‘Oh, Canada’: Paul Schrader, Richard Gere and guilty masculinity | Culture

Paul Schrader (Michigan, 1946) is one of the great portraitists of the recesses of contemporary masculinity. His filmography (from the script of Taxi driver from now on) is linked to characters marked by loneliness and a tormented identity. Also for the management of guilt and salvation, of second chances. In recent years, both The reverend (2017), as The card counter (2021) y The Master Gardener (2022) explored this type of antiheroes that in Oh, Canada, His new film offers an interesting twist, that of a socially revered man who, faced with the threat of death, decides to dismantle his myth.

To embody that hero willing to immolate himself, Schrader has turned to the actor whose successful career took off under his wings 44 years ago with American Gigolo. Richard Gere was 29 years old when he played Julian Kay, a escort luxury with an enviable Armani closet and a pink-carpeted apartment that was irresistible in its helplessness. American Gigolotoday a classic noir eighties, showed the clash between a classic masculinity and the one that was then being born, more ambiguous and aware of its femininity. Gere had stood out two years earlier with days of heavenbut what catapulted his career was Schrader’s film, Officer and gentleman (1982) and the remake american At the end of the getaway (1983), directed by Jim McBride.

The expectation regarding the reunion between performer and director was logical and, although Oh Canada He ends up knowing little, he has moments of weight in his rude way of stripping the hero of his greatness. The film is based on the novel by Russell Banks The abandonments. Shrader already adapted another of his books in 1997, Afflictionand now he dedicates this film to his friend Banks. The story is that of Leonard Fife, a fugitive and deserter who left the United States in 1968 to avoid going to the Vietnam War and who ended up becoming a famous documentary filmmaker and activist in Canada. But what was Leonard Fife running from? What is your truth?

Following the intimate ritual of a naked and raw confession, Gere soberly and movingly interprets this man who in the extremes He decides to settle accounts with himself. Fife (Gere) needs to atone for his past and from his home in Montreal he recounts his life in front of a camera and a small number of people, including his wife (Uma Thurman). The vehicle will be a last interview granted to a former student (Michael Imperioli) marked by the teacher’s fragile state of health and the effect of the medications on his head, which cloud his consciousness and turn his trips to the past into painful and confusing flashes of memory. Schrader turns that interview into an unfiltered confession full of guilt and remorse, betrayals and abandonments.

Schrader poses the zigzag between present and past with a series of flashbacks in which the young Gere is played by Jacob Elordi, although sometimes it will be Gere himself who replaces his younger self in his memories. It is precisely in this double story where the film loses intensity, the double character is not quite one. The dramatic tension suffers because of how disjointed certain time jumps are, some in color, others in black and white. Still, Schrader’s new antihero somehow resonates with the viewer, perhaps because it adds a new piece to the puzzle of his long obsession with masculinity and his regrets.