Sylvain
Richard is a film critic at Arts & Opinion. He
gave Truffe, which played at Montreal's
2008 Fantasia Film Festival, 3.1 out of 4 stars.
For the rest of his ratings, click
HERE.
Kim
Nguyen's sharply delineated black and white film, Truffe,
is a kaleidoscopic, sci fi mirror that reflects (Dans un monde
possible) a particular future's favourite food: truffles,
which fortuitously grow best in a working class area of Montreal
that has been bizarrely favoured by the effects of global
warming.
In Nguyen’s eponymous film, the truffles, that have
to be mined like coal, are the feeding and focal points of
an cinematic allegory that benefit from astute and instinctive
directing whose off-the-wall tectonic shifts will either delight
or deflate viewers as they discover the truffles are the object
of a takeover by a company that plans to exercise mind control
over an unsuspecting citizenry.
Enter
Charles, played by Saguenay chiseled, recessive gene dominant
Roy Dupuis (Shake Hands with the Devil), who unlike
anyone else in the hood, k(nose) how to sniff out the much
sought after delicacy that provokes all sorts of scuffle and
hustle and portentous evil in men's hearts. 
Charles
and wife initially employ the sacré truffle
to keep their low-end restaurant afloat. Much gustatory attention
is given to the scrumptious, saliva generating food, its incorporation
into the local poutine dish that has the effect of transporting
the etiquette challenged lower classes to a state of grace
worthy of Babette’s Feast.
Ever
resourceful and now budding celebrity Charles is persuaded
to offer his truffle ferreting talents to a competing company
that wants to monopolizes the succulent mushroom by empowering
an army of serpentine furry creatures blessed with the diabolical
ability to deny humans of their volition. In dream sequence
fashion, we find ourselves in a world where everyone is in
danger of being taken over by an amorphous alien force.
Enter Charles' wife, played by Celine Bonnier, a lithesome
women of few words, who dedicates herself to decommissioning
the aliens of their power over her haunted hubby, and by extension,
friends and good neighbours. Will she prevail? The answer
is rendered in 75 minute sprint to the finish.
Given
Truffe's potpourri of disparate ingredients, this
viewer expected the entire premise to crash well before its
conclusion, but it didn’t because of the quasi lysergical,
psychotropic effects skillfully confectioned by writer/director
Kim Nguyen, who manages to float the viewer so that the floating
and film's multi-directional peregrinations meaningfully saturate
each other, resulting in an unexpectedly enjoyable cinematic
experience that features food, as potent protein and protean
symbol, taken to the outer limits -- and then some. The rich
symbolism is an open category whose readings and interpretations
are supplied by the viewer provided the film hasn’t
turned him into a narcoleptic or induced an analysis informed
by untimely disturbances proper to the lower intestine.
Kim
Nyugen, assuming he'll eventually decide to work more closely
with terra firma material, is definitely a director to keep
a 3rd eye on.
For
the ratings of Montreal's 2008 Fantasia Film Festival, click
HERE.
