By Attrition

4/3/2020

Crépeau’s work has always been resolutely urban, as the memory of L'Usure (1986) testifies with its not dissimilar narrative of a burnt-out couple rekindling the fire, all the while standing on the pavement in the middle of a bleak Montreal street. This time there’s a kind of self-conscious bracketing of this urbanity, summoning it only as a framing device at beginning and end (somewhat the reverse of Pool’s structure in Anne Trister and Emporte-moi ). As if the singing of birds and cutaway reaction shots of placid cows were not enough to accent the self-conscious and no doubt impossible heterotopia of this world, which is somewhat akin to Polly’s absurd black and white fantasies in Mermaids , Crépeau brings intertextuality to the rescue. Her richly allusive mosaic serves not only to compe