Polytechnique (Denis Villeneuve, 2009): Canada

Reviewed by Gillian Weiner. Viewed at the Santa Barbara Film Festival

Polytechnique is a eye-opening dramatization of the 1989 Montreal Massacre. This dark, disturbing story is about a young misogynist who feels women have overstepped their boundaries and have taken too much in the world. This clearly depressed, antisocial boy does what he thinks is the most justified thing he’s ever done or ever going to do; by killing 28 people, mainly women, in an engineering school before killing himself.

This unusual film lasted only 76 minutes and was told in black in white. The director, Denis Villeneuve, chose to show the murderous act twice; first from the gunman’s perspective and second from the female students who were shot but not killed.

Going into the film, I knew what it was about but in no way was I prepared for what I saw. Not only was the gun he brought into the school legally purchased telling the clerk it was for hunting small game, the well known Canadian killer Marc Lepine (Maxim Gaudette) carefully separated the women from the men in the class he walked into. After letting the men go, he brutally gun downed the women telling them they were going to die because they were going to be engineers and that they were feminists.

The writer and director spared nothing and showed everything. Villeneuve succeeds in taking us into the minds of those students that were there that winter day. You feel the horror the students felt as Lepine fired shots walking throughout the halls of the school. The most disturbing aspect about this film is the voice-over of Lepine reciting his suicide note/hate letter towards women. It’s filled with pure hostility and spite towards women who try to make something of themselves. Here, is the first time we are given a reason as to why Lepine did what he did. We see another example of sexism when Valerie (Karine Vanasse), the lead actress who we follow after the shooting, goes to a job interview. The (male) interviewer is hesitant on giving her the engineering job because he is certain she will abandon her duties to become a mother. Valerie had to assure him she did not want kids and that she wanted the job more. After the interview we see a disturbed Valerie who knew, because she was a women, would have a rough career path as an engineer. Unfortunately, after the massacre at Polytechnique, Valerie deals with the fear she faces everyday that Lepine installed in her rather then her fear of success.

The best aspect of the film was the directors use of silence. To help underline the eerie feeling that was ever-present during the story there was almost zero dialogue. It made the suicide note voice-over that much more stomach churning and made the gun shots that much louder. When there wasn’t silence there were the screams and yelling coming from the students who ran for their lives as Lepine moved on from the class full of women to walking around and shooting at whomever he wanted. The lack of dialogue obviously doesn’t let the actors shine all the way through, however, it didn’t impact the film in a negative way.

The black and white images and the lack of unnecessary monologues made this film interesting to watch as well as painful.