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Sony Pictures

"I'm not doing movies for money. I'm not doing movies for prestige. I'm doing movies because I love doing movies, because this is what I like best in life."

Denys Arcand, the Canadian filmmaker whose first two films, Decline of the American Empire (1987) and Jesus of Monteal (1989), were both nominated for best Foreign-Language Oscars and whose follow-up, Jesus of Montreal, took the top prize at the 1989 Montreal World Film Festival, retains a youthful earnestness and idealism at age 53. Genteel and thoughtful, Arcand seems an unlikely candidate to direct the material that forms his third feature film (his first in English), a screen adaption of Brad Fraser's punkish, nerve-jangling 1991 play, Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love. It is a nihilistic take on the lives of a group of twenty-somethings, one of whom turns out to be a serial killer. The play is a bundle of jagged edges which have been tempered considerably by Arcand. He simplifies the title to Love and Human Remains and infuses the material with a humanity and sobriety that was perhaps implicit but considerably less evident on stage. Where Fraser saw existential anarchy in the lives and psyches of his characters, Arcand sees an identifiable dilemma. "These people have no family. They have no one to go back to, no real job... they're floating around, they have no anchor. It's very difficult for them to establish an identity of any kind. It is urban life, but its more than that. It's the end of the 20th century."

Film clip (1.4 Mb) qt | (1.4 Mb) avi

"With Denys the characters became a little warmer and less cynical," says Fraser, who adapted the material under Arcand's tutelage. This kinder, gentler approach, together with the purposefully wholesome casting, in some measure softens the material and almost dates it. Holding the film aloft, however, are a fundamental integrity and forthrightness (and a refreshing lack of pretension) which allow Arcand to assert some basic themes in a fresh, effective manner; that we are isolated from each other, numbed to our own experience and to that of others, incapable of and often prohibited from making even the most basic connections with one another; that this can cause enough confusion and pressure in our brains and hearts that our psyches eventually implode, driving us to irrational, destructive, even murderous behavior; and that the only bridge back is through one another, through the act of connecting to another human being, through the simple act of loving. These are the themes that drew Arcand to Brad Fraser's play in the first place and which he amplifies simply but to compelling dramatic effect in Love and Human Remains.

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