Leslie Mavangui

Raoul and Beatrice’s eyes meet in the Montreal metro. This sets off a chain of events that will affect the whole city. He's a rock star activist on a secret mission, she's a bohemian who wanders the streets at night, handing out books to the homeless. Every Thursday evening, she meets Constance and Eugène in their small candlelit apartment, for their weekly reading ritual. Constance broadcasts her live-sampled, politically conscious sound art on an independent radio station; Eugène has been working on a novel for years, whilst trying to shut himself off from the outside world. The three young friends all dream of their own poetic revolution, inspired by the situationists, on whom Raoul has modelled his persona.

Fiction bleeds into reality. Women declare themselves pregnant with the letter E! Denzel Washington plays himself in a popular sitcom. Chaos reigns and cops crave poetry. Mélusine Catafor abandons her identity in the city of Three-Rivers to seek a new one in Montreal where she hopes to learn English and where her best friend, Marie-Cobra Tremblay strives to birth an Odyssey. Rosaire, a melancholic pastor, organizes a major conference on Impossible Loves. Also, you'll meet La Renarde who hides a hole-punch in her coat. You'll learn the hole-punch is a formidable weapon used to pierce the ears of alley cats. As you can imagine, it's a comedy.

Much of Godin’s purple, declarative dialogue is delivered at a breakneck pace, as though these verbally nimble actors are running lines at auctioneer-speed while simultaneously playing their intentions to the hilt. The film is an exercise in radical compression, its velocity integral to its comic effects, though all the rapid-fire yakking and spastically edited reverse-shot sequences lead to a wordless denouement in which Mésuline searches her pockets for a cigarette in a shot that’s hardly protracted yet still takes up about one-fifth of this taut little film’s runtime. Her pleasure in finally lighting up is fairly adorable.

Waiting for April is a romantic, epic cop comedy freely inspired by songs and medieval fables collected by storyteller Michel Faubert. Detective Haffigan investigates a mysterious singing bone, a talisman endowed with dangerous powers, and chased after by a coterie of second-rate outlaws. The bone turns out to be in possession of Mithridate, a seductive actor with a gorilla’s right arm. Haffigan expresses romantic interest in the charming comedian, but he rebuffs her, instead setting his sights on Eleonore, a cashier at the Bank of Permanent Fog, who promises to liberate him from the bone’s curse.