Love & Human Remains

This is a reprint of the Austin Chronicle review that ran in March when this film premiered in Austin at the SXSW FIlm Festival. Looking for love in all the wrong places. This latest film by Denys Arcand (The Decline of the American Empire, Jesus of Montreal), adapted from the play by Brad Fraser, maps the geography of isolation among a group of friends in Nineties Montreal. Candy and Peter are roommates, both 30ish, both in jobs only barely fulfilling, both seeking some person with whom to bond, in order to fill the massive void in each of their lives. (They sought that bonding in each other once, but the romance didn't take, much to Candy's dismay. Now, Peter seeks male companionship exclusively.) The story follows Candy through a couple of awkward affairs with suitors of both sexes and Peter in a dalliance with a kid half his age (a busboy at the restaurant where he waits tables), while weaving in assorted references to urban horror stories and a grim subplot involving a serial killer. It's a study in missed connections and lost relationships, in feeling cold, distant, marginal, like a body already dead, a corpse. The bleak outlook and gruesome subtext might make the film tough going were it not for the frequent injections of Fraser's dry wit and the moving performances of Marshall and Gibson. Gibson's Peter affects the look of a man beyond needing to care, but he occasionally flashes emotions -- pain, remorse, need -- which reveal warm currents under the ice. Marshall's Candy is a sea of uncertainty, her face washed by wave after wave of doubt and self-reproach. Despite the breezy rationality they sometimes affect, they are still vulnerable human beings, and their vulnerability provides a light of hope in the dark, expansive landscape of modern love.