Worth: $15.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Gabriel Byrne, Jessica Paré, Brian Gleeson, Antoine Olivier Pilon, Karelle Tremblay, Suzanne Clément
Intro:
…dry and verbose wit delivered by an excellent cast, not to mention scenes are heightened to match the weight of Leonard Cohen’s oeuvre.
Death of a Ladies’ Man playfully mixes hallucinogenic fantasy with the grim reality of mortal death, all set to the husky and poetical stylings of Leonard Cohen.
University professor Samuel O’Shea is a crumpled alcoholic when he is given months to live with a brain tumour. Although a veritable womaniser, his wayward behaviour has broken two marriages, and disconnected him from his children that are grown-up and independent.
The film is split into three different phases, all named after Cohen songs, but more importantly allow space for necessary self-reflection of Sam’s shortcomings. Although not entirely distinct from one another, Part One ‘Like a Worm on a Hook’, finds Sam catching his wife cheating on him, realising he is a stranger to his children, as well as the beginnings of surreal hallucinations that appear entirely real. For example, a waitress morphs into a tanned female body-builder with a tiger’s head, while his son’s ice-hockey team pirouette to Leonard Cohen’s ‘Bird on a Wire’. This, in turn, plants a seed of doubt into the audience toward Sam’s lucidity and ability to redeem himself.
With a line-up of morose characters, the film errs on the side of unsympathetic, especially when Sam abandons his children to live out his life on an oceanside home. However, particularly in the third chapter ‘Let us Sing Another Song, Boys’, the film shows the proactive efforts of Sam to turn his life around in his final moments by writing the novel he has always dreamed of. In this way, the film avoids the potential clichés of a self-loathing existentialist that blames everything else for his issues. However, writer/director Matt Bissonnette alters the mise-en scene and the colour grading to reveal the tragic extent to which Sam’s hallucinatory delusions have taken over where reality and fantasy are indistinguishable.
It is certainly recommended for its dry and verbose wit delivered by an excellent cast, not to mention scenes are heightened to match the weight of Leonard Cohen’s oeuvre. However, the film becomes muddying in its own logic that needlessly complicates an otherwise original idea.
