Eric Tessier

Les Pee-Wee 3D: L’hiver qui a changé ma vie [The Pee-Wee 3D: The Winter That Changed My Life] (2012)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On TV, December 2020) Exactly no one was asking for a teen hockey film in three dimensions, but I suppose that the marketing coup in the small French-Canadian market was worth it – and let’s face it, audiences here lap up any kind of hockey film. Les Pee-Wee 3D: L’hiver qui a changé ma vie is familiar material – three young teenagers are brought together by hockey, learning life lessons along the way and competing in a major tournament as a test of their skills. Two boys and one girl share lead roles, and director Eric Tessier effectively moves the pieces of this small-scale sports film. The drama is shot cleanly, the hockey sequences are pretty good, and everything in between is unobtrusive. People who aren’t from Canada (and even more so French-Canada) can’t quite understand the enormous infrastructure that makes the country such an effective hockey-player factory, and it starts at the very junior level. If nothing else, Les Pee-Wee is a glimpse into that subculture, a pleasant-enough sports film for teenagers, and an easy crowd-pleaser. Surprisingly enough, the film got a sequel five years later, Junior Majeur, which followed the main characters into their early adult years, with far darker and more complicated subplots.

Junior Majeur (2017)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, December 2020) French-Canadian film producers will make hockey movies at the slightest provocation, and one of the strangest follow-ups has to be Junior Majeur, which takes characters from the kid-themed Les Pee-Wee 3d: L’hiver qui a changé ma vie and brings them five years forward, on the cusp of (maybe) being drafted for the big leagues. This time skip comes with themes and subplots more appropriate to the late-teen age group: alcohol abuse, sex, professional aspirations and friendship rifts. Slickly directed by Éric Tessier (who also helmed the first film), this is broad-spectrum filmmaking for the French-Canadian public: the references are familiar, the supporting actors are well known, the execution is professional, the acting is fine and the stakes are culturally understood. One thing it isn’t, however, is a film for kids. Does it work? It does. It may be a bit preachy around the edges, a bit closed off in its own universe, a bit gratuitously melodramatic in an attempt to create some artificial suspense, but nothing to seriously affect the film. In the end, Junior Majeur is a hockey movie. Those sell themselves. What I wonder, though, is if you can sell both films of the series as a single unit, considering that if the change in approach made sense in theatres, it leaves home viewers with very different experiences (and possibly incompatible audiences) for both films.

5150 Rue des ormes [5150, Elm Street] (2009)

5150 Rue des ormes [5150, Elm Street] (2009)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(In theatres, October 2009) I’m not going to be particularly objective in reviewing this film: Screenwriter Patrick Senécal (adapting his own novel) has been a good acquaintance of mine for years, I obtained tickets to the premier via a network of friendly contacts and I’ve got distant financial ties to the publisher of the original novel. Yeah, I’m biased. Still, it’s fun being biased when the movie being discussed is an accomplished piece of work like this one: a tight claustrophobic thriller, 5150 rue des Ormes manages to be a fair adaptation and a successful film on its own. The story of a teenager who gets trapped inside an ordinary family house by a psychotic man and his accomplice family, this is a thriller that means to lock you in a suburban dungeon along with an average protagonist. It gets much weirder than that, of course, especially when the true nature of the family patriarch’s madness is revealed, and when the hero comes to buy into his twisted rules. Some of the first hour is annoying: those who are expecting an action movie will be frustrated at the hero’s inability to grab a rifle, assault his captors or fiddle his way out of his dungeon. But this is a psychological thriller, not a shoot’em-up, and so we have to buy into some of the uncomfortable staging in order to get to the real core of the story. Fortunately, director Eric Tessier keeps things moving at a decent pace, and he can depend on a number of capable actors: Normand D’Amour is particularly effective as the evil patriarch, a thankless role on which much of the film depends. It all leads to an increasingly grotesque third act, and a deliberately unsatisfying conclusion that refuses to tie up all the threads. (Senécal fans already know that one of the characters missing in action eventually gets a sequel of sorts.) While not above a few credibility problems (duration of batteries in the video camera, length of beard, DNA evidence left at the scene of a murder, etc.), 5150 rue des Ormes is another solid thriller made-in-Quebec but fit to be seen anywhere on the planet.