Blu-Ray: Curling | reviews, news & interviews
Blu-Ray: Curling
Blu-Ray: Curling
Chilly Québécois meditation on loneliness and isolation
Curling could be an enigmatic contemporary noir, but for the fact that it was made in the depths of winter in rural Quebec.
Côté makes the mundane mesmerising: static shots of tired domestic interiors or pallid landscapes have a muted beauty, and Curling’s stately pace doesn’t prevent it becoming compelling. Both leads have secrets: Jean-François encountering and dealing with the victim of a road accident in unorthodox fashion, Julyvonne making a horrifying discovery during a solitary walk. A bloodied motel bathroom recalls Psycho. The expected grisly reveal never comes, Côté instead making us celebrate the pair’s small successes. Julyvonne discovers a taste for bowling, and Jean-François seemingly enjoys a successful liaison with a woman he meets in a motel café. There’s black humour too; poor Julyvonne, left to fend for herself for a few days, resorts to opening a jar of pasta sauce with a hammer. Kennedy’s attempts at flirting with the girl he’s hired to work at his bowling alley are excruciating, and we get an unexpectedly gripping explanation of the sport of curling halfway through. Côté dares us to find particular scenes amusing, the film’s subtly upbeat conclusion suggesting that we were right to smile, despite several key plot points never being resolved.
A recent bonus interview with a cheery, smiling Côté is essential viewing, and should prompt a second viewing. “I’m touched by people who are afraid of the world,” he reveals, later explaining that Curling's bleached colours were achieved with actual chemicals, the 35mm film stock subjected to a 'bleach bypass'. We also get a 2015’s May We Sleep Soundly, a beguiling, sinister short where an unseen intruder with a hand-held camera explores a series of houses, the occupants, pets excepted, fast asleep.
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