Lies and immortality
Director: Paul Schrader
Cast: Richard Gere, Jacob Elordi, Uma Thurman, Victoria Hill, Michael Imperioli
Rating: (M)
★★★+
REVIEWED BY AMASIO JUTEL
Oh, Canada (Apple, Neon, Prime) is the sentimental retrospective of a late-career auteur exploring his legacy. Dying of cancer, renowned documentarian Leonard Fife (Richard Gere) records his final interview.
Schrader's multi-timeline, multi-stylistic (between aspect ratios, colour palettes, and its inherent fictional documentarian quality) approach recalls and distorts memory, a thematic tie to ageing physicalised in Gere's vastly vulnerable performance.
Adept pacing and editing curate the revelation of key details, changing Leo's story, jumping through time to re-explore his relationships and repressed memories — Schrader turning to the work of Susan Sontag to illuminate legacy, memory, and truth.
Leo, now teaching, unpacks Sontag's theory, quoting, "After the event has ended, the picture will still exist, conferring on the event a kind of immortality". Leo shows his students the Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of the "Saigon Execution", which immortalises its subjects. His wife Emma (Uma Thurman) disputes this point, arguing the Viet Cong captain shot in the photograph will forever be dying. This is the thesis of the film.
Ageing, memory, and media — living forever and dying forever, on the screen and through the screen, as Schrader is and forever will be. Leo, the documentarian whose photographic reality has mythologised his life, fictionalising it alongside, and maybe through, his media.
Oh, Canada is a profound film with the sincerity and senility of a great film-maker in a vast conversation with his legacy.
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