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Monday, June 15, 2026
And the winners are...! Artist Awards at the 13th Montreal Asian International Film Festival (MAiFF) 2026
Friday, June 12, 2026
Orwell: 2+2=5 on MUBI
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| Orwell: 2+2=5 on MUBI TRAILER |
When 2+2 No Longer Equals 4: Orwell, Raoul Peck, and the Crisis of Reality
Raoul Peck’s Orwell: 2+2=5 arrives not as a documentary about a writer but as an intervention into a historical moment. It is a film haunted by the suspicion that George Orwell’s darkest fears were not warnings about some distant future but diagnoses of recurring tendencies within modern civilization itself. Watching Peck’s lucid and unsettling work, one is struck by a paradox: Orwell remains the most quoted political writer of the twentieth century precisely because he understood something timeless about power. Yet his relevance today is not merely political. It is existential. His work illuminates not only how governments manipulate truth, but how human beings accommodate themselves to lies when reality becomes too painful, complex, or inconvenient to bear.
The film takes its title from the most famous act of psychological coercion in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984): Winston Smith’s forced acceptance that two plus two equals five. The slogan has become a cultural shorthand for ideological conformity, but Peck wisely understands that its significance extends far beyond partisan politics. Orwell’s real subject was the destruction of objective reality itself. Tyranny begins not when citizens are forbidden to speak but when they lose confidence in their own perceptions.
This insight resonates with extraordinary force today. Across the world, democratic institutions appear increasingly fragile. Political leaders cultivate alternative realities. Social media transforms opinion into identity and identity into tribal warfare. Artificial intelligence generates persuasive fictions at industrial scale. Facts compete with narratives; narratives compete with emotions. In such an environment, Orwell’s vision no longer feels prophetic. It feels descriptive.
Peck structures the documentary around Orwell’s final years on the remote Scottish island of Jura, where he struggled to complete 1984 while tuberculosis consumed his body. Damian Lewis’s voiceover brings Orwell’s letters and diaries to life with remarkable intimacy. What emerges is not the image of a literary monument but of a frail, exhausted man writing under the shadow of death. Orwell himself remarked that the novel was written “under the influence of tuberculosis.” The observation is more profound than it first appears. Few works of literature possess such muscular intellectual confidence while being created by someone physically collapsing. The body was failing; the mind remained fiercely independent.
Peck juxtaposes Orwell’s illness with the obsession of authoritarian systems for strength, fitness, and spectacle. It is one of many subtle ironies in the film. Tyrannies often worship physical power because genuine intellectual freedom remains beyond their control. Orwell understood that the strongest act of resistance is sometimes simply to perceive reality accurately.
Yet the greatest achievement of Orwell: 2+2=5 lies in its insistence that Orwell’s ideas emerged not from abstraction but from experience. Before he became Orwell, he was Eric Blair: colonial policeman, socialist journalist, reluctant celebrity, and perhaps most importantly, witness.
No book demonstrates this better than Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), the Orwell work that taught me more about the human condition than any of his political writings. While Animal Farm and 1984 transformed him into a global icon, Down and Out reveals the moral intelligence behind those later masterpieces and highlights the societal structures that keep the very poor from pulling out of their predicament.
The book chronicles Orwell’s immersion in poverty among dishwashers, tramps, laborers, and the homeless. Unlike many social observers, Orwell does not sentimentalize suffering. Nor does he reduce poverty to economics. He understands that deprivation alters one’s relationship with time, dignity, self-respect, and possibility itself.
What remains astonishing nearly a century later is the precision of his observations. Orwell describes homelessness not merely as the absence of shelter but as a condition of social invisibility. The poor become people whom society ceases to notice except as problems to be managed. Reading those pages today, one recognizes contemporary cities in every line. The tents beneath overpasses, the encampments near luxury developments, the widening gap between prosperity and precarity—all seem anticipated by Orwell’s unsparing gaze.He possessed what might be called a Saturnian view of reality: cold, disciplined, resistant to illusion.
He rarely offered solutions. Instead, he illuminated mechanisms. He showed how institutions shape consciousness, how economic structures influence morality, and how language obscures suffering. His greatness lay not in resolving contradictions but in revealing them.
This quality distinguishes Orwell from many contemporary political commentators. Modern discourse often demands certainty, allegiance, and moral clarity. Orwell distrusted all three. He was capable of criticizing imperialism while acknowledging his own complicity in colonial structures. He fought for socialism while exposing the crimes of Soviet communism. He championed ordinary people while remaining painfully aware of his own class origins.
This complexity forms one of the most compelling themes in D.J. Taylor’s biography, "Orwell: A New Life" (Little, Brown, 496 pages). As Peter Marks observed in his insightful essay, “The self-fashioning of George Orwell,” the enduring fascination of Orwell lies partly in “the difference between the kind of person he was and the kind of person he imagined himself to be.” Marks, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Sydney and author of George Orwell the Essayist, identifies a central tension that runs throughout Orwell’s life: the perpetual effort to transform Eric Blair into George Orwell.
Indeed, Orwell may have been literature’s greatest self-invention. The colonial schoolboy became the champion of the dispossessed. The Etonian intellectual became the chronicler of miners and tramps. The aspiring novelist became history’s most influential political writer. Yet the transformation was never complete. Taylor’s biography wisely avoids hagiography. It presents Orwell as brilliant, courageous, occasionally prejudiced, sometimes contradictory, and frequently difficult.
These contradictions do not diminish Orwell. They make him more valuable.
Peck’s documentary occasionally glides past some of these uncomfortable dimensions. The controversies surrounding Orwell’s list of suspected communist sympathizers, his complicated attitudes toward women and homosexuality, and aspects of his political judgment receive limited attention. Yet even these omissions inadvertently underscore a larger truth: Orwell’s significance does not depend on personal perfection.
His authority derives from intellectual honesty.
In an era increasingly obsessed with ideological purity, Orwell’s willingness to examine his own assumptions feels almost revolutionary. He recognized that the most dangerous lies are often those we tell ourselves.
The contemporary parallels are impossible to ignore. When Orwell wrote about Newspeak, he was describing the manipulation of language to narrow the boundaries of thought. Today, linguistic battles dominate public life. Political movements across the spectrum compete to define permissible vocabulary. Social media rewards outrage while punishing nuance. Algorithms amplify certainty and suppress ambiguity.
Meanwhile, advances in artificial intelligence introduce new forms of epistemological instability. Deepfakes, synthetic media, automated propaganda, and algorithmic persuasion all threaten to blur distinctions between reality and fabrication. Orwell did not predict the technology. He predicted the psychology.
That is why Orwell: 2+2=5 feels so urgent.
" Orwell described the four penny coffin as an inexpensive and comparatively safe sleeping option for the poor of London." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_and_Out_in_Paris_and_London
Peck’s montage of contemporary figures—Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, Narendra Modi, Benjamin Netanyahu and others—does not argue that today’s democracies have become Oceania. Rather, it demonstrates how authoritarian impulses emerge repeatedly under different ideological banners. Orwell understood that tyranny has no permanent political home. It can wear the language of nationalism, revolution, religion, security, or even freedom.
The film’s most moving moments occur when it returns to Orwell’s faith in what he called the “proles”—ordinary people whose common sense remains resistant to official dogma. Peck offers this as a note of cautious hope. Yet it is a fragile hope.
For Orwell never believed progress was inevitable. Civilization survives only when individuals maintain the courage to see clearly and speak truthfully.
That may be the ultimate lesson of both Peck’s documentary and Orwell’s life. The battle over reality is never finally won. Every generation inherits it anew.
Today, amid information warfare, political polarization, technological disruption, rising authoritarianism, and deepening social inequality, Orwell’s work remains indispensable not because he predicted our future but because he understood our nature. He knew that human beings crave belonging, certainty, and meaning. He also knew that these desires make us vulnerable to manipulation.
Few writers have explored this dilemma with greater clarity.
And few films have captured its contemporary urgency as effectively as Orwell: 2+2=5.
The documentary leaves us with an uncomfortable realization. Orwell’s genius was not that he imagined a world where two plus two equals five. His genius was understanding how easily people might accept it—and how difficult, lonely, and necessary it is to insist that it equals four.
Epilogue: The Man Behind the Myth
To understand why Orwell still speaks so urgently to the twenty-first century, one must look beyond 1984 to the deeper moral formation that began with Down and Out in Paris and London. More than a memoir of poverty, it established the ethical lens through which Orwell would view power, class, and human dignity. Living among tramps, laborers, and the homeless taught him that suffering is not merely economic; it is a form of social invisibility. The compassion and unsentimental realism that animate his later work originate here.
Yet Orwell himself was a creation. As Orwell: A New Life argues, there remained a persistent tension between Eric Blair, the Eton-educated son of empire, and George Orwell, the self-fashioned champion of ordinary people. The scholar Peter Marks has perceptively described this as the gap between the person Orwell was and the person he aspired to become. That tension generated much of his intellectual energy.
His experience in the Spanish Civil War, later immortalized in Homage to Catalonia, convinced him that propaganda could distort reality as effectively as bullets. It was there that Orwell witnessed ideological factions rewriting events in real time, a revelation that became the foundation of his later warnings about totalitarianism.
None of this absolves Orwell's flaws. His documented prejudices, his discomfort with homosexuality, and his infamous list of suspected “crypto-communists” remain troubling facts. Yet they neither invalidate his insights nor reduce his achievement. Orwell's greatness lies partly in his willingness to expose uncomfortable truths, including those about himself.
What makes him indispensable today is that his concerns have evolved rather than disappeared. Newspeak has become algorithmic manipulation. State propaganda now coexists with AI-generated misinformation. Surveillance is no longer only governmental but commercial, embedded in platforms that monitor attention, behaviour, and desire. Democratic societies increasingly fragment into competing realities, each sustained by its own information ecosystem.
Many of Orwell's contemporaries remain admired; Orwell remains necessary. The reason is simple: he understood that the ultimate political struggle is not between left and right, but between truth and the forces determined to dissolve it. That battle, perhaps more than ever, is now our own.
The images depict the neighborhoods in Paris and London where he lived in extreme poverty.
Wednesday, June 10, 2026
LA MÉTHODE FELDENKRAIS DE CHANTAL MARTIN
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J’ai connu Chantal Martin alors que nous suivions toutes deux un cours portant sur les femmes en affaires. À cette époque, je ne connaissais pratiquement rien à la méthode Feldenkrais ni à son potentiel pour améliorer la mobilité et le bien-être. Dans le cadre de cette formation, Chantal m’a offert un échantillon de sa pratique sous forme d’un traitement individuel. Cette expérience, qui pouvait sembler simple à première vue, a eu un impact durable sur ma compréhension de mon propre corps.
Comme beaucoup de personnes de ma génération, je vivais avec des tensions constantes dans la nuque et les épaules. J’avais fini par considérer cet état comme normal, sans vraiment réaliser à quel point ces tensions étaient présentes et limitaient ma liberté de mouvement. Pendant cette séance d’essai, j’ai eu une véritable prise de conscience. J’ai été frappée de constater jusqu’à quel point mon cou et mes épaules étaient contractés en permanence. Cette découverte a été un choc, mais aussi une révélation : il existait une autre façon d’habiter mon corps, avec plus de souplesse, de confort et de conscience.
Les années ont passé. Plus de dix ans après cette première rencontre, j’ai développé un problème important à l’épaule droite. La douleur était telle que ma mobilité était sévèrement réduite et que certains mouvements étaient devenus presque impossibles. En cherchant une solution, je me suis souvenue de cette expérience marquante vécue avec Chantal. J’ai alors repris contact avec elle afin de recevoir des traitements individuels.
Cette décision a marqué un tournant important dans mon rétablissement. Grâce aux séances avec Chantal, j’ai progressivement retrouvé la mobilité et la flexibilité de mon épaule. Au-delà de l’amélioration physique, j’ai découvert une approche globale qui m’a permis de mieux comprendre mes habitudes de mouvement et la façon dont elles influençaient mon confort quotidien. Encouragée par les résultats, j’ai commencé à participer aux cours que Chantal offre au Centre Shambala. Ces ateliers sont devenus une source précieuse d’apprentissage et de développement personnel.
Mon parcours avec la méthode Feldenkrais ne s’est toutefois pas arrêté là. Un jour, alors que je marchais dans un parc, je me suis blessée de façon assez importante. La douleur était intense et il m’était impossible de poursuivre ma promenade comme prévu. C’est à ce moment que j’ai réalisé à quel point les apprentissages développés dans les ateliers étaient devenus intégrés. Malgré la douleur, j’ai pris conscience de mon état, de mon environnement et des différentes options qui s’offraient à moi pour rentrer chez moi en sécurité. Pas à pas, j’ai évalué mes capacités, ajusté mes mouvements et utilisé les principes de conscience corporelle acquis au fil des années. J’ai réussi à revenir chez moi lentement, mais avec confiance, en appliquant concrètement ce que j’avais appris.
Par la suite, j’ai également dû faire face à une opération majeure. Encore une fois, les traitements reçus auprès de Chantal ont joué un rôle déterminant dans ma récupération. Ils m’ont aidée à retrouver progressivement ma mobilité, ma capacité à marcher et à reprendre une vie active.
Aujourd’hui, lorsque je regarde le chemin parcouru, je constate qu’il ne me reste qu’environ 15 % des limitations de mobilité dont je souffrais lors de mes premiers rendez-vous privés avec Chantal Martin. Les bénéfices que j’ai retirés de cette démarche sont, pour moi, incalculables. Au-delà de l’amélioration physique, cette approche m’a permis de retrouver une plus grande autonomie, une meilleure qualité de vie et, surtout, une véritable joie de vivre. Je suis profondément reconnaissante envers Chantal pour son accompagnement, son expertise et son engagement à aider les gens à retrouver leur plein potentiel de mouvement.
DISCLOSURE DAY in theatres June 12
Nearly half a century after Close Encounters of the Third Kind transformed extraterrestrial life into a cinematic language of awe, Steven Spielberg returns to familiar cosmic territory with Disclosure Day, an ambitious, emotionally charged thriller about government secrecy, alien contact, and humanity’s capacity for empathy. It is a film that arrives at a peculiar cultural moment. What once belonged to the realm of speculative fantasy now occupies an increasingly crowded space of congressional hearings, declassified files, viral UFO videos, and endless online conspiracy ecosystems. The challenge facing Spielberg is not simply convincing audiences that extraterrestrials might exist. It is convincing them that the possibility still inspires wonder.
Disclosure Day succeeds brilliantly as a thriller and often as a philosophical drama. Yet it never fully recaptures the transcendent sense of revelation that made Spielberg’s greatest science-fiction films feel like encounters with the unknown itself. Instead, it becomes something more complicated: a reflection on a society so saturated with information, suspicion, and mythology that even the arrival of the extraordinary risks feeling familiar.
The film opens with remarkable confidence, plunging viewers directly into crisis rather than discovery. Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), a government contractor turned whistleblower, is already fleeing powerful forces determined to suppress evidence of extraterrestrial contact. The familiar first-act journey toward revelation has already happened somewhere off-screen. Spielberg and screenwriter David Koepp are less interested in whether aliens exist than in what happens after certainty arrives.
That narrative choice gives Disclosure Day its distinctive energy. Rather than a mystery, the film becomes a chase. Daniel possesses decades of classified evidence documenting alien encounters, hidden research programs, and the machinery of institutional deception. Pursuing him is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), the weary architect of a secrecy regime convinced that disclosure would fracture civilization itself.
Running parallel to Daniel’s story is Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a Kansas City meteorologist whose life is abruptly altered by inexplicable abilities. She can perceive hidden emotional truths, understand languages she has never learned, and eventually becomes a conduit for communication beyond ordinary human understanding. As Daniel and Margaret move toward one another, the film constructs a collision between political truth and spiritual revelation.
The structure occasionally threatens to overwhelm itself. Koepp’s screenplay is packed with ideas concerning faith, institutional power, psychological evolution, collective memory, and the ethics of disclosure. Some scenes exist almost entirely to articulate competing worldviews. Characters frequently debate whether humanity is ready for the truth, whether religion can survive confirmation of non-human intelligence, and whether secrecy has protected civilization or merely infantilized it.
Yet Spielberg remains one of cinema’s great conductors of movement. Even when the script grows talkative, the film never feels static. Collaborating once again with cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, Spielberg transforms exposition into momentum. The camera glides, circles, pivots, and pursues. Action sequences unfold with extraordinary clarity and elegance, particularly a dazzling set piece involving a collision of automobiles, railways, and impossible timing. Few directors understand spatial storytelling with Spielberg’s instinctive mastery.
The performances anchor the film’s loftier ambitions. O’Connor gives Daniel an appealing uncertainty. Unlike traditional action heroes, he appears burdened rather than empowered by his role in history. He is not a chosen savior so much as an accidental custodian of dangerous knowledge.
Blunt delivers the film’s strongest work. Margaret’s transformation could easily have descended into abstraction, but Blunt grounds the character in vulnerability. She portrays a woman overwhelmed by the sudden collapse of emotional boundaries. Every glance becomes an act of involuntary intimacy. Every interaction carries the weight of another person’s hidden pain. Her performance quietly reframes the film’s central concern. Disclosure, Spielberg suggests, is not ultimately about aliens. It is about seeing one another clearly.
Colman Domingo brings warmth and moral conviction to Hugo Wakefield, a former insider who has dedicated himself to exposing the truth. Domingo possesses an effortless authority that makes even the screenplay’s most explanatory passages feel persuasive. Firth, by contrast, avoids caricature. His Noah Scanlon is not a villain driven by greed or malice but a bureaucrat exhausted by responsibility. The film’s most compelling tension emerges from the possibility that both men may be right.
Yet for all its strengths, Disclosure Day reveals an intriguing limitation. Spielberg’s enduring message has always centered on empathy and acceptance of the Other. Here, extraterrestrials function once again as mirrors through which humanity can rediscover its better instincts. The problem is that the aliens themselves feel curiously underimagined.
The film draws heavily from familiar twentieth-century UFO mythology: Roswell, Area 51, secret autopsies, hidden archives, government cover-ups. These ideas remain culturally potent, but they belong to an older imaginative framework. In an era shaped by artificial intelligence, advanced cosmology, and unprecedented visual sophistication, the extraterrestrials often appear tethered to mid-century conceptions of alien life.
This is where Disclosure Day differs most profoundly from Close Encounters. The earlier film created imagery that reshaped popular culture. This one inherits imagery that culture has already absorbed, repeated, and commodified. Spielberg once defined how audiences imagined extraterrestrial life. Here, he appears to be responding to a mythology that has grown beyond him. And yet dismissing the film on those grounds would be a mistake. Because while Disclosure Day may not inspire wonder in the traditional sense, it achieves something else. It interrogates the nature of belief in an age when information is limitless but trust is scarce.
The film repeatedly asks whether truth possesses intrinsic value. Would disclosure unite humanity? Or would it deepen existing fractures? Would evidence liberate us, or simply become another weapon in endless ideological conflict? These questions resonate far beyond science fiction. The emotional climax, which arrives not through spectacle but through recognition, demonstrates Spielberg’s continuing faith in cinema as a moral force. It is unabashedly sentimental. Some viewers will resist its sincerity. Others may find it deeply moving precisely because it refuses cynicism.
For all its fascination with extraterrestrials, Disclosure Day ultimately argues that humanity’s greatest challenge is not making contact with alien intelligence. It is recovering our capacity for empathy in a world drowning in noise. The film never achieves the overwhelming wonder of Spielberg’s finest science-fiction work. It follows cultural myths more often than it creates new ones. Its extraterrestrials remain less imaginative than its ideas. Yet even when it stumbles, Disclosure Day possesses a seriousness of purpose and emotional conviction that distinguish it from most contemporary blockbusters. It is not a close encounter with the sublime. But it is an intelligent, engrossing, and unexpectedly thoughtful meditation on truth, belief, and the fragile bonds that hold civilization together. In an era increasingly defined by distrust, Spielberg’s enduring faith in human connection remains its own kind of radical act.
Epilogue: The great irony of Disclosure Day is that Spielberg has returned to extraterrestrials only to discover that the real mystery is no longer whether we are alone in the universe. It is whether we can still be astonished by anything at all
Sunday, June 7, 2026
NERVURES au cinéma dès le 12 juin
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| BANDE ANNONCE |
Nervures veut être un film de contamination — une œuvre où le deuil infecte l’espace, où les silences familiaux moisissent dans les murs d’un village oublié, où l’horreur naît moins du surnaturel que de l’effritement psychologique. Sur papier, l’ambition est réelle. Dans son exécution, toutefois, le film de Raymond St-Jean demeure prisonnier de ses propres intentions, incapable de transformer son riche matériau thématique en expérience viscérale cohérente. Il en résulte une œuvre qui intrigue par fragments, mais qui peine constamment à trouver son âme.
Le point de départ possède pourtant une force indéniable. Isabelle quitte Montréal après avoir appris que son père, Maurice, est gravement malade. En rejoignant Saint-Étienne, ancien village forestier rongé par le déclin économique et l’isolement social, elle découvre une vérité plus brutale encore : son père est déjà mort. Dès lors, Nervures s’engage dans une lente descente vers l’étrangeté, multipliant les comportements inquiétants, les indices cryptiques et les tensions familiales larvées.
Cette prémisse évoque immédiatement un certain cinéma d’horreur psychologique contemporain — celui qui privilégie l’atmosphère au choc immédiat, la désintégration émotionnelle à la simple mécanique de la peur. On pense parfois aux paysages désolés de l’horreur folk, parfois au body horror organique et humide popularisé par le cinéma indépendant récent. Mais là où ces œuvres parviennent à fusionner symbolisme et émotion, Nervures reste bloqué dans une zone intermédiaire, hésitant constamment entre drame intimiste, thriller psychologique et horreur corporelle.
Le principal problème du film réside dans cette incapacité à établir un ton clair. Chaque séquence semble appartenir à une version différente du récit. Certaines scènes suggèrent une œuvre contemplative et mélancolique sur la ruralité québécoise en décomposition ; d’autres basculent abruptement dans un registre presque grotesque, saturé d’effets sonores agressifs et d’images volontairement dérangeantes. Cette oscillation permanente finit par empêcher toute immersion durable.
Cette fragmentation est particulièrement visible dans l’écriture des dialogues. Très tôt, les conversations révèlent une artificialité difficile à ignorer. Les personnages parlent pour transmettre de l’information plutôt que pour exister. Les répliques semblent conçues pour être lues sur une page plutôt que vécues à l’écran. Chaque échange paraît légèrement surécrit, comme si le scénario craignait le silence.
Or, le silence aurait probablement été l’arme la plus puissante de Nervures. Saint-Étienne est un décor naturellement hanté : village vidé de sa vitalité, territoire suspendu entre mémoire et abandon, espace où la forêt semble lentement reprendre ses droits sur les humains. Dans ses meilleurs moments, le film comprend cela. Une lumière tamisée sur un corridor vide, un souffle dans les arbres, une pièce où personne n’ose parler : voilà les rares instants où Nervures approche enfin l’atmosphère qu’il recherche désespérément.
Mais Raymond St-Jean surcharge continuellement son récit de dialogues explicatifs, de tensions verbales et de signaux dramatiques insistants. Ce besoin constant de verbaliser les émotions finit paradoxalement par vider le film de sa substance émotionnelle. Nervures parle énormément, mais exprime très peu.
Cela dit, il serait injuste de nier certaines qualités formelles réelles. La direction artistique, notamment, témoigne d’un souci du détail appréciable. Les décors intérieurs dégagent une texture authentique : maisons vieillissantes, bois humide, objets usés par le temps. Le film réussit parfois à créer une sensation physique de décrépitude rurale, comme si chaque pièce contenait les résidus d’un passé impossible à enterrer.
La photographie constitue également l’un des aspects les plus solides du projet. Sans jamais atteindre la virtuosité visuelle des grandes références du genre, elle propose néanmoins plusieurs compositions élégantes. L’éclairage des scènes intérieures mérite une mention particulière : des jaunes étouffés, des ombres diffuses, des lumières faibles qui évoquent moins la peur immédiate qu’une forme d’épuisement émotionnel. Dans ces moments plus retenus, Nervures laisse entrevoir le film qu’il aurait pu devenir.
Le travail sonore, en revanche, illustre parfaitement les contradictions de l’œuvre. On sent une volonté sincère de créer une expérience sensorielle immersive. Bruits organiques, textures sonores oppressantes, nappes musicales anxiogènes : tout est mis en place pour générer un malaise constant. Pourtant, cette approche finit souvent par devenir contre-productive. Le mixage surcharge plusieurs scènes au point de transformer la tension en irritation. Là où le son devrait approfondir l’angoisse, il attire parfois inutilement l’attention sur lui-même.
C’est peut-être là le cœur du problème de Nervures : le film veut constamment convaincre le spectateur qu’il est dérangeant, étrange ou profond, plutôt que de laisser ces sensations émerger naturellement. Chaque effet paraît souligné. Chaque symbole semble annoncé. Chaque montée dramatique insiste sur sa propre importance.
Et pourtant, malgré toutes ses maladresses, Nervures n’est jamais totalement dénué d’intérêt. Il existe dans le film une sincérité palpable — une volonté réelle d’explorer la mémoire, le deuil, la désintégration familiale et la solitude des régions abandonnées. On sent un cinéaste attiré par des images fortes, des sensations troubles, des espaces émotionnels inconfortables. Cette ambition mérite d’être reconnue.
Le problème est que cette sincérité ne suffit pas toujours à porter un film lorsque l’écriture, le rythme et la direction d’acteurs demeurent aussi inégaux. Plusieurs performances souffrent d’une direction hésitante ; certains comédiens semblent jouer dans un drame naturaliste, d’autres dans une œuvre d’horreur stylisée. Là encore, l’absence d’unité tonale fragilise l’ensemble.
Nervures devient alors un objet paradoxal : un film manifestement personnel, parfois intriguant, mais profondément désaccordé avec lui-même. Comme les nervures d’une feuille morte, ses différentes composantes restent visibles — photographie, design sonore, idées thématiques, horreur organique — sans jamais vraiment converger vers une forme vivante et harmonieuse.
Ce n’est pas un désastre complet. Ce n’est pas non plus la révélation du cinéma de genre québécois que certains y verront peut-être. C’est plutôt l’œuvre d’un réalisateur encore en recherche, tenté par plusieurs directions artistiques simultanément, sans avoir encore trouvé la discipline formelle nécessaire pour les unir.
Il reste néanmoins quelque chose de fascinant dans cet échec imparfait : la sensation persistante qu’un meilleur film hante constamment celui-ci, tapi sous ses excès de dialogues, ses ruptures de ton et ses maladresses narratives. Et c’est peut-être cette présence fantomatique — celle du film que Nervures aurait pu être — qui demeure finalement l’élément le plus troublant de l’expérience.
