Long before Dune and Blade Runner 2049, long before LA, Denis Villeneuve made a movie in Quebec that mashed up kitchen-sink drama, dark humour, Tom Waits songs, and a narrator that is also a dying fish.
Maelstrom was a high-water mark for Quebec film in 2000, and by and large still holds up.
The story, in a nutshell, is that nepo baby Bibiane is bad at business and not super great at life: she’s blown a $200,000 deal for the family business, parties recklessly, and ultimately drunk-drives herself into a hit-and-run. She runs.
From there, scored partially by Tom Waits’ “The Ocean Doesn’t Want Me Today,” the movie loops around as Bibiane grapples with guilt, falls in love with the son of the man she murdered, and finds, if not happiness, some sort of French-Canadian approximation of same. The plot is driven in part by stale octopus and a mysterious man who looks like a Harkonnen Oliver Platt that dispenses wisdom at laser-perfect moments.
If you didn’t live in Quebec in the late ’90s, it’s hard to express how perfectly Marie-Josée Croze absolutely nails the ur-Quebec-Woman of that era — the look, the hair, the clothes are insanely bang-on. And the movie lives in Montreal really successfully — the upper-class apartments but also the dive bars, the docks, the bus, the subway.
The movie is narrated, for no particular reason, by a Cronenberg-level gross fish that is being serial-butchered by a giant naked dude. Quebec!
It’s achingly obvious that Villeneuve has grown as a director since; there’s significant chunks of “student film vibe” scattered around here. But it’s got a lot of loopy charm, it’s a compelling time capsule if you want a feeling for Quebec au tournant du siecle, the leads are charming, and it’s interesting to see L’il Villeneuve as a nascent film director finding his feet.