The last time Paul Schrader made a film with Richard Gere, sex was the text and the subtext was danger. That was more than 40 years ago, enough time for Hollywood to have ordered a remake of American Gigolo as a series. Director and actor are back together in Oh, Canada, which is showing in competition at the Cannes Film Festival. This time, the text is sex and the subtext is mortality. Or maybe it’s the other way round. Whatever the case, the new film finds Schrader contemplating sex and death, lust and disease, memory and deception.
Adapted from Foregone, a novel by the late Russell Banks, Oh, Canada presents us with Leonard Fife, a dying documentary filmmaker getting filmed for a documentary about his life. His interlocutors are Malcolm and Diane, a pair he once taught in the years in which he was a youngish lecturer. As the crew sets up for filming, Malcolm seems particularly happy to be able to use a technique Fife taught his class back in the day, if only because the master is now himself the subject. But Fife says he got the technique, which involves getting a subject to face the camera directly, from Freud, a name-drop that suggests the film’s preoccupation with psychology. Susan Sontag also gets a name-drop.
Fife doesn’t seem extremely eager to do the interview—unless his wife Emma, played by Uma Thurman, is present. We soon learn why. He wants to talk to her directly; he wants to confess. He wants to talk about his deceptions, some of which she is aware of and doesn’t want on camera.
Schrader’s main technique here is flashbacks that are deliberately non-linear. A report by Cannes calls the film “a puzzle” but if it is, it isn’t a complicated one. Schrader is not Christopher Nolan. It is easy enough to understand when a particular thing takes place, even when Fife shows up as Jacob Elordi for portions of his youth.
What proves tricky is the veracity of what happened. In different scenes but in the same setting, for example, a young Fife seems to seduce both Diane and Emma during a date. Schrader also seems distracted from the Fife-Emma axis when a bit of dialogue makes it seem as though all the men and women involved in the interview have been intimate with one another. The information comes and goes and is barely pursued afterwards. It is the type of idea that could be cut without losing much of anything.
In any case, decades after his first picture as a director, the 1978 Blue Collar, Schrader is pretty much the same filmmaker he has always been. His visual style and his screenplay remain taut and dry, an aspect of his work that, even when deploying mainstream stars, has seen him embraced by art house audiences over the years. The not quite complimentary feature of his work, a muted, vaguely unsatisfactory ending, is also present here. This means that Schrader will not now become a maker of box office conquests. Indeed, Oh, Canada will appeal to the writer-director’s fans and filmography completists above all else. It is also fairly certain that the strength of the man’s name and the Cannes screening will be a draw for any venue the director chooses.
As Schrader’s leading man in the new film, Gere retains the attractiveness that made him a fitting gigolo in 1980. And there is something of a passing-the-torch tenderness in having Elordi play the young Fife only a few months after viewers saw a man so consumed by lust that he gave Elordi’s bathwater a slurpy sip.
But maybe Schrader’s big coup is getting Thurman, who has been absent from major film productions since 2018, to play Emma. She doesn’t exactly do much besides look at her onscreen partner with teary chagrin. But she does form one half of a couple performing a sexual act in a scene that doesn’t come close to the surprise of American Gigolo’s full-frontal nudity, but which might yet generate some buzz for a movie that is neither Schrader’s best work nor his most scandalous.
Director, screenplay: Paul Schrader
Cast: Richard Gere, Uma Thurman, Jacob Elordi
Cinematography: Andrew Wonder
Production design: Deborah Jensen
Music: Phosphorescent
Editing: Benjamin Rodriguez Jr.
Sound: James Baker
Production companies: Oh Canada LLC
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)
In English
95 minutes
