A Guide to All Creative Directors

A Guide to All Creative Directors

A Guide to All Creative Directors

A Guide to All Creative Directors

A Guide to All Creative Directors

A Guide to All Creative Directors

A Guide to All Creative Directors

A Guide to All Creative Directors

A Guide to All Creative Directors

A Guide to All Creative Directors

A Guide to All Creative Directors

A Guide to All Creative Directors

A Guide to All Creative Directors

A Guide to All Creative Directors

A Guide to All Creative Directors

A Guide to All Creative Directors

A Guide to All Creative Directors

A Guide to All Creative Directors

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"Oh, Canada": fiction and memories in Paul Schrader's cinema

Jacob Elordi and Richard Gere take on the same character in between past and present

Oh, Canada: fiction and memories in Paul Schrader's cinema Jacob Elordi and Richard Gere take on the same character in between past and present

It is no coincidence that Paul Schrader, in discussing aging, memory, and emotions in his film Oh, Canada, references Susan Sontag’s essay Regarding the Pain of Others through the protagonist Leonard Fife—played as a young man by Jacob Elordi and as an older man by Richard Gere. Leonard is a photographer and a documentarian who finds himself on the other side of the lens for the first time, becoming the desired object of the camera’s gaze. It is his illness we see, his suffering, his search through the labyrinth of memories that should yield some truth that, perhaps, will never fully emerge. Certainly not by the film’s end. “People do not become inured to what they are shown because of the volume of images with which they are inundated. It is passivity that dulls feelings,” wrote the American author and philosopher, and Leonard, along with those around him in the final days of his life, cannot remain indifferent to what the man is trying to convey.

So what, then, is he trying to convey? The past is a testament. He wants to look directly into the eyes of his wife Emma, played by Uma Thurman, and tell her what kind of man she married. The problem, and the intriguing ambiguity of the film, is that he will never truly discover it. Neither she nor the audience will. Oh, Canada experiments with the perception of memory—how it is malleable, firstly, when it must be revived by the subjects themselves, and secondly, how it can be reinterpreted over the years, shaped by illness, and retold differently by each person involved. Fixed and captured images are the only possible resistance to this fluidity, offering a sliver of truth as they depict exactly what happens externally, which is what a documentarian does through their work. Even there, however, those familiar with the medium know there is always a hint of deceit, a sliver of fiction, hidden behind it; nothing is more manipulable and counterfeit than a cinematic image.

Oh, Canada is precisely this. The audience follows Gere’s words, Elordi’s features, and the reconstruction of Fife’s past, but soon begins to doubt every sequence presented. The protagonist confuses, modifies, and overlaps memories. An external voice, that of his lifelong partner and muse Emma, tells us this. So whom should we believe? The woman, who lucidly believes the man is overcome by the delusions of illness and exhaustion, or Leonard, who swears that what he is recounting is the truth, even though it appears distorted to the audience? Are they secrets, or is it fiction? In Schrader’s cinema, as in his latest film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, truth is always subjective, and the camera contributes its own eye, its own vision of the world. For this reason, Oh, Canada cannot be a linear story. Fife’s narratives cannot be trusted, and therein lies their charm. Because in front of the camera, one can be true, naked, and authentic in a way they have never been before. And what if, in real life, one has been a charlatan? A liar who bent reality to their will? This is precisely what Paul Schrader has achieved.