Paul Schrader’s film, Oh, Canada is a tricky unfolding mess and marvel of a film – one which keeps shifting in front of your eyes, playing with what you know and twisting it into something new. It creates something often distancing and vaguely confusing, attempting things that no one else is, and going in subtle directions that change not only scenes but the whole film. In it, we follow Leonard Fife, a documentary filmmaker in the late stages of cancer, giving a final interview as part of a documentary being made about him by his now middle-aged ex-students.
The film’s plot is pretty bare bones, and not very original either. There is a reason for that, as narrative is not at the center of this film. Instead, it focuses on Leonard Fife’s sole perspective as a man who does not care for his biography but is only concerned with his regrets, his thoughts, and ultimately, who he was as a man. In an interesting and quietly experimental way, Mr. Schrader decides to allow the narrative to fall out of focus, an act which is the film’s biggest success and very possibly its biggest fault.
At first, we are brought into this film with the promise of narrative and biography, setting up a classic tale of a hard life recounted. Slowly, we begin to drift further away from the promise of that known structure. The change is easy to miss, requiring the viewer to pay closer attention to the presentation of the film than the events in it. In a world where narrative-led film reigns supreme, it can be off-putting, and it can very easily make a viewer feel disconnected. Especially with an ending that could easily be seen as a failed attempt at that classic narrative ending, when really it is the personal, ephemeral confession of a man admitting things to himself, not to the audience.
Review by Billy Newbery