Maelström (2000)

 

Director: Denis Villeneuve

Screenplay: Denis Villeneuve

Cast: Marie-Josée Croze as Bibiane Champagne; Jean-Nicolas Verreault as Evian; Stephanie Morgenstern as Claire Gunderson; Pierre Lebeau as The Fish; Kliment Denchev as Head-Annstein Karlsen

Canon Fodder

 

The opening dialogue, telling the story-within-a-story of Maelström (2000), comes from a talking fish. Right away, Maelström is not as strange as this bookend suggests, which I feel is something to consider as this is more of a mostly bleak tale of life and death which happens to end with a happy ending. The fish however is strange, and Denis Villeneuve, long before he crossed over into Hollywood with his own style, showed an eccentricity with this touch. Based on a prehistoric type, the fish befits the fishing motifs throughout, and is the idea of a fantastic narrator whose constant death and resurrection, because he is a fish being prepared for food, befit the tale of death and life here. Said fish, an animatronic which adds to this surreal touch, wishes to tell a story to us, and he (though note gendered, only with a male voiced narrator) does stand out for what is a film which is interesting, but does entirely depend on your taste in a bleaker drama with moments of black comedy.

What initially feels like a horror film as the fish is being prepared in a medieval hell chamber cuts jarringly to modern Canada in the midst of the most clinically done abortion. The patient is our female lead Bibiane "Bibi" Champagne (Marie-Josée Croze). The daughter of a famous figure, with the weight of this and her brother’s success on top of her, her high fashion store is failing, and her life between drugs and casual sex leads to an accidental hit-and-run whilst intoxicated of a Norwegian fish factory employee. This older man manages to drag himself to his apartment but he still dies, and she sadly already drove off unaware of what she has done, only realizing what she had done the morning after and sober.

Text introductions to sections makes this feel like a novel, with its silent film intertitles and the emphasis on a plot which begins with despair, about losing all, and eventually leads to romance and true love even if through her mistakes and death. The eccentricity is there just in how Tom Waits’ The Ocean Doesn't Want Me is use, proudly without any subtext but literal, with an attempted suicide attempt by Bibi where fate decides to keep her for a reason. Maelström is a bleak film just in terms of its grey aesthetic. It does come with happiness; one where fate intertwines hers with the adult son coming to pay his dues to his father, but this complete a drama whose characters find themselves in their lowest. The dark humour is there, where the ashes of the father end up considered down a toilet, but it feels incredibly bleak for a long period of itself, where the happiness is based in the matter-of-fact, with only our fish narrator the only thing close to a spiritual entity. It is through love, the burgeoning one despite the obvious melodramatic concern, in how you can love a person who hit-and-run your father, that offers a serenity and something magical in this world which the fish recounts. There is also the man who finds himself consoling our two central figures separately, telling them to live for the moment, as close to this tale's angel, if an older man abruptly tangled in the web of fate, adding another bow of light in this very grounded world.

The style of Denis Villeneuve at this point did not really change into the modern day, with films like Prisoners (2013) still possessing traits from Maelström, which presents a moment which was absolutely reassuring, regardless of your opinions on him as a filmmaker and personal taste. That being in the 2010s onwards, when I went through that decade with concerns of the auteur and idiosyncratic filmmakers being far less common than the blockbuster, one did appear and he seemingly did not get compromised at all, even when handling a licensed adaptation like Dune.