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Lesage’s controlled stylistic approach, when put against the fact that the subject matter was potentially controversial, might remind some viewers of his fellow countryman Denis Villeneuve’s more transitional works. It’s really not hard to visualize the director leapfrogging constructs and bounds of the industry into more rough-around-the-edges mainstream cinema, especially considering that his first narrative film, “Copenhague A Love Story,” only premiered last year. For now, nonetheless, it is clear that the independent documentarian’s gaze, which previously directed his four nonfiction features, is meticulously in focus right from the first frame of “The Demons.” With the astonishing strains of Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion,” the sound imagery is stripped and a steadily relaxing camera watches a class of pre-adolescent children practising freestyle dancing in a school gymnasium. The absence of any noticeable adult supervision is a foretelling of coming weakness. (The novel citation for a “Professeur de breakdance” does appear in closing credits, however.)
Among the group is Felix (eyes wide open newcomer Edouard Tremblay-Grenier), a reserved young man whose anxiety-prone mannerisms and tendencies to seclude himself leave Selim feeling conflicted with an otherwise pleasant existence in late-1980s Suburban Montreal.
At School, he interacts with appropriate peers and has a soft spot for his beautiful teacher, Miss Victoria Diamond. He is well supported by his older siblings, Vassili Schneider, and Sarah Mottet, alongside his parents, Laurent Lucas and Pascale Bussieres. However, he is old enough to understand that there are more superficial issues in their marriage. (In one disturbing, and hard scene to watch, the vicious marital clash drags all three children into a frenzied case of untangling limbs as they shriek from room to room. It is chaotic, to say the least.)
Felix has reached that infuriating period where the majority of adults believe he is entirely innocent, while he is well exposed enough to the adult world to be needlessly anxious about everything. Lesage has cleverly decided to put a twist to his own childhood by setting the film in a time before the internet where children only had select access to information. This greatly exaggerated the spread of alarming news stories and urban legends through classrooms. Predominantly, the AIDS panic combined with snippets he overheard his parents arguing furiously about tainted the way Felix critically explored his newly emerging sexuality.
Lesage understands perfectly the childhood experiences that stem from adults talking in the background. He portrays the theme beautifully while capturing how children are able to retrieve and re-enact these experiences.
The community hears of children going missing which makes them worry more. The things Felix feared, such as the dark or the inner feelings he struggles to grapple with, become more complex. A threat emerges that isn’t easy to dismiss. Until the film is one hour in, and Lesage jumps from the protagonist’s point of view to capture the more vulnerable, yet insecure realm around him. The immediacy of that threat is ambiguous, and the shift in perspective is dislocating and unsettling. It brings an element of accusation toward the film for being exploitative, but not at a cost. Throughout the film, Lesage embraces the psychological suffering entwined within his younger subject, shoving brutal realities that portray the could-be truth into Felix’s plunge into an anxious world. The tension between the two is intricate and Victor Erice’s classical depiction of a girl’s psyche, “The Spirit of the Beehive” captures that very idea. A child is never entirely pulled out of the conflict they are safeguarded as much by what they know and don’t know.
Lesage is pleased to note the contribution of the remarkably naturalistic ensemble of the film, which has its very own Ana Torrent in the intensely curious Tremblay-Grenier. He is most deeply assisted by d.p. Nicolas Canniccioni, who uses the lensing of the wide screen so expansively. Canniccioni captures, in the ordinary schoolyard or at the municipal swimming pool, the fluid social interactivity of Felix and his peers in still, long, watchful shots that are so long stilled that they can, depending on the viewer’s own suspicion, be considered perceptive or even predatory. One realizes at once that first-person perspective is avoided throughout the entire film, however intimate a character’s inner workings are presented in a film.
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