Philippe Lesage’s new film Who By Fire, presented at the 74th Berlinale in the Generation strand, is a cunning, complex character study on desire and yearning.
When it comes to teenage angst and coming of age dramas, Qubuecois filmmaker Philippe Lesage always delivers original stories filled with emotional depth and raw performances. His previous film Genesis (2018) showed a pair of siblings wrestling their inner emotions of queer identity and rushed love ending in one of the most audacious epilogues of recent cinema. He returns with his highly anticipated Comme le feu (Who By Fire) in the Generation section of the 74th Berlinale. Set in a lodge in the mountains, Lesage brings a background of film workers led by the ex-collaborators Albert (Paul Ahmarani) and Blake (Arieh Worthalter), along with Albert’s daughter, Aliocha (Aurélia Arandi-Longpré) and son, Max (Antoine Marchand-Gagnon), as well as Max’s best friend, Jeff (Noah Parker). In the traditional vacation sense, what starts off as a space and time to relax and wonder, Lesage dissects the characters to reveal deeper meanings behind art and commerce, love and lust through perceptive manipulation.
Opening in a car ride filled with sensual tension, we hear the creeping electronic music of hums and vibrations as we see knees in and out of contact and hands on the verge of touching of two teenagers Aliocha and Jeff, evoking the anxiety of young love. Lesage impressively introduces characters’ personalities with subtle gestures and writing. It is in his script where he draws out scenes to allow time to reach viewers and his characters to contemplate in real time. They arrive at Blake’s lodge where we see where the film’s other two main characters’ come into play. Albert and Blake, ex-collaborators on narrative films (Albert: Writer, Blake: Director), reminisce of their golden days of youth, playfully bickering at each other to the point of insult. This setting plays into the themes of opening up wounds disguised through the celebration of reunion.
From the get-go and throughout the film, cinematographer Balthazar Lab, notably positions his cameras in calculated stances, instinctively pans across the frame to stress the dialogue on the framing. Shooting the vast landscapes of the forest and the river, to the intimate spaces of the lodge, Lab’s camera work to pan and zoom while dialogue is spoken adds another element to the film’s layered storytelling. In one of the multiple scenes over dinner consisting of a 10+ minute scene, Albert and Blake argue over Albert’s hypocrisy of his stance on art (him writing for a TV show called “Rock Lobster”, while preaching to the guests about Dostoevsky), the image begins to secede the dialogue, showing the characters’ true feelings through gestures.
The friendliness between Aliocha and Jeff confuses him due to her free-spirited lifestyle. After a cold-hard rejection, Jeff escapes himself, figuratively and literally to the woods, only to be found by Blake the morning after. After the arrival of coveted actress Helene (Irène Jacob) and her husband, Eddy (Laurent Lucas), Blake torments Albert again with a petty prank of switching Albert’s coveted wine to a cheaper one. This unleashes Albert again into an episode, similar to Jeff’s outburst. The film builds on the dynamic and the correlation between Jeff and Aliocha with Albert and Blake, analyzing relationships and the themes of vulnerability and deception.
Who By Fire is another ambitious film by Lesage solely for its duration and its sly interplay between its characters. It may not contain the radical epilogue or extremities of youth in Genesis, but captures the core nature of vulnerability in both young and old generations through its cheeky dialogue and the parallels between the Jeff/Aliocha and Albert/Blake pairs. Lesage’s exquisitely contrasts the dynamics between youths and adults, resulting in a riveting and thought-provoking story on the insecurities of the human condition.
