Denis Villeneuve, photographed by Maryse LarivièreTwenty years ago this December, as they finished up their last week of classes before the Christmas break, fourteen young women at Montreal’s École Polytechnique were killed by twenty-five-year-old Marc Lépine, who entered the school with a semi-automatic machine gun sheathed in a garbage bag, and went on a nineteen-minute shooting spree before turning his weapon on himself.

Our shared memories of December 6, 1989, are mostly related to the crime scene as it was shown on the evening news: the ambulances and police vehicles parked on the snowy bank beside the school, sirens flashing; the sobbing parents as they arrived on the scene; and the terrified students as they exited the building, shivering in their T-shirts. But our knowledge of what happened that day has always been limited, as though the locked doors of the institution, sealed with crime scene tape, served not only to hide the bodies from view, but to shield us from the traumatic realities of Lépine’s murderous rage.

While the dearth of first-hand stories about the events at the Polytechnique is notable, even more remarkable is that until this year no feature film had been made about them. “We in Canada think of ourselves as very progressive, especially when it comes to questions of power relations between women and men,” says Denis Villeneuve, whose seventy-seven-minute black and white Polytechnique is the first moment-by-moment recounting of that day. “We like to negate our problems, and we have a lot of trouble expressing our feelings about what happened that day, even so many years later. But rage and violence have their own language, and it needs to be spoken. If you ask me, Polytechnique is a little too late, even; this film should probably have been made a long time ago. For me, [making Polytechnique] was hugely important. It renewed my conviction that cinema has the potential to provide consolation to people in the very depths of their pain.”

Villeneuve’s rediscovered zeal for filmmaking, which has resulted in Polytechnique and another major film this year, comes at the end of a long hiatus. In 1998, when he was thirty, his first feature, Un 32 août sur terre, played at Cannes, and achieved critical and (modest) box-office success. His sophomore effort, Maelström, went on to win the prestigious fipresci prize at the Berlin International Film Festival. Soon afterward, he disappeared.

Well, not entirely. During those years, Villeneuve could be spotted close to home in Montreal’s Mile End neighbourhood, a young Cannes lion as stay-at-home-dad, with the aquiline, slightly stubbled, soft-lipped handsomeness particular to some French Canadian movie heartthrobs. Though once hailed as Quebec’s hottest young director, the forty-one-year-old has been absent for most of the province’s recent film renaissance, as a new generation of Québécois filmmakers showcased their talents. Ricardo Trogi’s wry, earnest Québec-Montréal and Horloge biologique made waves, as did Jean-Marc Vallée’s explosive C.R.A.Z.Y., Lyne Charlebois’s frenzied Borderline, Louis Bélanger’s earthy Gaz Bar Blues, and Kim Nguyen’s ominous Le Marais and surreal Truffe. Villeneuve’s close friend Philippe Falardeau made Congorama and last year’s C’est pas moi, je le jure! — two movies admired for many of the qualities seen in Villeneuve’s early work.

“After Maelström, I stopped for several years, because I didn’t know what I was doing,” said Villeneuve during the first of several meetings, at a café around the corner from his children’s school. “I had young kids, and that was part of it. I decided to be present for them in a significant way during those years. But it wasn’t just about my private life. To put it bluntly, I thought my writing needed work, and I needed to rediscover my relationship to cinema. I didn’t want to go into a spin where I would just make Maelström 2, Maelström 3, and so on…so I stopped. I went back to school, so to speak, to learn and to reflect, and it was the best decision I ever made. I didn’t care about being [the next big thing in Quebec cinema]. I needed to find subjects that would speak to me. And if I didn’t find them, I didn’t care if I never made another movie.”

His creative passion was reignited by the prospect of adapting Wajdi Mouawad’s play Incendies (Scorched) for the screen. Incendies, which has had successful runs at Montreal’s Théâtre de Quat’Sous and Centaur Theatre
Company, as well as in Toronto and abroad, is a magical realist Oedipal tragedy about torture, war, and man’s inhumanity to woman that takes place in an unnamed Middle Eastern country (the playwright was born in Lebanon). Mouawad’s ambitious mise en sècne and focus on trans-generational trauma appealed to Villeneuve, for whom discovering the play was an instant coup de foudre (bolt of lightning, or love at first sight). Villeneuve began pre-production on Incandies just before Christmas, while he was still finishing Polytechnique. “Wajdi’s subject is the propagation of rage from one generation to the next, and the way we can be gripped by a spectral fear that isn’t even ours,” he says. “I’m committed to the idea that we aren’t free from our passions, and that in order to attain a certain freedom in our own lives we have to confront our intense feelings of violence.”

Villeneuve shot Polytechnique in the winter of 2008, and last spring his short film Next Floor won the Grand Prix Canal + for best short film at Cannes. Next Floor was produced by Montreal arts impresario Phoebe Greenberg, and shot over a few days in a heritage building in Old Montreal that Greenberg had purchased for renovation as a centre for the arts. She decided that before she gutted her building Villeneuve should have carte blanche to shoot a film there, and to wreak as much havoc as he wanted. With his co-scriptwriter, Jacques Davidts, who wrote Polytechnique, the director conceived a story reminiscent of Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, about a grotesque meal where the guests gather to devour the victuals of unidentified beasts. Between courses, everyone falls through the floor in a riot of plaster, planks, and dust, landing on the floor below, where more glistening carcasses await their dining pleasure.

“When I was a young writer, before I made any films, I existed in a universe much more like Next Floor than 32 août or Maelström,” says Villeneuve. “I love naturalist cinema, but that’s not where I started. I’m much more drawn to the theatrical, and to the relationship the surreal can have with the imagination. Polytechnique is a very realistic movie; the subject demands it. Next Floor was a chance to execute my impulses toward the abstract, and it felt completely freeing. I made it for my kids, because I know they won’t be able to see either of my next two features until they are at least eighteen.”

His early films are about sex and the proximity of death, not necessarily in that order. Both centre on calamitous events in the lives of women — specifically, car accidents that cause his protagonists to drastically change the course of their lives. In 32 août, an elegant perfume model, Simone Prévost (Pascale Bussières), walks away from a vehicular mishap and decides to quit her career and have a baby with her best friend — who agrees, on the condition that they conceive the child in the middle of the Utah desert. They get there, finally — in a taxi. In Maelström, a stylish young boutique owner, Bibiane Champagne (Marie-Josée Croze), is reeling from an abortion. She gets drunk and hits a Norwegian fisherman with her BMW, killing him. When the man’s son comes to Montreal from Norway to mourn him and track down his murderer, they fall in love.