Arsenault & Fils (Arsenault & Sons)

The patriarchy's up to its old tricks again, this time in Rafaël Ouellet's Arsenault & Fils, wherein which a family of ruthless poachers is thoroughly and counterintuitively whitewashed.

Think of all the families who play by the rules to maintain healthy animal populations. The Arsenault's poach so much that sometimes nothing's left for their neighbours during hunting season. A lot of woodland people can save heavily on their winter grocery bills if they're able to harvest a deer or moose from such a population. But if some rogue family of jackasses shoots everything in the nearby forest (while claiming kinship with nature) including curious bears there's nothing left for thrifty locals to catch. The Arsenault's don't even keep the meat for themselves or distribute it to their community.

They sell it to far off restaurants. 

And when the heat's on they dump it in the forest.

It's basic math, well-meaning bright people have created a system to manage the hunt, and ensure it continues for generation after generation, just as long as you don't fucking kill everything.

As the saying goes, one family poaching for scraps is negligible.

5 million poachers will destroy a forest.

Look at Britain.

What a catastrophe. 

Although a lot of people are bringin' it back.

When we aren't supposed to be falling for the loveable family that's trying to change, while killing innocent bears and moose with high-tech weapons outside of hunting season!, a beautiful lass infiltrates the unit with hopes of bringing them down.

Undercover and at one time conscious of the adorable 4-legged residents of the forest, she witnesses several transgressions and compiles enough evidence to put them away.

But it's classic patriarchy.

In the short amount of time she's spent chillin' with the family, she's unconsciously fallen for them, especially the one who cares little for his appearance (the true patriarch needn't do anything to attract devoted beautiful mates), and she even cares for his nutjob brother.

Worried that they'll die in a confrontation with the cops, she blows her cover and ruins everything.

The writers suggesting she couldn't overcome.

Her natural dependence on lawless men.

I was so angry while watching the production team try to cultivate sympathy for such a way of life, that I thought committing myself to the animal protection squad may just be a great way to live.

I have lots of ideas like that though and I don't know if I'm ruthless enough for the job.

It'd be nice to save animal lives though.

Wish the UN paid more attention.  

Gurov & Anna

Another bleak film, Rafaël Ouellet's Gurov & Anna, not as bleak as Chorus, which seems to have set out to create the most depressing film ever, nevertheless, quite bleak, desolate.

Post-Oscar season.

No sign of a Grand Budapest Hotel this March.

Gurov & Anna examines the line where literature intersects with reality, where imaginary creations try to fit within a quotidian schematic, this particular schematic slowly becoming increasingly more desperate as the realistic variables which haven't been taken into account significantly diverge from their literary counterpoints.

I couldn't generate sympathy for Ben (Andreas Apergis) as he sacrifices his near perfect life for an impromptu affair, an impromptu affair which maniacally consumes him, causing him to lose all sense of decorum.

You see that he's a jerk to begin with, critical when he should be supportive, neglectful of the luxuries life has granted him, more concerned with control than cooperation, a success, but still quite empty inside.

He thinks an affair will somehow revitalize his lost youth, or romantically overcome his overwhelming sense of aged futility, as it does occasionally in books, without taking into consideration the price such sensualists often pay.

He doesn't even try to get to know young Mercedes (Sophie Desmarais), just purely objectifies her, slowly becoming more and more brutal as an individual accustomed to the dictates of reason succumbs to hedonistic madness.

He's made all the right moves throughout his life and doesn't have the historicopsychological makeup to formalize being a complete and utter screw-up.

If that's possible.

When it becomes obvious that he can't control the affair in the same way he controls everything else in his life, not realizing that his ecstasy is the product of the affair's lack of limitations, which can't be controlled without being effaced, entropy sets in, with its accompanying focus on destruction.

Contentment.

There's something to be said for contentment.

Not in the sense that you let it prevent you from changing or let it cause you to stop innovating within the boundaries established by your marriage, in the sense that, from time to time, like Dale Cooper's daily present, without letting it neuter you, you appreciate the wonderful situation you find yourself within, and thereby seek to find new ways to enhance its diversity, through the art of conversation and the love of difference, through youthfully embracing the maturity of the role.

I know it doesn't work out that way a lot of the time.

It does in Kierkegaard's Aesthetic Validity of Marriage however; so easy to write, so difficult to realize.

Mercedes is as full of life and beauty as Ben is full of reserve and banality.

Her presence saves the film.

A complicated look at relationships and their shortcomings, the wonders of the imagination, and realism's abyss.