Émile Gaudreault

(On TV, January 2022) As much as I’ve got some homegrown pride for the French-Canadian film industry, it’s not infallible and it has some built-in failure modes that often undermine its best intentions. Low budgets are definitely a factor, but on a creative level, the bigger issue is how Quebec-focused films with aspirations of popular success have to reach for comedy in order to make it past the media filter. (The occasional exceptions are historical films.)  That often leads to some curious tonal issues, as exemplified by Le vrai du faux. While eventually pitched as a meditation on what’s true in fiction and what’s fictive in truth, the film struggles almost endlessly between its best intentions and its low execution. As a French-Canadian director of action movies strives to silence his critics by striving for weightier material, he lands on the idea of directing a raw documentary on the struggles of a PTSD-afflicted Afghanistan veteran. That’s not exactly comedy material, but you wouldn’t know it for much of the film. After all, it’s headlined by comedian Stéphane Rousseau, populated by more comedians in supporting roles, driven by comedic screenwriting (all the way to a ridiculous supporting character meant as a satire on overly sensitive males), and clearly patterned as a comedy by veteran director Émile Gaudreault, also best-known for comedies. Except that the film decides to be serious in portraying the veteran’s struggles, giving voice to his frustrations at not being understood by his family, delving into the source of his trauma, and arguing for more sensitivity. But at the speed and unpredictability at which the film flips moods are such that the entire thing feels like a misguided concept: there’s no way this premise should have been a comedy. Except that comedy sells French-Canadian films. Le vrai du faux is not quite a disaster : if you focus on the comedy at the risk of trivializing an important subject matter, the film gets a few solid lines (even if it mishandles some other material, such as a protagonist so lacking in self-awareness as to court caricature), and the idea of transporting the action from Montréal to the sweeping alien vistas of Thetford Mines’ open-air quarries is something that brings a lot of visual interest to the film. (Cue the director character being enthusiastic about the cinematic qualities of the setting.)  It plays with a steady forward momentum despite a few odd turns, but the ending feels trite because it’s stuck between the comic requirements of its shifting tone and the more serious subject matter that it can’t quite satisfy. But that’s the reality for Quebec films aspiring at box-office success… although there’s some cold irony in noting that Le vrai du faux still ended up being a box-office flop even by French-Canadian standards.