Paul Schrader returns to the cinema with the film Oh, Canada, shot in just 17 days and due out on 16 January 2025, after two years ago in Venice with The Master Gardener he put an end to his beautiful trilogy on accidents. Based on the novel of the same name by Russell Banks, who passed away last January, the film presents itself as a journey into the concept of truth in a personal and universal sense. It also becomes an analysis on the relationship between artist and work, life and cinematographic art, on how much the camera can give the certainty, or the illusion, of a truth at hand, exposing only a part of our soul.

Oh, Canada – the plot

For Leo Fife (Richard Gere in the present, Jacob Elordi in the past) one of the most celebrated and appreciated documentary directors of all time, life is now coming to an end. Cancer is taking him away, making him the ghost of the man he was and that’s why he accepted the offer of his former students Malcolm (Michale Imperioli) and Diana (Victoria HIll). They want to record his final confession, give him the opportunity to create a personal will, to tell the whole truth and nothing else about his life and work.

Leo’s wife, Emma (Uma Thurman) is doubtful about the result of the operation, but Leo is adamant, also because he knows he hasn’t told everything about his past, that of a confused ex-boyfriend from the provinces of the late ’60s , who fled to Canada to escape the Vietnam draft. There he became a cult director, but was he really this great man? Leo, while fighting against the tumor that is now killing him, tries to dominate his mind, which seems to be wavering, in which past, present, truth and fantasy are confused.

But then how to do it? How can we understand if what he is saying is truly a list of unspeakable secrets or the sick fantasy of a now lost man? Oh, Canada is the great return of Paul Schrader, one of the great protagonists of the New Hollywood era, one of the most influential directors of his generation.

Director and character who is uncomfortable, choleric, with a difficult character like this protagonist, who from the pages of the regretted Russell Banks, slips before our eyes with a double interpretation, which bears the signature not only of Richard Gere, but also of a Jacbo Elordi, which at first glance seems like an absurd choice from a realistic point of view. The two actors have a 20cm difference in height and no physical resemblance, but this casting is actually incredibly witty, audacious, due to the desire that Schrader shows to make a point, to point out a difference, to enhance the tone halfway between reality and self-projection, of what life was for Leo.

Also for this reason, Oh, Canada becomes an epiphany, a monument to anticlimatic storytelling, with a narrative structure as irregular as it is seductive.

A syncopated journey into a life made of regrets and half-truths

Oh, Canada relies not only on Schrader’s sublime direction, but above all on the chemistry between the protagonists. Here the performances are of the highest level, but above all it is Richard Gere who dominates every scene. Leo is one of his best characters. Proud, hurt, full of shame and anger, he is also without filters, he is honest or at least so it seems, because Oh, Canada also plays a lot with our perception, just as it does with images, with Andrew Wonder’s photography.

Schrader returns to film, with his beloved 16mm, he uses both black and white often, then here are different shades of color, he helps the film to have a vintage, indie air, but without excesses or mannerisms, but with coherence of wanting to talk to us (or at least make us believe that he is talking) about the truth. The colors on the other hand concern the unspeakable part, or perhaps the invented one who knows. The truth, Oh, Canada, seems to tell us, is always a point of view, but it is not even said that this is perhaps the center of Leo’s story, who at not even thirty years old had already left two women behind him, had fled from a country and a war. Around him Paul Schrader draws a crude but not excessively severe portrait of the Beat generation, his generation, the one that thought it was changing the world but instead the world changed them.

Uma Thurman is painful and very sweet in the role of this wife, who realizes that, perhaps, deep down, she never really knew that husband, not as much as she thought; but the rest of the cast is also perfect in drawing what is also a historical arc of transformation of a country, of a society and of the concept of the artist. He does it in that America which, since the beginning of the 1960s, has finally wandered around in this 21st century without knowing who he is. There is also an analysis of cinema itself as a medium, of documentary in particular. That camera is just a means, the intention is what makes the difference.

We always have before us the voice and mind of Leo, young and full of doubts and fears, old and full of certainties, a soul in pain in the eternal search for something unfinished and incredible, an agonizing body supported by a spirit that clings to his word, at his will. An often detestable, selfish, narcissistic character, but at the same time also incredibly coherent, symbol of a desire for final redemption, which however has nothing religious about it. There are some small problems in the screenplay, we can see that the film had a very particular genesis, but the result remains robust, it leaves a trace, like every work by Paul Schrader, the last of his breed.

Rating: 7.5