WFF 2012 - Familiar Grounds

There's no doubt that Stéphane Lafleur's Familiar Grounds was the drollest offering at this year's film festival that I saw. Taking place in an anonymous suburb in Quebec, it features a sister and brother in their late 30s, Maryse and Benoit, who are each leading quiet lives of desperation. Maryse mans a desk in a box factory when not at home muddling through a failing marriage while Benoit seems to be unemployed and is trapped as a man-child at home with their father. His love life is no better than Maryse's as his relationship with a single mother named Nathalie is stuck in first gear.

An accident at the factory where a man loses an arm lodges itself in Maryse's brain and won't go away. She is obsessed with the thought of losing one of her own. In a typically deadpan scene, she is at a store putting her arm in a cooler to see if it would fit packed with ice ready to be sewn back on. This obsession leads to her demanding that the small backhoe that her husband has for sale in the front yard be moved. She is adamant about this and volunteers to do it herself. But this requires a trailer. Her father has a trailer but it's at his cottage and so she and Benoit plan a trek to retrieve it.

The problem is that a man from the future appears to Benoit warning him not to go on the trip because there is an accident and Maryse is killed. This man, however, is not some quixotic scientist bent on using his discovery to right the cruelties of fate. He has come from only 5 or 6 months in the future and is the proprietor of a local car rental business. You almost feel sorry for the guy as he seems embarrassed to be admonishing Benoit. We get no explanation of his remarkable ability.

Lafleur reminded me of the Coen Brothers here with the dry humor and all the snow on the ground. Nathalie's son hates Benoit and, in one scene, growls at him like a dog. Benoit can never get his snowmobile started though his old man has the touch. These are, in a sense, average jokes but the perpetual look ennui on actor Francis La Haye's face came across as a parody of many a French New Wave character. Plus Lafleur's use of longish takes and willingness to frame characters in long shots distances Benoit rather than endearing him to us so his little tragedies are all the funnier. He is pitiful but in a cute, harmless way so we don't feel guilty laughing at him.