A plot description of the upcoming film from French-Canadian writer-director Philippe Lesage is highly likely to arouse apprehension, if not outright dread, in some moviegoers. To put it another way, Albert, an aging screenwriter, takes his son Max, daughter Aliocha, and Max's friend Jeff deep into the Canadian wilderness in order to meet up with Blake, his former collaborator. Are films about filmmakers correct? But while the professions of the “Who By Fire”’s male protagonists serve as explanations for their sometimes-monstrous self-importance and self-involvement, they’re otherwise incidental to the combustible character conflicts the film steeps you in. The picture opens with a long shot from behind Albert’s car, tooling down a nicely paved road bracketed by trees, as a single organ chord prefaced by a one-note lead-in plays for almost five minutes. Max, his ginger son, looks bored, Aliocha, his daughter (we will soon learn that the impossibly pretentious Albert named her after the saintliest of the Karamazov brothers), pouts vaguely, and puffy Jeff, whose close-cropped haircut does him no favors, looks like he just lost his best friend, if he ever had one. Albert is cheerily oblivious to the three children in the backseat. Once installed in Blake’s roomy cabin, there’s the usual grousing about sleeping quarters from the kids, and the “it’s been too long” bonhomie between Blake and Albert is short-lived. Lesage directs in a straightforward manner, employing numerous long takes. This is highlighted in the spectacularly sniping dinner scenes in which, among other things, they reveal that since their glory days, Albert has gone on to writing for a children’s TV series called “Rock Lobster” and Blake has been discontentedly directing documentaries. On learning that Jeff wants to become a director, he sarcastically nicknames the kid “Spielberg” and won’t stop calling him that. (Like he has a leg to stand on: He’s unironically named his dog, who has an eventually substantial role to play—I wondered if the phrase “deus ex canis” was actually a thing—“Ingmar.”)
"Why didn't you two work together anymore?" One of the group—Blake's hunting advisor, his picture-like film editor, and eventually former colleague Irène Jacob—asks at one of these events as if the resentments that are bubbling up without pause don't tell us something. In the meantime, irritable Jeff, whose hormones are acting strangely on him, plays Aliocha awkwardly and then slaps her when she refuses. Eventually, one of the characters suggests a hunting outing, and you think, “Sure, give all these people guns, what could go wrong?” While Jeff’s a relentless pot-stirrer with murderous ideas, he is also equipped with boundless reserves of cowardice. The performance of Noah Parker as Jeff is perfectly creepy. At the same time, Aurélia Arandi-Longpré does exceptional, nuanced work as a character just learning the power she has over others in her life and her calibration of how much she should put it to work, if at all. You won't be able to look away from these performers, even though the rest of the cast is superb. Lesage supplies exemplary tension and intrigue over the course of two plus hours, while at the same time suggesting to the viewer, accurately, that anything in the way of a definitive resolution is not in the cards. As a result, the fact that the movie doesn't neatly wrap up the scenarios at the end doesn't really disappoint. That’s life, as they say. Finally, a line from the classic song "Don't Let's Start" by They Might Be Giants comes to mind: "No one in the world ever gets what they want, and that is beautiful."