Denis Villeneuve was a different director at YFF

Last week, Thom Barker looked at a film by an acclaimed director near the end of his career, so it only makes sense to follow that with a director near the beginning of theirs. Denis Villeneuve has become one of this country’s most acclaimed directors, the man behind the highly regarded Sicario, Incendies, and Prisoners. None of which really provide much context for his 1995 Best of Festival winning music video for Querer by Cirque du Soleil.

In his features, Villeneuve is largely focused on societal problems and violence, whether it’s his take on the war on drugs in Mexico in Sicario, the Montreal Massacre in Polytechnique or using war, racism and sexual violence as the basis for a missing person mystery in Incendies.

One might forgive this reviewer for having certain expectations for something made by Villeneuve, looking at his subsequent work. One might imagine my surprise when confronted with a story about the frustrated dreams of semi-mechanical men.

When it’s a music video for a song by Cirque du Soleil, a tango to be precise, one may also have expectations knowing that as well, given that they’re best known for their acrobatics. One does not expect to see largely inert people when Cirque du Soleil is involved – the bulky costumes don’t lend themselves to movement, something used to great effect in the final act of the film when one of the robots needs to attempt to tango. The actor’s faces are the real focus, even when they’re half obscured by mattress foam and wire.

The short video’s biggest achievement is production design, and it justifiably won Best Art Direction. Built out of old radios, car parts and other technological detritus, the set, props and costumes are then largely painted red to give the look of a world coated in rust. Radio aerials turn into budding flowers and rusted bolts turn into breakfast cereal.

Some nuggets of Villeneuve’s point of view come through, the bookends of the film involve the robots at its center engulfed in flame, characters achieve their goals with the result of intense personal pain, but it’s significantly more light-hearted and weird than the director’s subsequent work.

Villeneuve is set to direct a sequel to Blade Runner, bringing him back to the stories of artificial life which began his career. I suspect that film won’t look anything like this, but that might be the only Villeneuve project that this earlier work could have predicted.