Love And Human Remains

Denys Arcand's first English language film is an unhappy alliance of weak psycho-thriller (guess who's the serial killer) and looking-for-love relationship film and a forgettable follow-up effort from the director of over-rated art-house hit, Jésus of Montréal (1989).

Involving a number of overlapping plot lines it adopts my least favourite cinematic approach to narrative, which is to show a little bit of one plot-line, then a little bit of the next, then a little bit of another and so on with piecemeal circularity, the audience in no doubt that these are going to intersect. Compounding the problem is the fact that the characters are all so uniformly off-beat/emotionally confused. Whereas this might have worked in the hermetic environment of the original stage play (called Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love) by Brad Fraser from which the script was developed (by Fraser himself), transposed to a real-life setting it is completely unconvincing.

As with Jésus, the film's best moments are comedic, including the memorable exchange "Do you gift-wrap?"; "It's what we live for".

 

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