Polytechnique ( David Villeneuves, 2009): Canada

Reviewed by Jonas Pedersen Hardebrant. Viewed at Metro 4, at Santa Barbara International Film Festival.

Without further notice we are pushed straight into the action in Denis Villeneuves black and white movie Polytechnique.  The movie portrays the school massacre in Montreal, Canada December 6 1989, where a young man killed 14 women and injured another 10 women and 4 men.  I believe that the budget for this movie wasn’t very big, but who said you need much money to make good movies?

In the film we follow three different character stories, of which are students at École Polytechnique. The first one who is never mentioned by name in the film “The Killer” (Maxim Gaudette), Valérie (Karine Vanasse) a young engineering student and Jean-François (Sebastien Huberdeau) a male engineering student. We follow how both Valérie and “The Killer” is getting ready for the day, and as Valérie is getting ready for an internship, “The Killer” is getting ready to do just that, kill.
He writes a suicide-letter where he blames feminist for taking too much and that they are ignorant and greedy. It is because of this reason that he have decided to kill female, in “The Killers” eyes feminists, engineers who are taking men’s work. A few hours later, “The Killer” enters one of the classrooms at the school with a semi-automatic rifle and a hunting knife. When he thereafter tells the male students leave and forces the female students to stay, it is the beginning of the worst school massacre in Canadian history.

Polytechnique is such a brilliant but still horrifying movie that you don’t really know whether to hate or love it. The subject, school massacre, is always a sensitive one and Villeneuves shows us, without filtering, blood, shooting and mercilessness in a new dimension. At the same time there is such beautifulness in all the shots and sequences that Villeneuve shoots. After leaving the theatre I was totally stunned with the camera work and how each and every shot could have been one of those pictures that says more than a thousand words. The playfulness in the camera movement, the choosing of angles and the unusual shots in the movie takes it to another level. My favorite scene in the movie is in the beginning of the third act, when the camera follows a car that drives next to a lake and it is visually absolutely stunning.

When a director chooses to make a movie in black and white, like Polytechnique, you might think that there are fewer opportunities to “play” with coloring, but I strongly disagree. Like Federico Fellini did in almost all of his films, Villeneuve is using the black and white coloring to his advantage, whereas a colored movie wouldn’t have near as good effects. Many
What also captured my mind is how the usage of silence in many different parts of the movie makes it almost unbearable to watch at certain times. No music, no dialog just plain steps, breathes or shots, which makes the movie extremely personal and realistic.

I would argue that a school massacre have never been so beautifully portrayed at the big screen as Polytechnique. With brutality, emotionality and originality it goes straight into the our minds and leaves us with questions we will unfortunately never get the answers to.