Polytechnique remains a harrowing portrayal of… | Little White Lies

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Poly­tech­nique remains a har­row­ing por­tray­al of vio­lent misogyny

07 Dec 2020

Words by Anton Bitel

Close-up hands of person covering their face, monochrome image.
Close-up hands of person covering their face, monochrome image.
Denis Villeneuve’s third fea­ture, which respect­ful­ly drama­tis­es a real-life school shoot­ing, remains trag­i­cal­ly relevant.

In Cana­da, 1989 was a year that saw sev­er­al vic­to­ries for women’s rights and rep­re­sen­ta­tion. On 9 March, the Supreme Court declared moot an appeal brought by anti-abor­tion­ist Joseph Borows­ki, and so in effect estab­lished a pro­tec­tion from lit­i­ga­tion for women assert­ing their repro­duc­tive rights. On 19 May, the Pay Equi­ty Act was intro­duced for pub­lic ser­vice employ­ees. And on 2 Decem­ber, Audrey McLaugh­lin was elect­ed head of the New Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty, becom­ing the first female leader of a major polit­i­cal par­ty in Cana­di­an history.

Yet with progress there often comes a back­lash. On 6 Decem­ber, Marc Lépine entered the École Poly­tech­nique de Mon­tréal – an insti­tu­tion which had twice reject­ed enrol­ment appli­ca­tions from him – with a semi-auto­mat­ic rifle, and mur­dered 14 women (injur­ing a fur­ther 10 women and four men) before killing him­self. A sui­cide note named fem­i­nists’ as his express tar­gets, and his actu­al ram­page made it clear that in his mind this was a cat­e­go­ry encom­pass­ing any ran­dom women who hap­pened to cross his path.

It would be anoth­er 20 years before the film Poly­tech­nique would attempt to address, and even to a degree to heal, this deep wound in the Cana­di­an conscience.

Drama­ti­sa­tions of recent true crimes demand a very spe­cial kind of sen­si­tiv­i­ty, and this ear­ly film from Denis Vil­leneuve – only his third fea­ture, fol­low­ing 1998’s August 32nd on Earth and 2000’s Mael­ström – is a text­book exam­ple of how to approach such mate­ri­als respon­si­bly. Out of respect for the vic­tims and their fam­i­lies,” as text reveals at the film’s begin­ning, all char­ac­ters are fic­ti­tious”, their expe­ri­ences com­pos­it­ed from sur­vivors’ tes­ti­monies. Although the char­ac­ters’ names have all been invent­ed, clos­ing cred­its duly list and com­mem­o­rate the real victims.

The killer (played by Max­im Gaudette) is nev­er named, although almost the entire con­tent of Lépine’s sui­cide note is quot­ed ver­ba­tim (in voiceover) to leave no doubt as to his misog­y­nis­tic motives. His mur­ders are pre­sent­ed in a blank, unsen­sa­tion­alised man­ner that match­es the bleak snowy exte­ri­ors and clin­i­cal­ly insti­tu­tion­al inte­ri­ors of the Polytechnique.

Out of respect, Vil­leneuve shot these scenes else­where, even though he had per­mis­sion to film on site. A black-and-white for­mat was adopt­ed, in part to avoid high­light­ing all the spilt blood. Most impor­tant­ly of all, the film’s focus is as much on the after­math of trau­ma and recov­ery as on the atroc­i­ty itself.

Close-up hands of person covering their face, monochrome image.

This was inevitable,” the killer writes in a let­ter that he leaves for his moth­er before embark­ing on his spree. That inevitabil­i­ty comes in sev­er­al shades for the view­er. There is first the fact that the film has been recon­struct­ed from real events both well doc­u­ment­ed and falling with­in liv­ing mem­o­ry, and then that it opens in medias res with two young women sud­den­ly being shot while pho­to­copy­ing papers at the Polytechnique.

From then on, as the sto­ry jumps back a lit­tle and fol­lows the dif­fer­ing per­spec­tives not just of the killer but also of some stu­dents obliv­i­ous­ly going about their dai­ly activ­i­ties, there is a ten­sion built into every scene, bring­ing a grim fatal­ism to this chron­i­cle of deaths fore­told. The killer’s first shoot­ings take place in a lec­ture room, where he has inter­rupt­ed a les­son con­cern­ing, sig­nif­i­cant­ly, entropy.

Here the killer him­self arrives as an entrop­ic force, the ran­dom dis­or­der in a closed sys­tem and the Ele­phant in the room, bring­ing about (as the lec­tur­er puts it) irre­versible degra­da­tion to the point of self-destruc­tion.” His is a vio­lent expres­sion of ten­sions – along gen­dered lines – present in Cana­di­an soci­ety, and his first move is to divide the room into girls on one side and guys on the oth­er (as he is only inter­est­ed in killing the women).

Run­ning counter to the killer’s nar­ra­tive tra­jec­to­ry are two oth­er sto­ries. Engi­neer­ing stu­dent Jean-François (Sébastien Huberdeau) is quick to grasp what is going on and to risk his life help­ing oth­ers left in the killer’s wake, but strug­gles with a crip­pling sense of survivor’s guilt. The decen­cy of J‑F’, his increduli­ty before the hor­rors unfold­ing in the Poly­tech­nique, and his self-imper­illing efforts to tend or res­cue vic­tims, all rep­re­sent an alter­na­tive kind of mas­culin­i­ty to what the killer embodies.

Mean­while, J‑F’s fel­low stu­dent Valérie (the film’s co-pro­duc­er Karine Vanasse) car­ries the film’s scars, and its hopes for a bet­ter future. Short­ly before she becomes caught up in the shoot­ings, we see Valérie being inter­viewed for a mechan­i­cal engi­neer­ing intern­ship. Her inter­view­er (Pierre Leblanc), a man from the old school, greets her with casu­al male chau­vin­ism, sug­gest­ing that she might pre­fer to work in civ­il engi­neer­ing which is eas­i­er for rais­ing a fam­i­ly… we’re look­ing for can­di­dates who won’t quit.” It is an offen­sive remark, show­ing pre­cise­ly the inequal­i­ties which women must face in the work­place, but Valérie gets the intern­ship, not least because she is clear­ly the best engi­neer among her peers, help­ing both J‑F and her room­mate Stéphanie (Eve­lyne Brochu) with their course work.

Through Valérie, we see the pos­si­bil­i­ty of progress and change, of a future gen­er­a­tion that is bet­ter than the past. She is the very oppo­site of what the killer, a fail­ure who describes him­self in his sui­cide note pre­cise­ly as rather back­ward-look­ing by nature.” Off­set­ting the hate­ful sui­cide note that the killer writes at the film’s begin­ning is a let­ter that Valérie writes to the killer’s father at the film’s end – a mis­sive full of pain, but also of love and hope.

Here Valérie gets the appar­ent last word, as the pos­i­tive coun­ter­ar­gu­ment to the killer’s neg­a­tive posi­tion. Yet this is an ongo­ing dialec­tic, and if the film was ever intend­ed to exor­cise the tragedy of the École Poly­tech­nique Mas­sacre, the ten­sions that it presents, and the sys­temic entropy that it por­trays, remain har­row­ing­ly rel­e­vant in our own age of misog­y­nis­tic ram­pages – like the 2014 Isla Vista killings and the 2018 Toron­to van attack, both car­ried out by self-iden­ti­fy­ing incels’.

Vil­leneuve made two ver­sions of the film con­cur­rent­ly, one in French and the oth­er in Eng­lish, both of which are pre­sent­ed on this BFI release, offer­ing a dispir­it­ing dip­tych of progress and its reac­tionary coun­ter­force. Also includ­ed is Judith Plamondon’s doc­u­men­tary Poly­tech­nique: Ce 1u’il reste du 6 décem­bre, nar­rat­ed by Vanasse and released on the 30th anniver­sary of the mas­sacre, which illus­trates just how close­ly the fea­ture film cleaves to what actu­al­ly happened.

Poly­tech­nique is avail­able (in both its Eng­lish- and French-lan­guage ver­sions) on Blu-ray on 7 Decem­ber from BFI.

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