Zach Braff has experience running around like a clueless anglophone in French Canada. Long before French Girl avec Évelyne Brochu, Braff played Henry on the streets of Montréal in The High Cost of Living.
Henry is a drug dealer and also a locksmith who lives upstairs from a Chinese restaurant. Even though he lives in a bilingual city (more than Quebec City), Henry remains a stubborn anglophone. Henry is delivering drugs when he drives his car the wrong way down a 1-way street. Nathalie (Isabelle Blais) is pregnant and thinks she is having labour pains. She waits for the taxi in the street and Henry hits her with his car.
Nathalie loses the baby. The "medical diagnosis" is that she has to remain pregnant for weeks because she needs to get over the shock to then deliver the stillborn baby. I am not an obstetrician but this seemed really confusing.
Her husband Michael (Patrick Labbe) is the stereotypical hard-working man who sacrifices everything else. A minor quibble but calling him Michel would have made more sense given that he is part of the francophone section of the story.
Nathalie has to remain "pregnant" to further this story so Henry can try and be a guardian angel of sorts, all while hiding his actual involvement. Henry's personality goes from being a scummy drug dealer into a person with a heart of gold with no thoughts about delivering drugs (though he still does that).
Nathalie has friends but somehow doesn't want to share the fact that she lost the baby. The film gives the impression that her friends are child obsessed and she no longer feels like she can relate. So Nathalie turns to the one person who caused all of this.
In the scene where we find out a little bit about Henry's story, Nathalie and Henry stop off at Fairmount for bagels. Henry confesses he's an American from New York City who still thinks the bagels from New York City are better.
Henry asks Johnny (Julian Lo), the son of the Chinese restaurant workers, to take the blame for the hit and run. Johnny can speak French, unlike Henry.
Deborah Chow (writer/director) created a rather good premise. The art of Nathalie and Henry getting to know each other is intriguing with a side of creepy. The scenes where Nathalie explores her own pregnant body with a stillborn fetus are compelling and very sad.
There are tidbits along the way that are puzzling. Henry said his visa expired when there aren't visas between the 2 countries. Perhaps Henry gets that wrong but he should know something in all of this.
The irony is that Henry escapes his anglophone world when he hits Nathalie with his car yet none of it rubs off on him.
Canadian film notebook: Évelyne Brochu gets caught in a love triangle in French Girl
You can overcome Chow's oddities in the script to enjoy the film on some level. Directorial debuts are never perfect and some are more flawed than others. Braff comes across well as a clueless anglophone; his growth is limited to dealing with Nathalie.
Blais carries everything in this story: the plot, the emotion, the stillborn baby. The story keeps going because she doesn't want to deliver the stillborn baby until we know we are toward the end of the movie.
Suspend a lot of reality to watch the film. If you aren't as obsessed about details as your humble narrator, you are more likely to enjoy the film at face value. This isn't as bad as it could be, watch knowing you will ask a lot of questions.
CanadianCrossing.com film reviews
CanadianCrossing.com film coverage
The High Cost of Living won the TIFF's award for Best Canadian First Feature Film and made the festival's Top Ten Canadian films of 2010.
The High Cost of Living is available on Peacock in the United States.
video credit: Filmoption International
photo credit: The High Cost of Living
Comments