Correspondingly, Arcand’s sureness as a director puts us in a trance, as he fashions a commandingly leisurely pace that allows us to follow these people who walk a tightrope separating ecstasy from misery. Luc and Lindsay appear to feel as if they’re walking through a dream, a sensation that’s exacerbated by the poshness of their lifestyles. In real life, when people meet someone who stirs something rare within them, it often serves to temporarily divorce them from their regular life, because this intensity feels like a miracle that renders ordinary things both more ordinary and less real. The tropes of traditional romances, such as an emphatic score and trumped-up “suspense” as to whether lovers will be caught by others, serve to distance us from the immediacy of the central union. The film’s calm and misleadingly tranquil atmosphere paradoxically captures the exhilaration of attraction. Is this an affair, a fling, the blossoming of a socially “legitimate” longer-term association, or are these distinctions pitifully bourgeoisie to begin with? It’s an intensely erotic moment, and it casts a subtle air of mystery on the film. After Luc and Lindsay have sex for the first time, the camera lingers on the latter’s face in close-up for an almost uncomfortably intimate amount of time, accentuating how often filmmakers fail to exhibit such emotional curiosity, particularly for female characters, when dramatizing post-coitus. Sometimes that platitudinous business about there “being a charge in the air” when meeting a significant partner isn’t a myth. A telling lean of a body into another, or a prolonged smile, says far more than expository declarations ever could.
The blossoming of Luc and Lindsay’s relationship is conveyed almost entirely through their respective physicality in context with the other. Luc meets Lindsay (Melanie Merkosky) at a conference in Toronto, and the two are powerfully attracted to one another, initiating an affair while Luc manages a variety of potential catastrophes in his home life.ĭistinguishing the film is Arcand’s refusal to court traditional melodrama.
On paper, the film sounds ordinary, following a promising young architect, Luc (Éric Bruneau), as he enjoys the rarified Canadian high life with his wife Stéphanie (Mélanie Thierry) and assorted friends, skiing, playing tennis, entertaining at their enviable home, and so on.
The filmmaker regards his wealthy, attractive characters from a cool remove that approximates how they appear to regard themselves, causing one to sense what might be missing from their lives, such as the highs and lows of emotional extremis. Despite a developing romantic relationship with Bri, Talion rides off, leaving her behind so that she does not meet the same fate as his late wife.In An Eye for Beauty, Denys Arcand displays a striking kind of distanced empathy. Wallace, it turns out, is the son of the famous Pat Garrett, who took down Billy the Kid. The two bounty hunters are later forced to rely upon each other when Talion's gun hand is shattered in a shootout and Wallace is blinded during a confrontation with Ike Slant's outlaws, leading them to resolutely combine into one single, unstoppable killing machine. Along the way, they befriend single mother Bri Quince ( Gloria Talbott) and her son "Jo-Hi" ( Clint Howard). Robert Lansing plays Talion, an ex-bounty hunter turned homesteader who, after his ranch is burned to the ground and his wife and child are murdered, meets up with and hires bounty hunter Benny Wallace ( Patrick Wayne, son of John Wayne) to track down the killer, Ike Slant ( Slim Pickens).
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