Michael Atkinson
Some high-end, auteur-driven, 21st-century movies are streamlined theme rockets, carefully built for power, meaning, and minimal drag coefficient, while others are as teeming and shambolic as a wild mushroom patch: fecund, organically erratic, and subject to what-the-hell quirk. If your average Hou or Haneke or Martel fit that first paradigm, I’d throw Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast (2023), Leos Carax’s Annette (2021), Ruben Ostlund’s The Square (2017), and even Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist into that last hopper, along with the new Québécois drama Who by Fire, the ambitions of which only begin with its signifying title. (The titular 1974 song, by Leonard Cohen, was riffing on the Unetaneh Tokef, an ancient High Holy Days prayer ruminating on who shall perish “by water and who by fire; who by the sword and who by a wild beast….”) A prize-winner at the Berlin Film Festival, the movie is an arresting, exhausting bloom of enigmas and tensions, if temperamentally unwilling to stick the landing.
Writer-director Philippe Lesage’s eighth film (including a rash of documentaries), and, like nearly all of them, focused to some degree on the frustrated storms of adolescence, Who by Fire is in no hurry. We’re driving up into the mountains with a boujie family: flabby, prankish dad Albert (Paul Ahmarani), teen kids Aliocha (Aurélia Arandi-Longpré) and Max (Antoine Marchand-Gagnon), and Max’s friend Jeff (Noah Parker) — Lesage’s camera loiters and scans the back seat, where the sweaty Jeff is already near implosion in close quarters with Aliocha, who is, in fact, almost intolerably gorgeous.
There’s no mention of Mom, and who is what to whom is slowly leaked out. They meet Blake (Arieh Worthalter), a vividly rugged adventurist with a waterplane who, it turns out, was once Albert’s filmmaking partner, and whose spacious lodge is everyone’s destination. Blake, we see immediately, is also a bit of a competitive prick-jokester, and the sense of sublimated stress persists; between the adults’ dick duel, the doe-eyed vulnerability of Aliocha (I thought, did last year’s indie beaut Good One – young girl vs. selfish dads – mark a trend?), and the incel-like pressure of Jeff’s nervous ardor, you can already see the lid beginning to blow off the pot.
The mix gets complex: Add in Blake’s chirpy girlfriend/editor Millie (Sophie Desmarais), Blake’s two guide employees (Guillaume Laurin and Carlo Harrietha), and, eventually, a visiting couple of French film-industry colleagues (Irène Jacob and Laurent Lucas), all of it marinated in a hundred bottles of wine. Albert brought rabbits, which are killed and skinned in front of us, just so we know the stakes. Lesage’s prowling camerawork craftily musters tension even when no one is fighting, but it actually takes almost no time at all for Albert and Blake to begin insulting each other in long unbroken dinner scenes, a rich web of character nuance and lurking recriminations laid on the table, Edward Albee–style. As the scenes build, it’s like watching a hand grenade fall into the room in slow motion.
You could say that the film is structured around three such uncut scenes, each lasting 10 minutes or more and each drunker and more embittered than the last, and there is more than enough stanky testosterone sprayed about for any one film’s patriarchy critique. But Lesage’s lengthy drama often focuses elsewhere, especially on Jeff, whose ill-fitting instability includes a good number of crying jags, an impulsive pounce on Aliocha (he slaps her, but the next day she seems fine), and a pouty walk into the dark woods, where he gets lost for a whole night and finds shelter in an empty shack, building a fire and cooking himself some beans. Long passages follow the whole troupe hunting in the woods (Chekhov’s guns everywhere), fly fishing and, tragically, canoeing rapids, shot by Lesage in pensive lateral tracking shots that scream magnitude at us, beautifully. (The choreography of the one-shot fishing sequence seems to include the cooperation of live lake trout.)
Other points of irrelevance and humiliation are touched upon, as more wine is consumed, including Aliocha’s posing semi-nude for Blake’s Polaroids (which sends Jeff on a tear and gives him a chance to jerk off), Max deciding that Jeff was ignoring him (the whole film ignores him), Blake’s ill dog, and an extended dance party to the B-52’s “Rock Lobster.”
A certain amount of time spent with these people makes you wish you could go home. But, ultimately, it’s Who by Fire’s wild-mushroomy-ness that’s more maddening — too many dramatic outbursts and potent plot tangents go defiantly unfulfilled, so you’re not sure why they happened. Someone actually dies on that canoe trip, but Lesage hardly acknowledges it in subsequent scenes; instead, Aliocha sings by the fire (along with a non-diegetic song on the soundtrack), and then we go to the dog’s vet. What’s it all about, Philippe? Not merely toxic manliness, and not only teenage angst. Formally, Lesage carves beautiful blocks, full of character stripteases, evocative off-screen space, hypnotic wilderness, and extended tangled-antler face-offs. But they don’t really stack, and in the end, I’m not sure what he’s built.