Love in the Time of Civil War

By: Amos Lassen

Alex (Alexandre Landry) is a young addict who sells his body in Montreal. He and his friends Bruno, Simon, Jeanne, Eric and Velma are all caught up in the same spiral of compulsion. They defy society's logic and are "are the fallen angels of a dark and violent time".

In the opening scene Alex and Bruno (Jean-Simon Leduc) having sex in a seedy hotel and it is photographed as if the searching and groping qualities of sexual arousal are signs of an irrational need that needs to be satisfied. We learn of the rapport between Bruno and Alex later as the film progresses, but we do see that for Alex there's little difference between johns, casual lovers and fellow addicts. He regards sex as a commodity as well as a necessity, something that can procure a physical high but also can be done for payment, which in turn can be used to buy whatever are available for his next chemical high.

There is really not much narrative here even though it is the word of Ron Ladd. It basically goes like this: Alex has sex for money or simply steals from his johns, hangs out with his druggie friends (some of whom are straight, but he tries to convince them to have sex with him anyway) and tries to find a place to , at least for the night. Alex simply tries to get by, with his mind fixed - when it is not too spaced out - only on how to obtain the next high. One act doesn't seem to have more consequences than another; at one point Alex is arrested in a bust, but the next shot sees him leave the police station and simply continue doing what he was doing before. So it is hard to find a storyline yet the non story is effective when bringing out the other bits of the film. The intentional repetition of similar scenes, suggests that addicts seem to live only in the now and what they do is dictated by their next high. Indeed, they themselves don't have a narrative in mind for their own lives, as the only moment that exists is the one until their next fix.

Director Rodrigue Jean's approach here is similar to his documentary "Men For Sale" that featured interviews with Montreal hustlers that ran a whopping 145 minutes and that got its point across by virtue of repetition. Each interviewee sounded like the other and taken together, they suggest not necessarily that all male sex workers are exactly alike but that their problems are not isolated cases, and that, since the troubles are so similar, it should be possible to do something about them collectively.

Landry here throws himself into role of Alexander and into the material with typical abandon and achieves something that's very difficult to do: he plays an archetype with no character arc and no redeeming qualities yet he nonetheless succeeds in keeping the viewer involved. If anything, his is almost a non-performance, as he lends his body to the character but not his mind and soul, both long gone up in clouds of smoke. It's both mysterious and mesmerizing to watch his disembodied presence, as it stumbles from one scene into another, from one short-term idea to the other, driven by the of habit rather than any direct will to live - much less accomplish anything that doesn't deliver near-instant gratification.