Dir: Stephane Lafleur Canada 2007. 103 min.
From the bold statement of the title to the closing scene that completes a crooked circle, Stephane LaFleur's feature debut is a mordantly funny tour of human despair. You don't need firearms to kill the human spirit, loneliness and a boring job will do the trick nicely.

The film owes much to the dead-pan, dead-end world charted by Aki Kaursimaki: a desolate and featureless suburban existence where dullness disguises a deeper malaise. In Continental, everything is much worse than it initially appears.

LaFleur's disinclination to engage the emotions will polarise audiences. Having screened at Venice (in Venice Days), the film will struggle in the heavy traffic of Toronto and likely need another festival or market appearance to get buyer attention.

There are failings - this is a cardinal instance of too much 'show' and not enough 'tell' - but this is a debut that brims with subtle insights into human frailty. The patient viewer will be rewarded by a perfectly-realised conclusion.

An older man in a business suit is riding a city bus. He sleeps fitfully as the bus rolls through darkening streets. When he awakes, the bus has come to a stop and is empty. He tentatively steps out. The bus is the only source of light on a forested road. Gently, then growing slightly in intensity, a sound comes from the forest. The man peers into the gloom and then walks off, disappearing into the woods.

LaFleur is a believer in Henry David Thoreau's nostrum that most men lead lives of quiet desperation. Male, female, young and old, the persons directly or tangentially touched by the man's disappearance are united only in the drabness of their existence. Even the disappearance is anti-sensational. Responding to the missing-person report, a policeman shrugs his shoulders and tells the bereft wife: 'This is what a man does when he needs a change.

There are constant reminders of mortality and the drudgery of quotidian human existence made crueler by an uncaring world. A salesman sells life insurance to people who are themselves nearly dead. The wife puts up 'missing' posters on telephone poles as though she's lost a pet, and her rain-soaked notices are similarly ignored. A pretty clerk, whose loneliness is so profound she leaves herself phone messages, rides a bicycle with a child's seat attached. LaFleur never makes reference to the child it might have carried.

There are moments when of heavy-handedness. In one scene the salesman is lured into participating as a voyeur to a couple in the adjoining room at his hotel. The banality of the couple's middle-aged love-making feels too obvious and easy a target to merit inclusion.

And yet LaFleur can spin gold from small details. The missing man's office sends a condolence card but the secretary can only find a birthday card with a tinny chime. This aural joke somehow transcends its baldness to become a recurring melody, haunting the wife, and ultimately mirroring the mysterious sound from the forest. These and other small but brilliant pieces of engineering suggest LaFleur is talent to watch.

Director
Stephane LaFleur

Production company
micro-_scope (Ca)

International sales
Christal Films Distribution (Ca)
(514) 844 4554

Distribution
Christal Films (Ca)

Producers
Luc Dery
Kim McCraw

Screenplay
Stephane Lafleur

Cinematography
Sara Mishara

Editor
Sophie Leblond

Main cast
Marie-Ginette Guay
Gilbert Sicotte
Real Bosse
Fanny Mallette
Pauline Martin