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The December Man | Maxim Gaudette plays misogynist spree-killer Marc Lepine in Denis Villeneuve’s Polytechnique.

POLYTECHNIQUE
Directed by Denis Villeneuve. Starring Maxim Gaudette, Karine Vanasse, Sébastien Huberdeau. Metro Cinema (Zeidler Hall, The Citadel). Fri-Mon, Nov 27-30.
***

Two decades ago, a young man walked into the École Polytechnique in Montreal and murdered 14 women before turning the gun on himself, under the reasoning that feminists had ruined his life. I’m young enough that I can’t remember when this happened, which means I have little insight to offer about the event, but which perhaps also puts me in the target audience for Denis Villeneuve’s film Polytechnique, a recounting of the day of the massacre.

It’s always a somewhat nebulous experience being educated about real-life events through dramatizations, with all of the manipulations and false verisimilitude they offer; no matter the filmmakers’ intentions, these films will always be taken as attempts at definitive statements on what happened. Gus Van Sant’s Elephant avoided this problem by portraying an entirely fictitious school shooting, twisting itself into something that was a response to Columbine, but was not Columbine.

Polytechnique changes character names and twists around some small details, but for the most part it moves in the opposite direction, striving to become both film and historical document, which is always an exceedingly difficult line to walk.

The killer’s real-life suicide note, written on the morning of the massacre, is narrated in its entirety near the beginning of the film — which is an unsettling experience, to say the least. Thankfully, that’s as far as the film goes in explaining Marc Lepine’s motives or plumb the depths of his psyche. (As Chris Rock once said about those trying to understand the Columbine killers’ psyches: “Whatever happened to ‘crazy’?”) He is left nameless and un-relatable, portrayed as minimalistically as possible by Maxim Gaudette, and his suicide note serves as nothing more than the morally abhorrent and intellectually vapid bullshit that it is.

Villeneuve focuses instead on two students who survive the attacks: Valérie (Karine Vanasse), an engineering student who is shot alongside the other women in her class, and Jean-François (Sébastien Huberdeau), a decent guy and friend of Valérie who is crushed by the guilt of having been unable to help his classmates.

Given that it was women who were targeted in the attack, it is unfortunate that Jean-François’ story is by far the more effective of the two. It helps that the majority of his screen time comes during the actual massacre, during which Villeneuve’s lens is most direct and visceral and the film is most straightforward. (Counterintuitively, it’s the quieter moments in between that receive the more heavy-handed cinematic flourishes.) “J-F” seemingly does everything right — he runs first to contact the police, then returns to help whomever he can. The imagery of the victims, along with J-F’s inability to help any of them, is truly heartbreaking.

The film’s latter portion focuses on Valérie years after the attack, and seems to devote much of its time to demonstrating that the killer’s ideas about women were monstrously misguided — something that I, perhaps naïvely, choose to believe was already sufficiently obvious. It adds a superfluous editorial voice to events that were more than capable of speaking for themselves, and gives the killer’s motivations more weight than they deserve.

At the same time, it’s perfectly understandable (maybe even ethically essential) that Villeneuve would give Valérie the film’s final word. But this is just one of the many problems in trying to create something that is both film and historical document. It’s a difficult proposition, and, for the most part, Polytechnique does the best job it can.