Kim Nguyen

  • Le nez [Empire of the Scents] (2014)

    Le nez [Empire of the Scents] (2014)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, April 2021) As far as documentaries go, Le nez has an asset that most lack — a first-rate filmmaker in French-Canadian writer/director Kim Nguyen, here taking a break from fiction feature films. (In the arc of Nguyen’s career, Le nez comes right before his turn to better-known English-language films such as Two Lovers and a Bear, as well as The Hummingbird Project.)  Le nez, as the title suggests, takes aim at the sense of smell, and just about everything related to it — perfume, food, emotions, seduction and sex. The film benefits from a great variety of interviewees — most notably chemist François Chartier, whose work on the chemistry of taste remains definitive (he has an evocative moment in which he describes the experience of tasting a very old and expensive wine that practically puts you there.), astronaut Chris Hadfield describing the smell of space (similar to cordite, if you’re curious), and journalist Molly Birbaum (who evocatively describes her loss of smell after a severe accident). Other highlights include an intriguing exploration of the world of fragrance, a look at ambergris, and a squirm-inducing segment on the link between smell and sexual attraction. From a filmmaking perspective, Le nez is put together far more strikingly than most documentaries, but the topic itself remains fascinating even if there’s an impression that Nguyen has only scratched (and possibly sniffed) the surface of the topic.

  • Two Lovers and a Bear (2016)

    Two Lovers and a Bear (2016)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2019) After seeing Kim Nguyen’s poetic Le Marais and then his techno-thriller-ish The Hummingbird Project, I was curious as to how a filmmaker could go from one to the other. It turns out that Two Lovers and a Bear holds part of the answer—or, at least, mixes a harsh reality with suspense mechanisms with an oneiric sensibility that occasionally turns the film into something quite different. There is some built-in interest in the premise, which follows two young people madly in love with each other in Canada’s deep, deep north—the kind of arctic-circle north that scares even Canadians that live in the kind of climate that scares Americans. Humans are not meant to live that far north without considerable assistance, and nearly everything there is measured against the imperatives of temperature and distance to the south where it’s not always frozen. Our two titular lovers are played by Dane DeHaan and Tatiana Maslany—it goes without saying that Maslany acts circles around DeHaan, but the climate suits him: he’s not nearly as annoying nor emotionally distant here than in many other movies. As for the bear, well, the bear is an imaginary companion that only speaks to him, not her. When they are convinced that a stalker is threatening her, they strike out southward, getting stuck in a blizzard and eventually discovering an abandoned military base that can act as shelter. But the stalker is as imaginary as the bear—and if it’s not clear enough from the get-go that these are not emotionally healthy characters, they then burn their sole shelter to make a point. The rest of the film barrels toward its tragic but romantic conclusion, with intrusions of the fantastic into reality that, to me, act as a bridge between Nguyen’s earlier work and the somewhat more realistic nature of his latest film. I can’t say that I really enjoyed Two Lovers and a Bear: I didn’t like the characters, the ending, the undisciplined blend of genres. But it did hold my attention, and there were a few moments that were particularly successful. Suddenly, I’m far more interested in Nguyen’s filmography: I can gather a sense of direction from it, and I hope that his next project will keep going even further in that direction.

  • Le Marais [The Marsh] (2002)

    Le Marais [The Marsh] (2002)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, June 2019) A typical criticism of French-Canadian movies is that they often take place on a very literal, very realistic register: They’re often concerned with domestic drama in a contemporary setting, or in realistic depiction of French-Canadian history. Now here comes Le Marais to offer a counter-example: Set in nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, it’s a semi-fable about a small village, a semi-accidental death and its coverup ensnaring two eccentric men living near the closest marsh. The film’s images are unusually impressionistic, set in fog and palpable humidity. The plot doesn’t stick to reality as we know it. Actors (and not the usual group that you can see over and over in Québec’s biggest box-office hits) speak in an unusual accent, cultivate eccentricities, and behave with the gravitas that their semi-poetic dialogue requires. Writer-director Kim Nguyen is clearly trying something different. The film may or may not be meant to be taken literally—there are levels of meaning and thematic resonances here … it’s not just a movie about characters living near a marsh. Alas, for all the freedom that the non-realistic approach implies, it’s also a movie that leaves cold: when the end comes, relatively abruptly, I was left with a shrug and no real intention to stay a moment longer in Le marais’s distinct reality.