In the opening scene of Who by Fire, Quebecois filmmaker Philippe Lesage’s latest feature, a car pulls over along a highway for a brief rest stop. As one of the passengers, a young woman, Aliocha (Aurélia Arandi-Longpré), attempts to get back in, however, the car, driven by her father Albert (Paul Ahmarani), lurches forward just out of reach. When she walks toward the car, it drives away yet again. We see this “joke” played out at least one more time, in more extreme form, as the car drives away, around a bend in the road, out of sight. In the next scene, she is back in the car, which pulls up along the side of a lake where a seaplane is docked. The plane, piloted by Blake (Arieh Worthalter), an old friend of her father’s, will take the group, which also includes her brother Max (Antoine Marchand-Gagnon) and his best friend Jeff (Noah Parker), to a spacious cabin in the woods for an extended vacation. The earlier incident with the car is never referenced again.
This opening scene establishes, in abridged form, at least one central dynamic that runs through Who by Fire. On the basis of The Demons (2015) and Genèse (2018), Lesage is no stranger to extremes of behavior — in particular the way ostensibly harmless pranks can quickly shade into aggression and outright cruelty. Here, though, Lesage displays a tendency to skip over the resolution of such actions, often jumping forward to moments where the social violation has been assimilated, however uncertainly, into the larger group dynamic. Early on in the film, for example, Max tells Jeff about how he once caught Aliocha watching sadomasochistic porn, a story that the latter evinces a touch too much interest in. In a subsequent scene, we see Jeff and Aliocha talking on her bed, until the former makes a pass at her, is abruptly rebuffed, and then slaps her lightly on the face before rushing out of the cabin in distress. The next time we see them together, the two are being introduced to Blake’s friends, the actress Hélène (Irène Jacob) and her partner Eddy (Laurent Lucas), who are joining the party in the woods, and who assume that the pair are dating. Aliocha promptly corrects them, but as before, the prior event is not brought up then or any time after.
For at least half of Who by Fire’s 155-minute runtime, this dynamic proves absorbing enough. Blake, a well-off filmmaker known for his earlier fiction features, scripted by Albert, has, for a time now, worked as a documentarian. Though unremarkable in itself, the career decision has had an appreciable impact on Albert, who currently scripts animated TV shows for kids, and is an evident source of friction between the two. So when past tensions surface — not for the last time — during a lengthy, drunken dinner scene, captured in a continuous shot, we derive interest not just from how the personal spat is refracted by the rest of the table, but also from how the conflict is subsequently assimilated into the group dynamic the day following.
Eventually, though, Lesage’s decision to elide the precise details of various character interactions feels less strategic than evasive. The basic setup, which gathers a group of egotistical adults and unstable youths together in a restricted space, allows Lesage to generate any number of dramatic conflicts. It soon becomes clear, however, that Who by Fire is populated not so much by characters as by dramatic engines — figures that exist solely to inject intensity on demand. The tense relationship that develops between Jeff and Aliocha, for instance, becomes a stated source of frustration for Max. But as neither his relationship to his sister nor to Jeff is developed in any significant way, there is no context in which to comprehend his behavior, and when he later tells Jeff that it is as if he does not exist, the line resonates as unintentional meta-commentary on his place within the larger drama. Aliocha, likewise, does not do much more than stand at the nexus of two overlapping dramas, triangulating between not just Jeff and Max, but also her father and Blake. As in the female-driven half of Genèse, she exists here less in her own right than to serve a structural purpose.
Even structurally, though, Who by Fire finally fails to cohere. It is unclear, for instance, why the film, though ostensibly an ensemble piece, spends so much of its runtime following Jeff. The late-breaking death of a minor character, likewise, brings Who by Fire close not to tragedy, but plain incoherence. Indeed, the film does not end so much as deflate in multiple directions, including about five different endings — all portentous, none convincing. In a film-festival environment where artistic novelty is often defined in terms of surface stylistic difference, it is on some level refreshing to find a film that falters on the more prosaic terms of script and character. But whereas Lesage’s Genèse impressed despite such flaws, Who by Fire leaves much more to be desired, its drama failing to go beyond the merely schematic.
Published as part of NYFF 2024 — Dispatch 3.
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