Ville-Marie

Time, working, family, accidents, surprises, routines, love.

An emotion sustained for months or a lifetime, regardless passionate rapture eternally embraced, questioned, appealed to, reevaluated, censored, longed for by many, cursed by a few.

Guy Édoin's Ville-Marie intertwines several lives to examine love professionally, from occupational perspectives, working love into the working day, as it follows two mothers working in amorous domains.

Proust's madeleine can be confusing as you're sitting at work doing some everyday task that seems to have nothing to do with anything you've ever done, before you're then suddenly flooded with long forgotten memories.

The intensity of these memories can throw you off for a second or two as you readjust to whatever it is you happen to be doing, considerations of the madeleine then complicating things further, before you refocus, and plunge back within.

There's no time to dissect the correlation.

No time to illuminate the emotion.

You can come back to it later after the moment has passed if you have an inkling to do so, after which point the resonant intensity will have decreased, and you may have to rely on meditation to recover it.

It's this frame that I externally apply to Sophie Bernard (Monica Bellucci) and Marie Santerre (Pascale Bussières) as I consider their struggles with love, both having estranged relationships with their sons, both competent professionals haunted by their family lives.

Their predetermined roles.

Ville-Marie isn't that simple, rather, it's an intricate delicate yet harsh illustration of the devastating affects of unexpected consciousness altering collisions.

It isn't really delicate or harsh but seemed to be surreally moving back and forth within a continuum established between these qualifications, or perhaps within a spherical relation with love forging the z-axis, professionalism, relationships, family, honesty, and trust stylizing the encompassing bulk material.

The ponderous weight.

Dreamlike yet relatable, Ville-Marie maturely investigates unpronounced social phenomenons, tragically exemplifying the confines of material existence.

Caught within its relational void lie several struggling characters, unconsciously searching for meaning, madeleines within madeleines, awoken by shocking extremities.

With hints of Mulholland Drive.