A hero’s journey holds appeal not just to the outsiders who chronicle it, but also to the hero himself, for whom narration imparts structure and structure enacts justification for the road taken. The same goes for heroines, of course, and those who fancy themselves the center of their universe, i.e., anyone who does not have a depersonalization disorder. But what comes out of making this journey the very subject of cinematic study? In a way, Francis Bordeleau’s Anna Kiri exemplifies such an approach, foregrounding the inner thoughts and desires of Anna (Catherine Brunet), a delinquent with a flair for writing. But the film also falls drastically short of its ambitions, clinging onto stereotypes long enmeshed in the heroic monomyth and padding them over with the hip immediacy of many a voiceover.
Bordeleau’s second feature follows Anna, first among a ragtag group of low-level thieves led by her brother Vincent (Maxime de Cotret), and then within the circles of Montreal’s up-and-coming literati. Brother and sister, we learn, were traumatized by an abusive father — raw snippets of split-second violence often surface from the recesses of her memory — and left to a life of petty crime: he a convenient anarchist, she (no less performatively) a diarist and dreamer. Alongside Cindy (Charlotte Aubin) and Mirko (Jade Hassouné), they blunder a heist, only to have a literature professor (Fayolle Jean) pick up Anna’s private journal and discover her boundless potential.
The film is quick to spotlight the inexorable hypocrisy of society at large, lampooning its caricatures of vapid, cool posturing. Ever the idealist who sees each loot of cocaine as a portal to quick luxury, Vincent justifies his gangbanging activities as a means of survival and of care for his little sister. Similarly, the gleaming intellectual world that Anna transitions into quickly comes undone by declarations of artistic credos and haughty pretensions from her newfound peers. Yet these caricatures never amount to much, and the message behind them doesn’t stick the landing. While Céline (Caroline Néron), a publishing cognoscente, sets her eyes on Anna and encourages her to publish her memories of suffering in a novel, Micky (Karl Graboshas), a nemesis from her unsightly past, reappears to collect his due, setting off a collision course between two equally fickle and volatile worlds.
There’s a grudgingly admirable punkish sensibility to Anna Kiri, whose bleak and grungy depictions of wintry Montreal are foil to an enlivened attempt at conjuring the artistic impulses that follow suburban disaffection. As it stands, however, the film’s anarchist roots end up subsumed by its bourgeois representation, with aphorisms a dime a dozen thrown into a superficial homage of French New Wave aesthetics. While Anna “Kiri,” the Québécois Anna Karina, finds her voice, her director more often than not dramatizes this search in a lazy, by-the-books way, proffering a hackneyed stab at her interiority that mostly repeats the tired and whimsical tropes popular at the height of the Sundance Noughties. “The problem with finding someone too beautiful too long,” Anna jots somewhere in her folio of life, is that “we end up destroying them. Because beauty is unbearable over time.” So, too, are farce and frivolity.
Published as part of Fantasia Fest 2025 — Dispatch 6.
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