20h17 Rue Darling | Review

Destiny is ugly for a man on more than one mission.

The best way to describe this film is like the beer at the bottom of an almost empty bottle, for some it bares the final great sip, for others it is the most scummiest portion to swallow. Consequently, director Bernard Émond’s social commentary about poverty, looks and feels and tastes like the brown bottle, with a first great tang about a man’s struggle with his own demons along with a possible storyline that follows a low-grade involuntary who dunnit scenario, only until it gets to the core of the film, where the taste is not as fresh, perhaps even flat with a fragmented storyline that gives us the full 12-steps of a bottled-up inside, defunct and disjointed man.

With time, accompanied by a simple piano score, 20h17 Rue Darling is all about one man named Gérard, (Luc Picard La Femme qui boit) going down the one-way street to hang-over hell. Displaying a one-man chug-a-thon is the brilliant performance from the province’s best actor-Picard gives an authentic portrayal of how it feels for a person who relishes in the thoughts of wanting to give up, but the kindness of a couple of strangers (Guylaine Tremblay and Diane Lavallée Mambo Italiano) and the reflections of a shoelace incident and a fender-bender spare him from a tragic event and set him straight, well sort of. The irony of the picture is that he was used to being the person on the other side of the fence looking in, but the former journalist who’s got the knack for snooping around and not minding his own business now needs the people who like him the least, including former wives and firemen. The character is almost like one of those people who loses his entire family in a car accident and must go on through with life asking the question why me?

It is hard to figure out his motivations of this film, and behind the protagonist. At first we are told that it is so important for him to find out why the house blew up, and in contrast to the character’s description he is shown as being suddenly compassionate for the poor people, also known as the ‘people downstairs’ who he hardly knew or cared for in the first place. Emond initially has this strong idea of false leads, flourishing relationships with over-dramatized characters-which have only a couple of seconds to give a caricatured performance and act as a symbol and then fade away. And why give us some many trails of biker gangs, fraudulent findings, family problems and prescription-pill dependant tenants as possible motives? Instead, Gérard should have been shown us a little more of his love/hate relationship with the bottle, instead of narrating the 12 golden rules of from the AA.

As pronounced in the film’s very first shot showing the water beating away at a set of rocks washing away the layers, this is about losing a piece of yourself, losing a home, losing a loved one and losing one’s self. The promising investigation of motives and why get replaced by a more heavily somber, and less of a bumpy ride examination of the various degrees on an alcoholism. Perhaps the only reason to see 20h17 Rue Darling is because of Picard’s portrayal, but by the end you kind of wish that there would be a closure to not only the character and his endless voice-over sermons but also something to the cap off the rest of the story as well.

Viewed in Original French language.

Rating 2 stars