Denis Villeneuve’s somber and meticulous “Polytechnique,” about killings that took place more than 20 years ago at a Montreal technical school, feels both shocking and dreadfully familiar. The way horror erupts into the routines of an ordinary day, in drab, functional, institutional spaces — we know this from news reports, from our own imaginations and from movies like Gus Van Sant’s “Elephant,” a film loosely based on the Columbine High School shootings that casts an ambiguous shadow over “Polytechnique.”
Mr. Villeneuve, a Québécois filmmaker recently celebrated for “Incendies,” a larger and more ambitious history of violence than “Polytechnique,” is perhaps not as coy an artist as Mr. Van Sant, but they are similar in addressing the reconstruction of a terrible event as a formal and ethical challenge. Both “Elephant” and this film steer away from trying to explain or moralize about what is depicted on screen, perhaps on the assumption that such work will be done, exhaustively, elsewhere. Instead they stick to the basics of time, space and human behavior and allow meaning to seep in gradually and obliquely through the edges.
Like the real shooter, Marc Lepine, who killed 14 women on Dec. 6, 1989, Mr. Villeneuve’s fictional perpetrator is motivated by rage against feminism, which he blames for both his own unspecified problems and for the sorry state of modern civilization. The existence of female engineers and scientists is the focal point of his resentment, as he makes clear once he has arrived on campus to begin his gruesome, methodical work. And without penetrating too deeply into his disordered inner life — the face of Maxim Gaudette, the actor who plays him, is impassive and calm, as is the voice that reads the shooter’s pompous letter laying out the reasons for his action — “Polytechnique” allows us to intuit some of the twisted thinking that may have turned frustration into murder.
The film’s sympathies, though, lie entirely with the victims, to whose memory it is dedicated. “Incendies” demonstrated Mr. Villeneuve’s ability to hold onto a humanist perspective in the face of extreme inhumanity, and “Polytechnique,” though it relies less on dramatic contrivances, is similarly clear in its insistence that decency is ultimately stronger than barbarism. In addition to the man with the gun, the film follows two other characters through the shooting and its aftermath, looping back to certain moments and showing them from different angles.
One is Valérie (Karine Vanasse), a student whose experience at a humiliating interview — she is asked why she is interested in an aeronautics career that might stand in the way of her presumed desire to have babies — is a succinct refutation of the shooter’s belief that women enjoy unfair advantages. Sexism follows her through the corridors and classrooms like an odorless cloud. You sense her awareness of it in her cautious demeanor and, in her open, wide-eyed stare, also the hope that it will go away. The third main figure is Jean-François (Sébastien Huberdeau), a classmate of Valérie’s who stumbles into an agonizing predicament as he realizes what is happening around him. His response illustrates both the possibility and the futility of empathy in the face of insane violence.
“Polytechnique,” which was released in Canada in 2009 and won several Genie awards, is in many ways a modest film. Shot in restrained, wide-screen black-and-white, it is neither floridly melodramatic nor showily minimalist. The virtue — and also the limitation — of this movie is that it confronts senselessness and insists on remaining calm and sane.
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