REVIEWS • • Lea Pool's Anne Trister f feminism in the '60s consisted, in part, of a rejection of mothers and Itheir roles in the social structure, the '80s have brought a return to the mother, if not to the domestic and fam­ ilial values of the '40s and the '50s. Anne Trister, Lea Pool's second fea­ ture, seems to be concerned with this new feminist position which echoes the concerns of other feminist films of the '80s, such as The Bad Sister, made for British television by Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, and Kay Armatage's Storytelling. These films try to find some kind of alternative position for women that is outside the classical Oedipal text. Much of this work is based on the post-Lacanian psychoanalytic theory of such French feminists as Cix­ ous, Irigaray, Lemoine- Luccioni and Montrelay, concerned witj1. the rela­ tionship to the mother, the return to the mother and the need to accept the mother if one is to produce a feminist • Symbolizations of desire in Anne Trister: Louise Marleau as Alix with Albane Guilhe as Anne discourse outside the patriarchal (Oedi­ pal) cycle. daughter's despair over the death of her and sensitively played. Albane Guilhe other films financed in part by televis­ The first shot in Anne Trister is that father and how the mother was never portrays Anne as a lost, young woman ion, the visuals seem to be constructed of a young woman's naked back,- she's able to give her daughter the love she looking for herself in her art and in her specifically for the small screen and a' lying on a bed and crying. The camera needed. relationship to another woman. Al­ sense of claustrophobia develops. In pulls back and we see an older woman Loud, draIpatic music now and a though she's believable enough in the this case this is doubly disappointing. dressed in black sitting rigidly on a jerky pan over the skyline of Montreal. role of a sensitive girl in need of the First, because the concept of the film bench a few feet in front of her. She It's Anne's point-of-view. She has ar­ care and affection of an older woman, it and some of its parts promise much does ~ot move to comfort her. The next rived in Montreal and here she looks up is hard to see her as conscious or more, but also because Lea Pool's ear­ shot is of the young woman walking two people. One is an old Jewish man sophisticated enough to create the lier films show such a wonderful mas­ around in a desolate, half-built building who runs a cafe, a friend of her father. complex art work which becomes the tery of the cinematic language as a whose grey walls are covered in graffiti. As they sit talking about her father (in a central symbol of the film. means of poetic expression. We hear the sounds of water and wind. conventionally shot scene consisting of Simon, her father'S friend, and an ob­ On one wall is scribbled, "Adam and close-ups and shot-counter-shot edit­ vious father substitute, gives her a La femme de l'hotel (1984) also Eve" On another there is a huge draw­ ing) there is a sudden cut from Anne's studio. There is a long pan around the deals with the parallels between the art­ ing of a naked man and woman and two face to a video-screen shot of a little girl peeling grey walls, which echoes the ist and the neurotic personality. But in small children. As she walks around this bandaging a teddy bear. She is being pan through the deserted building at that film there is no separation between labyrinth-like structure we see another treated by a therapist at the Sainte Jus­ the beginning. Anne takes the whole the real world and that of the artist's graffiti of a raised fist, some written tine Hospital. The woman therapist, studio as her canvas and turns it into an imagination. A soft, muted light echoes obscehities, and the words "La loi" ap­ Alix, is the other person who Anne intricate architectural environment the muted lives of the women, and pear on another wall. Cut to her face as looks up. She moves into her apartment whose obsessive all-over patterning, the deadness of the city in winter be­ she walks forward. A woman's voice is and the continual and rather awkward and mUltiple false perspectives, crossed comes an ever-expanding metaphor for raised in the Hebrew prayer for the cross cutting between Anne and the with a strong linear play of shafts of the deadness and alienation that they dead and we see a corpse, wrapped in a child, Sara, whom Alix is treating makes light and painted shadows, is reminis­ struggle with. The inter-relationship of white sheet, being carried through the it obvious that we are to draw a parallel cent of the expressionist sets of The the artist/filmmaker and the neurotic desert on a stretcher. A funeral proces­ between their two cases. Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the 1920 si­ woman who resembles her fictive sion follows, and the young woman is One of the virtues of the film is that it lent film classic. In some ways the character is carefully woven out of one of the mourners. The titles appear is rather hard to tell what will be the studio comes to look like a mausoleum, chance encounters. In other words the over a close-up of moving sand; the outcome of this plot. But one of the dis­ a tomb, and Anne's own precarious bal­ inner and outer realities of the film mir­ sound of water is beard_ appointments is that eventually we ance is echoed in that of a falling red ror and echo each other in a more sub­ The ' opening scenes are highly realize that this ' is a conventional chair she paints on the wall. There is a tle and evocative way than in Anne dramatic and their lack of a realistic I dramatic story, with its usual narrative beautiful scene where she is lying on Trister where the continual straight context .makes them seem to be sym- tension and climax. However, here the the scaffold with her eyes shut and an cuts between Anne and her counter­ bolic. O{ What, we do not know yet. roles have been switched and instead of overturned pot of red paint at her side. part, Sara, are jarring and heavy-handed. A h PaintS a red line on a window, the tension between a m.an · and a She awakes to find that a pigeon has EJKept for some wintry exteriors, the the ca 1'a back and we are willi ~Is woman leading to the climax of their' somehow flown into the studio. It flaps ph~s ical reality of the city does not the you '. woman in an art class. From eventual coupling, we find ourselves in- ! around the room trying to find a way seem to be used in any metaphoriC or this po'3, OR the film takes a realistic volved in a love story between two out, knocking against the real and the even mood-inducing manner. Alix's turn and' the emphasis is (}n' the women. One begins to wonder if we'll false windows but finding no exit. apartmeQt', wkh its soft greys and blues Psycholo~cat drama. of the young be subjected to the usuaf titillating, Unfortunately (except for the pro­ and its multiple windows that look out to woman, ~ . TriSler,. trying come to exploitative scenes of lesbian foVe-mak­ logue) the rest of the film does not into the peal world, does seem to func­ terms with her father'S death. She de­ ing. Fortunately the film avoids this and come up to the imaginative height of tioR as an alternative symbol to the cides to leave her lover and go to Louise Marleau's performance as the this central symbol. Instead it becomes mausoleum-like studio. But, like most of Montreal. At the airport, her mother therapist caught between her male a psychological drama with an emphasis the other locales in the film, it looks like (the woman who was watching her cry) lover and her concern for and attraction on the character's emotions, shot a stage set and I ended up feeling that I sneaks to Annp's lovpr. Pierre. of her to the young painter is both believably mostly in sharp, well-lit close-ups. Like was watching a play filmed for televis- April 1986 - Cinema Canada/21 F I L M R E v I E w 5 • ion.• The filmmaker must have also felt a lows her to find her way back to the botched security truck robbery. The lack because her use of music becomes mother through her relationship to Yves Simoneau's thieves, a pair of down-and-out ex-cons, over-emphatic, making sure we under­ Alix. In her role as therapist Alix also the son of one of them and the stand the dramatic emotions involved plays the part of the mother, mediating girlfriend of the other, act under the il­ in her story and threatening to turn the between the imaginary and the sym­ Pouvoir lusion that they are working for them­ whole thing into a melodrama. When bolic, dream and reality, past and pre­ selves, for Big Money. Actually they are the chords started plunking at every sent.