Would the
unrealized Lost Girls and Love Hotels
have been an important project for Jean-Marc Vallée? A couple of online
articles discuss its possible adaption: It’s 2009, The Young Victoria is about to be released, and Kate Bosworth (21) is planning to star, adapt and
produce Catherine Hanrahan’s book with the Québécois director. But instead Vallée
would go on to make Café de flore
then Dallas Buyers Club and the rest
is history (just last week he was honored with an Order of Canada): to tell
more personal stories he would discard the weight of studio filmmaking to work more
closely with the actors and actresses, a smaller crew, lighter cameras and in a
more insular environment.
But
what did Vallée exactly see in Lost
Girls and Love Hotels? A commissioned job? Something more personal? What
could it have added to his oeuvre? Is it best that it was never made? Important
questions for a Valléeien to ask.
First
off, here is the story of Lost Girls and Love
Hotels: Margaret, a young Toronto woman, leaves her family and home, which
includes a brother with schizophrenia and her single mother (their father left
a long time ago), to live in Tokyo to teach English at a stewardess academy.
There Margaret lives in a low-rent apartment with a party friend Ines, gets
involved with a gangster Kazu and spends her nights drinking, dancing, high and
having sex. Eventually she comes to terms with the trauma of her past and
starts to accept herself for who she is. The book ends with an interior
monologue: “I tell myself, there is no
happy ending. All the pieces do not fit together perfectly. Things are ragged
and messy. We are torn apart by events. Put back together differently by
others. And somehow everything is beautiful.”
A
few things come to mind reading Lost
Girls: It’s a perfect fit for Vallée, anticipates his later redemption
stories and it’s a shame that he stopped making more personalized projects.
So
what’s characteristic of a Vallée story? A child being dropped into an
unwelcoming world. Individual perseverance against some form of oppression.
Travel as necessary to see the world and to find oneself. Sex, drugs, smoking
as important parts of life. Music as essential. And I’m sure that I could go on
about more reoccurring themes in his work.
The
suggestive title and cover of Lost Girls
and Love Hotels might give the impression that it’s about sensational
sexual encounters. But it’s actually more about the spirit of the Margaret
character: her vulnerability, childhood trauma, aimlessness and friendships.
It’s a brisk read of young adult fiction that recalls Enemy, Fifty Shades of Grey
and Lost in Translation.
The
odd characteristic of books that Vallée has either adapted, or had planned to
adapt, is that they all seem have been written in a prose that recalls his
visual style, while at the same time being very personal, or at least very
individual stories, for their authors (Wild
and Lost Girls are the two that
come to mind). Are these just Valléeien coincidences?
Just
as a reminder of the titles so far in the Vallée literary canon: So far they include Hanrahan’s
Lost Girls and Love Hotels, Cheryl
Strayed’s Wild, Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies, Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects and Dominique Fortier’s Du bon usage des étoiles. All works by
women authors.
But
on the subject of symmetries between the books and Vallée’s mise en scène let’s
look at Lost Girls as an example.
Inside its story, classic pop music makes an appearance through conversation
and atmosphere. There’s a focus on a dysfunctional childhood and its family
dynamics. Memories appear through stream of consciousness flashbacks. There are certain
reoccurring subjects that are touched upon like airports and border crossing,
diseases and hospitals. As well, like so many of Vallée’s films (including The Young Victoria and the abandoned
Janis Joplin project), they’re all coming of age stories about young woman.
Where
something like Lost Girls would fit
in the Vallée cannon would be somewhere between the erotic thriller of Loser Love and the young woman
rediscovery narrative of Wild. The
film would have also provided a great role for the actress Kate Bosworth whose
talents are definitively underused. And two things that I think would have made
an adaptation of Lost Girls so great
is that it would have been Vallée’s first production partly set in Toronto and
it would have really delved into his interest in Japanese culture.
But
what’s being lost through Vallée’s submission to American production companies
– that would rather adapt New York Times best sellers that already have
built-in audiences – are some regional specificities, a dilution of his own
interests and (most importantly) a director loosing the direction of his own
career. However good Sharp Objects will
be (and the rumors is that afterwards he might have to do a couple more
commissioned projects for some friends), I would rather see Vallée start
working on films like his own Les
fleurs/mots magiques follow-up, Lost
Girls and Love Hotels, the Joplin or even the John Franklin film.
So
finally what makes Jean-Marc Vallée exactly Jean-Marc Vallée is slowly being
pushed towards the background – the personal desire and force that led him to make C.R.A.Z.Y. and Café de flore.
The Jean-Marc Vallée that exploded the Canadian film landscape with a newfound
cinematographic ambition mixed with an impressive playlist. Where imagination
and fantasy, ambition and dreams, winning and melancholy could rise above the
problems of society and an omnipresent cynicism. But since Vallée’s stateside
trip in the meantime Québécois cinema seems to have met and exceeded his call
for a cinema of the imagination: Vic +
Flo ont vu un ours, Nelly, Les démons, Tu dors Nicole and Ceux qui font les révolutions à moitié… (with a few of their directors even casting the lead of C.R.A.Z.Y.,
Marc-André Grondin). It led to a new cinematographic renaissance in Montreal.
Though
there’s still something about Vallée that infiltrates his current projects like
Sharp Objects. Since he couldn’t
make Janis Joplin film (which I imagined the show being initially a test-run
with Amy Adams for it), Sharp Objects will
have to make up for it. You can see parallels between both projects as they're both about a young vulnerable artist (here a
journalist), sensitive to their own feelings and surrounding, and when
confronted with a cold, cruel and violent world, through their perseverance to
their passion and work (however underappreciated they are), the consequences will lead them to their own personal
resignation and possible death. It’s the same narrative drive that leads to the
plane crash at the end of Café, Ron
Woodroof’s martyrdom in Dallas Buyers
Club and finally the fate of both Janis Joplin and John Franklin.
But
as Anne Marie Fox’s amazing Instagram account shows (and we’re still waiting for
the special features on the Big Little
Lies boxset), Vallée is a consummate professional, still light-hearted and
a team leader. He knows what he’s doing: Modestly siting in the shadows, waiting to
share his prediction of the future with the rest of us. But the question
remains: Could Vallée be lost to the American system or is his best work still
to come?
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