Seattle Sightings: The Seattle International Film Festival (review)

attachment to documentary realism) and key political events (e.g., the 1980 Quebec sovereignty referendum) influenced how narrative fiction films have been created, distributed, and viewed both locally and by global audiences. Borrowing from approaches used in textual analysis, cultural studies, genre studies, and queer studies, Pike’s “variegated methodology” (12) results in a work whose nine chapters alternate loosely between broad survey and detailed case study. The latter are especially rich in their ability to challenge widely-held cultural assumptions opposing art and commerce , cinema and advertising, international film and local television, English and French. For example, chapter 3 revisits the “time capsule” films of Anglo-Canadian Patricia Rozema and Québécois Denys Arcand, juxtaposing the career paths of two idiosyncratic directors who succeeded in bringing an art cinema perspective into the realm of popular commercial film, using satire as a vehicle for expressing deep personal concern with societal and spiritual values. In his treatment of contemporary screen stars, Pike profiles Québécois ‘crossover icons’ Pascale Bussières and Roy Dupuis, whose popularity and professional longevity can be attributed in part to an ability to negotiate multiple cultural identities and to project different, often contradictory personas to audiences in different markets. While a filmography and chronology section would make the work more accessible to students and non-specialists, Canadian Cinema clearly underscores just how limiting it is to consider English-Canadian or Québécois cinema in isolation, or to overlook the ways today’s filmmakers are incorporating pop music and recycling familiar genre film tropes in the creation of an authentically Canadian cinema that retains its trademark emphasis on spatio-temporal specificity and insists upon the strong bond between cinematic image and material reality. Davidson College (NC) Carole Kruger Seattle Sightings: The Seattle International Film Festival, 2014. . SIFF’s celebratory Fortieth Anniversary Edition promised attendees would “be returned home safely but forever changed.”Over 25 days, 435 films from 83 countries projected viewers along endlessly varying itineraries in time and space, reality and imagination. Opportunities to travel through French-hued landscapes were plentiful. Debut features accounted for almost half the pictures with French connections. Two—Guillaume Gallienne’s Les garçons et Guillaume, à table! and Abdellah Taïa’s L’armée du salut—are based on autobiographical reminiscences of adolescent issues concerning sexual identity. In Christophe Offenstein’s gorgeously photographed En solitaire,a Breton yachtsman circumnavigates the earth in theVendée Globe race,coping with weather and a young stowaway’s disqualifying presence on board. Dyana Gaye’s Des étoiles thoughtfully considers issues encountered by Senegalese immigrants— those who leave and those who return. 296 FRENCH REVIEW 88.3 Reviews 297 Sophomore efforts included Eastern Boys (Robin Campillo), The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears (Bruno Forzani and Hélène Cattet), and Grand Central (Rebecca Zlotowski). Gabrielle was noteworthy for its realistic, straightforward portrayal of the frustrations individuals with intellectual disabilities encounter with love, family, and living independently. Wishing to make a film with and not just about her subjects, director Louise Archambault cast Gabrielle Marion-Rivard—a musically-talented young actress with Williams Syndrome—in the title role. Veteran directors focused on individuals seeking order and meaning in their life. Triptych (Robert Lepage and Pedro Pires) gracefully intertwines three absorbing stories whose characters in various ways lose and then rediscover their voice: a schizophrenic poet no longer writing, an unhappily married surgeon escaping mutely into alcohol, a jazz singer suffering aphasia after a brain operation. Philippe Garrel’s Jealousy recalls New Wave films due in part to the moody black-and-white cinematography of Willy Kurant (who shot Godard’s Masculin féminin). The director’s son, Louis, plays a man caught between two women—his wife and a new love.All three gradually succumb to the corrosive effects of infidelity. Lucas Belvaux’s Pas son genre is an honest look at what a couple needs to sustain a relationship. A Parisian professor assigned for a year to “provincial” Arras falls for a divorced single mother (played by Émilie Dequenne with bubbly energy and a dazzling smile) who works as a hairdresser. Mutually attracted, they set about conquering differences. She peruses Kant...