Black Gate

Film noir’s usually thought of as an urban genre. Its standard setting is the mean streets down which a man must go who is not himself mean. But a city’s not necessary; the Criterion Channel recently hosted a collection of Western Noir, films like Rancho Notorious and The Walking Hills. The ingredients for noir — violence, criminality, a morally bleak world — can be brought together anywhere.

Thus The Oak Room. Directed by Cody Calahan, with a script by Peter Genoway based on his own play, it’s a rural Canadian noir that plays with narrative and genre. You can see the preoccupations of CanLit — fathers and sons, hopelessness and a lack of escape, the harshness of the land. But you also see noir: an atmosphere of violence, a sense that everybody’s compromised, shadows and night. There’s no femme fatale here, no women at all, in fact; but there is a concern with truth, as characters tell each other stories and teach other how to bullshit. What’s true and what’s false and why the characters are telling each other the things they do become increasingly important, questions even of life and death.

There’s perhaps less a plot to The Oak Room than a structure, a framework filled with stories and discussions of storytelling. It begins one night in the middle of a snowstorm with a man walking into a bar off a highway in western Ontario. The customer, Steve (RJ Mitte) has a history with the bartender, Paul (Peter Outerbridge). Steve’s come to pick up his dead father’s things from Paul, who’s been holding them. Paul isn’t shy about telling Steve he’d be a disappointment to his old man, but Steve starts telling him a story, about a man who walks into a bar in rural Ontario one night in the middle of a snowstorm.

Why he tells the story, and what happens in it, become a large part of what The Oak Room is about. The conflict between Paul and Steve plays out on a number of levels, and goes to unexpected places. In particular there’s a story that gets told around the middle of the film about Steve’s father which gives a theological tone to events by illustrating a specific kind of damnation. It echoes the theme of mortality, but it also gives the movie a weight, a sense of the meaning behind events and why these stories matter.

On the flip side, that story’s image of damnation could be described as what happens when you have no story to tell yourself about your life and future. This is a movie about storytelling, about the motives for telling stories and about the ways stories have a power over their audience. It’s more cynical than most stories with that theme, though. Stories here delay and obfuscate and set up their audiences as marks. You could call it a movie about the danger of storytelling, but also a movie about how you need stories, and how you can use them.

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The Western’s an American genre in origin, but Europeans from Sergio Leone to Charlier and Moebius have done interesting work in the form. Usually, though, European Westerns follow American heroes. That is, the European creators are still telling American stories. Savage State (L’État Sauvage), a Western from French writer/director David Perrault, does something different, following a French family trying to get out of the American South during the Civil War. It’s a nice idea. Unfortunately, the execution’s lacking.

The movie starts in Missouri in 1863. After a brush with occupying Union soldiers turns violent, a wealthy French family decides to flee the American Civil War and return to France. Patriarch Edmond (Bruno Todeschini) hires a gunslinger named Victor (Kevin Janssens) to accompany him, his wife Madeleine (Constance Dollé), his three daughters, and their free Black servant Layla (Armelle Abibou) who is also Edmond’s lover. They set out for the coast accompanied by a couple other family retainers, but a woman from Victor’s past (Kate Moran) who leads a gang of bandits threatens to bring ruin on them all.

Let’s start with the good: the movie looks spectacular. There’s a long tradition in Western films of stunning landscape cinematography, and we get that here. The first act, largely taking place in aristocratic interiors, is less interesting; but the journey through the wilderness, lush in a way that Westerns usually aren’t, presents one sumptuous location after another. Mountain scenes give us sublime vistas. Deep green forests yield to snow as the journey progresses. It’s a nice picture to look at.

But if that’s the good, all the rest is the bad and the ugly. In particular, the story is at best thin and unconvincing. At worst, it’s a misfire. Nothing builds in any logical way or develops coherently. Character remains underdeveloped. Choices are baffling.

The idea here should be simple: fill the journey that is the spine of the film with thematically-resonant incidents that say something about character. This doesn’t happen. In fact the journey takes a while to get started — as noted, the whole first act — and then doesn’t end either in France or at an American port city, but in a ghost town in a mountain valley. So the movie starts late and ends early.

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Every story’s got a genre, even if the story’s the sole example of its genre, so by extension a lot of stories use genre conventions and trust that the audience will accept them even if they’re unlikely or unbelievable. Often the audience does, especially when the conventions are so common they don’t register as conventions. But a story usually works better the more it can justify its conventions. Especially when the justification, and the convention, work with the story’s theme.

Take Minor Premise, the first film I saw on the twelfth day of Fantasia. It’s the debut film by director Eric Schultz, with a script Schultz wrote with Justin Moretto and Thomas Torrey, and it tells the story of Ethan (Sathya Sridharan), a neuroscientist who thinks he’s worked out something fundamental about the human psyche and developed a way to control consciousness. He experiments on himself, hoping to balance his emotional landscape and enhance his intellect. Things don’t go according to plan. Ethan shatters himself, so that different parts of his mind are in control of him at any given point, and his more coherent parts must work with his ex-girlfriend Allie (Paton Ashbrook) to find a way to undo the experiment — before the physical stresses of the division kill Ethan. Mysteries abound, as Ethan’s memory isn’t consistent across all his different moods; he’s become different people, and some of them may have their own agendas.

A lone mad scientist developing a technology beyond modern science is a convention freely used in science-fiction and horror stories. It’s uncommon in reality, where much research is done in teams. But it’s a well-established storytelling device, going back to the Romantic era and Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein. The trick is making the audience believe that the scientist of questionable mental stability is able to make their breakthrough on their own. The scientist has to be written as somebody who’s that smart, and that individualistic. And the breakthrough has to be something credible — an obvious advance that’s close enough to reality, or depicted as close enough to reality, that you believe a single researcher in a lab could come up with it.

Minor Premise does all this. It’s a well-told story in general, strongly constructed and well-paced. But it handles its science-fictional conventions with an eye on its characters, and its thematic ideas play into both. This is a film about the nature of character, and the specific character of its lead is examined in a way that’s both dramatic and specifically science-fictional.

Of course, for that to work, the character has to be credible. And Ethan is. He’s vain, and smart, and the writing shows him to be smart enough that we understand his vanity while also seeing his blind spots. We see how he could have been smarter in the past, and why he thinks his life would be better if he had been that much smarter; we see how, as an intelligent man, he values his intelligence and assumes that if he were even more brilliant he’d be able to see through other people before they betray him. We can see why he’d attract someone like Allie, and why he’d inevitably drive her away.

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