The Québécois director Philippe Lesage began making documentaries in the early two-thousands. He has since switched to narrative features, but they have been meaningfully shaped by his nonfiction work, in ways both plain and thrilling to see. In “The Demons” (2015), set during the nineteen-eighties, Lesage anatomized the quiet terrors and looming uncertainties of his own preadolescence with an unsettling, highly disciplined watchfulness. He studied his characters up close but also from afar, often via a fixed camera, and he allowed sequences to play out at length, without interrupting the action or hurrying it along. His style relaxed and ripened a bit in “Genesis” (2018), a wrenching trio of stories set in motion by the unruly and often unrequited yearnings of youth. But even there the drama was powered by an eerie intensity of observation and again displayed a reluctance to look away too soon.
And so it feels notable that one of the characters in “Who by Fire,” Lesage’s patient, emotionally roiling new film, is a middle-aged Canadian director who has essentially followed his creator’s trajectory in reverse. The director, Blake Cadieux (Arieh Worthalter), had early success directing fiction films—he even won an Oscar—but he has since retreated from the mainstream and now works in documentaries. “Who by Fire” unfolds over a few days and nights in a remote, mountainous stretch of Quebec, where Blake, who owns a lodge in the area, has invited a handful of friends and colleagues to stay. It’s never clear exactly when the story is set, though cellphones are visibly absent, and not just because of high-altitude Wi-Fi issues; one visitor, who’s writing a novel, has brought along a manual typewriter.
As the film opens, one of the guests, a screenwriter named Albert Gary (Paul Ahmarani), is driving to meet Blake, and has brought along his college-aged daughter, Aliocha (Aurélia Arandi-Longpré); his son, Max (Antoine Marchand-Gagnon); and Max’s friend, Jeff (Noah Parker). The boys are in their late teens, and Jeff, who dreams of becoming a filmmaker, is eager to ingratiate himself with Blake, who will pick them up in a seaplane and take them to the lodge. His excitement at meeting the director is matched—and, ultimately, surpassed—by his excitement at proximity to Aliocha. We’re clued in to those feelings almost immediately, when Jeff, nervously sitting next to her in the back of the car, slips his hand into the seat crevice between his leg and hers. You can practically see his hand thinking, so intently does the camera linger on its every fidget and hesitation. You may remember this closeup later, when Jeff’s hand is put to more aggressive use after Aliocha rebuffs his clumsy come-on.
Lesage is attentive to such bursts of emotional whiplash; in steady buildups and abrupt releases of tension, he shows how quickly superficial barriers of politeness can fall away. Not long after Jeff meets Blake, he mentions a semi-autobiographical film of Blake’s and then poses a too-forward question about his family history. “You don’t hold back,” Blake replies. But he doesn’t hold back, either, and Worthalter, who made a fiery defendant in the fine French courtroom drama “The Goldman Case” (2023), peels back Blake’s friendly, smiling layers to reveal an arrogant alpha beneath.
Blake and Albert are old friends and former collaborators—the films they worked on together were their greatest career successes—and it’s clear, even before they get to the lodge, that they are in for a bumpy reunion. The first thing Blake does when they meet is subject Albert to a seemingly harmless prank, one that Albert, a bit of a joker himself, easily laughs off, though the hostility that underpins it is barely disguised. Later, at the lodge, there’s an unnervingly funny sequence in which Blake overpowers Albert, wrestles him onto a bed, and, amid exasperated protests, kisses his exposed paunch. It’s a rambunctious display of male bonding whose performative exaggeration is revealing, blurring the line where affection ends and aggression begins.
Of course, it is aggression that soon comes to the fore. “Who by Fire” is structured around three skillfully modulated dinner sequences, each of which is filmed in an uninterrupted take that makes superb use of the film’s capacious wide-screen compositions. (The cinematographer is Balthazar Lab.) Blake and Albert, their tongues loosened by wine, reopen and then scratch viciously at old wounds, calling out personal failures and professional betrayals. Blake is accused of having drifted into high-toned seriousness; Albert, now writing for television, is branded a sellout. The camera watches and watches, its calm, unblinking stasis amplifying every anxiety.
There are others at dinner, too, and although they mostly hover at the periphery, shifting in their seats and exchanging uncomfortable glances, their presence tells a story of its own. There is Blake’s editor, Millie (Sophie Desmarais), a quietly soothing presence; a chef, Ferran (Guillaume Laurin); and the lodge’s “spiritual guide,” Barney (Carlo Harrietha). In time, they will be joined at the table by Blake’s actress friend, Hélène, who is played by Irène Jacob—best known for her work in Krzysztof Kieślowski’s “The Double Life of Véronique” (1991) and “Three Colors: Red” (1994)—and is accompanied by her partner, Eddy (Laurent Lucas). As the days and nights wear on, these other friends of Blake’s, by design or not, get drawn into the rivalry with Albert. They also serve to remind him, through their easygoing jollity with their host, that the past is very much the past, and this trip down memory lane will be remembered as a brief, ugly blip. Blake has moved on.
Lesage, who is in his late forties, has often gravitated toward turbulent tales of youth, rooted in autobiographical inspirations. In recent interviews, he’s noted that, whereas “The Demons” and “Genesis” were inspired by personal events, “Who by Fire” was loosely drawn from an experience recounted to him by his older brother, Jean-François Lesage, a documentary filmmaker. That may explain why it’s initially tricky to get a handle on the story’s point of emotional identification; the younger Lesage’s sympathies feel more ambiguously spread out than usual, more evenly dispersed across the frame. This is the first of the director’s features I’ve seen with a truly intergenerational focus, in which older characters register as more than just distant, inattentive figures. Despite its constricted, isolated setting, the film feels more psychologically expansive than its predecessors; the characters are continually, and often surprisingly, repositioned in relation to one another, and whenever the tension threatens to turn claustrophobic, the great outdoors beckon.
It takes a bit of time, then, for Jeff to emerge as the closest thing the film has to a protagonist, and tellingly, nearly all those moments of revelation occur in nature. After his ill-advised pass at Aliocha, Jeff flees into the darkness of the surrounding forest, gets lost, and spends the night at an abandoned cabin—a potentially chastening experience, but one from which Jeff, frustrated and petulant, learns almost nothing. Again and again, he is propelled into action by a combustible mix of lust and anger—both always close to the surface of Parker’s fiercely expressive performance—only to find himself in a survival thriller of sorts, confronted with the unyielding fury of the elements and the inadequacy of his own body. At various points, Blake takes his guests fly-fishing, canoeing, and hunting—and, on every occasion, has to rescue Jeff from himself. In the most heightened of these interventions, the two of them, both very good at behaving badly, turn their own rage against each other.
When the movie was screened at the New York Film Festival, in October, the critic Beatrice Loayza, writing in Film Comment, astutely pointed out that Jeff’s “emotional ups and downs seem to determine the film’s shifting styles—it’s as if he were already behind the camera, using cinema to articulate what he could never say aloud.” If “Who by Fire” can be read as an indictment of male fragility, then Lesage, in aligning himself with Jeff, cannot help but also indict himself. He may even be acknowledging some inherent cruelty in the artistic impulse, at least as it’s experienced by men; Albert, a screenwriter, is hardly exempted from this circle of toxic manhood. By contrast, there is Aliocha, an aspiring novelist, who emerges, in Arandi-Longpré’s supremely watchful performance, as the film’s least predictable character and perhaps the most interesting. Hardly unaware of her ability to reduce men to blithering idiots, Aliocha follows her own impulses and desires, leaps into action as the occasion demands, and, in one haunting interlude, sings a quavering version of John Grant’s “Marz”—a bittersweet expression of nostalgia for earlier, more innocent days of youth.
As in his previous films, Lesage uses music to inspired, sometimes incongruously powerful effect; someone puts on the B-52’s “Rock Lobster” and an impromptu dance party erupts, in which everyone’s pent-up anxieties find a joyous, if temporary, release. The conspicuously absent tune here is the one that gives the movie its title. Leonard Cohen’s “Who by Fire” ruminates on the inevitability and unpredictability of death, and its absence from the soundtrack only underscores the creeping insidiousness of those themes in the film, in which rage and regret are ultimately exposed as flimsy bulwarks against an inescapable end. Lesage hasn’t lost his affinity for youth and its limitless sense of possibility. But here, amid towering cliffs and treacherous rivers, he leaves his characters, and the audience, astride an abyss. ♦
