Quebec animator Felix Dufour-Laperrière in Dying Does Not Exist (La mort n’existe pas) facilities his fourth function on two fundamental characters, Helene and Manon, as they strike a Faustian discount.
Believing radical change requires violence to overthrow the previous order, the 2 ladies and their fellow comrades launch an armed assault on rich landowners in a stately villa. It doesn’t go effectively. Helene freezes and, after escaping right into a magical valley stuffed with shifting colours and stress, Manon comes again to hang-out her.
Collectively, in a collection of dialogues and monologues, the 2 ladies, after the bloody mayhem behind them, discover violence, love, dedication and the way, in difficult the established order, solely good can probably come from one thing unhealthy taking place.
“Life. It’s motion,” Manon tells Helene at one level. “And motion has a price, inevitably. It’s arduous. Save your pores and skin, or soiled your palms. And perhaps change issues. Or save what you like. It’s true, it’s arduous. However crying like a child doesn’t change something. It’s important to select. What are you loyal to? To whom?”
As Dying Does Not Exist heads to Cannes for a world premiere, earlier than additionally screening at Annecy, director Dufour-Laperrière tells The Hollywood Reporter he sought in his poetically hand-drawn animated function to mix the situation of a tragic friendship with the fallout from a botched terrorist assault. “They expertise, firstly, the impossibility of violence,” he explains. “You don’t management the implications. It will get instantly out of hand. And but they expertise it in a world the place violence exists.”
As a part of the tragic story, Manon presents Helene the prospect, after ditching her accomplices throughout the failed armed assault, to return to the landowners’ villa and full the terrorist mission. “Manon is providing the chance to perhaps save her associates and save her love and save her conviction, but and threat all of it in the identical second. That’s a tragic alternative,” Dufour-Laperrière recounts.
The director provides Dying Does Not Exist can be impressed by a darkish and turbulent time in Canadian historical past, the autumn 1970 October Disaster when a radical Quebec separatist group, the Entrance de Libération du Québec (FLQ), kidnapped excessive profile politicians to escalate their battle for independence from Canada and lead Ottawa to impose the Warfare Measures Act.
“To start with, I noticed the October Disaster-meets-Alice in Wonderland,” Dufour-Laperrière says of the FLQ utilizing violence towards symbolic targets for political positive aspects. As for his minimalist animation type, the director insists abstraction with a mixing and overlapping in visuals and sound higher explains a tumultuous world utilizing his movie.
That’s very true with Dufour-Laperrière’s use of a shade palette as an example characters rendered with solely a pair, but ever-shifting particulars. “It makes an entire. The (characters) are a part of the context, of the backgrounds, and the background is a part of them,” the director recollects. “They’re not unbiased. And it was enjoyable to be very free in using shade and to method it like a portray.”
Dufour-Laperrière says about his Cannes world premiere for his Canada-France co-production: “It’s an actual pleasure to get an grownup animated function on the market and to place it in a really stunning normal cinema context just like the Cannes Movie Pageant. So the enjoyment is larger than the stress.”
Dying Does Not Exist has a voice solid that features Zeneb Blanchet, Karelle Tremblay, Mattis Savard-Verhoeven, Barbara Ulrich and Irene Dufour. UFO, BFF and Maison 4:3 are distributing.