of All You Can Eat Buddha—I simply wasn’t in the mood for puzzle resolution, so I just let the film wash over me and wasn’t completely bored by the experience. Many will get much more out of it, but the key is not expecting anything as ordinary as a narrative-driven film. It often feels like a dream, so that should tell you enough about whether you’re susceptible to its strengths or not.