A loosely connected group of inner-city teenagers spend the summer partying, daydreaming, fighting, flirting, arguing with their families and working dead-end jobs in Gamma Rays. This warm-hearted docu-fiction hybrid feature from Quebecois director Henry Bernadet is essentially a love letter to multicultural Montreal, whose tourist landmarks and idyllic riverside vistas figure prominently throughout the film’s freewheeling patchwork narrative. Following its world premiere in San Sebastian this week, Bernadet’s lyrical ensemble drama should pick up further festival play, although its low-key tone and fairly uneventful plot will likely limit its appeal to niche art-house audiences. It opens domestically in November.
In style and theme, Gamma Rays plays like a semi-sequel to Bernadet’s debut feature West of Pluto (2008), a prize-winning docudrama about another gang of adolescents, this time in the director’s native Quebec City. Since then he has made shorts, and episodic series for TV and online broadcast, but he returns to the same teen-centric mosaic formula here using the much larger and more socially mixed canvas of Montreal. Bernadet recruited his young-adult protagonists, all from non-white and immigrant families, via high schools and youth forums in the Saint-Michel and Villeray neighbourhoods, drawing on their own life experiences to create a loose narrative framework.
At its core, Gamma Rays is a triptych of character studies, each a stand-alone plotline but loosely intersecting across the film. Fatima (Chaimaa Zinedine) is a street-wise, hot-tempered beauty from a Moroccan family who works a dead-end job as a supermarket cashier. She previously ran errands for a small-time drug dealer whose clutches she is trying to escape, with only limited success. Meanwhile, shy Abdel (Yassine Jabrane), also from a Morrocan background, becomes steadily more irritated with his boorish cousin Omar (Hani Laroum), who has been imposed on him as house-guest and playmate for the whole summer. Eventually Abdel snaps, leaving Omar alone at a metro station, after which he disappears into the city, triggering an anxious manhunt and angry recriminations at home.
Completing this trio is Toussaint (Chris Kanyembuga), a reserved Afro-Canadian loner with a love of astronomy and fishing. One day, he finds a message in a bottle with a phone number inside, and calls it on impulse. The woman at the other end becomes a kind of confidante and life coach to her new phone friend, slowly coaxing him out of his solitude in a way that appears to be therapeutic for both. This is the most lyrical of the three stories, but also the least convincing, veering into sentimental fairy tale terrain at times. With no friends and no visible family, the supernaturally wise Toussaint feels more like a film-maker’s fantasy than a flesh-and-blood character.
The ending of Gamma Rays feels particulalry Canadian, where any problem can be smoothed over by everyone just being a little bit nicer to each other, possibly while sharing a freshly baked muffin. But despite occasionally glib moments, Bernadet’s big-hearted urban symphony exudes plenty of rough charm and visual poetry. The domestic struggles of Fatima and Abdel have a real-world texture to them, as do the observational scenes featuring teenagers chatting and joking together, seemingly oblivious to the camera. However amateur this cast may be, Zinedine already has professional potential, with the looks and charisma of a movie star.
Visually, the default style of Gamma Rays is hand-held documentary naturalism, but Bernadet counterpoints this raw aesthetic with dreamy cloudscapes, hazy sunsets, artfully composed dissolves between scenes, and even a lightly experimental episode shot using a thermal imaging camera. The director and his team of cinematographers share an especially keen eye for Montreal’s modernist architecture, from familiar icons like the Olympic stadium and Biosphere to striking work-in-progress slabs of concrete brutalism. A heavily deployed score of shimmering, woozy electronica seems designed to reinforce the film’s underlying message that life-affirming beauty can be found even in the city’s most neglected neighbourhoods.
Director: Henry Bernadet
Screenwriters: Henry Bernadet, Nicolas Krief, Isabelle Brouillette
Cast: Chaimaa Zinedine, Chris Kanyembuga, Yassine Jabrane, Hani Laroum, Océane Garçon-Gravel
Producer: Vuk Stojanovic
Cinematography: Philémon Crête, Nathan B Foisy, Philippe St-Gelais
Editing: Jules Saulnier
Music: Maxime Veilleux, Mathieu Charbonneau, Simon Trotier
Production company: Coop Video de Montreal (Canada)
World sales: H264 (Canada)
Venue: San Sebastian International Film Festival (New Directors)
In French
99 minutes
