parallel lives

THE reviews usually begin: "The distinguished Qu"becois theatre director Robert Lepage " No denying that. On stage, Lepage is in the distinguished avant garde. On film, though, he is a dud. Possible Worlds is an exceptionally opaque offering, adapted from a play by John Mighton, and showing its origins in dialogue that is endlessly pronounced rather than acted. It is Lepage's fourth film and his first in English, a plain-dealing language without the advantage of French to conceal a fatal obscurity of intention and meaning.

Metaphysical is the word here: but it's a chicken-out description of what goes on in the film, rather than a category for events that, as far as I could see, have next to no connection with one another, with cinematic naturalism, or indeed with the would-be sub-limity of the theme, which appears to be the existence among us of parallel worlds. Lepage seems to sense the difficulties, and seeks at first to anchor them in a gruesome detective story. A janitor in the opening scene washes the vast and towering windows of a chic loft apartment and, as the soap is skimmed, spies a corpse inside with its cranium neatly lobotomised, Hannibal Lecter-style, and its brain gone missing.

This promising overture suggests events will be grounded in the police procedural, allowing philosophical conundrums to be posed. Actually, it lays a false scent. The investigation gets nowhere and gradually disappears. It serves only to give audiences false hope that now and again they, like the baffled cops, will understand what's going on. Namely, the encoun- ters in another life, and then in another, and then in one more, and possibly in a fourth one, too, that take place prior to the murder between the corpse (Tom McCamus) and a neurosurgeon (Tilda Swinton), who seems to have had the life drained out of her in her job at the lab even before she assumes the multiple lives in several other vaguely defined professions, personalities and habitats.

There's also a macabre sequence in one of those labs where rodents have their brains excised and kept "alive" in artificial life; and where a ghoulish scientist retires periodically to a sensory- deprivation tank, possibly to refresh his own brain, but without making good the narrative deprivation of the film.

In short, the thing is a pileup of pretentious illustrations about the nature of consciousness and the multiplicity of personality. If the cinema had a Pseud's Corner, Possible Worlds would fit snugly into it. The pity is all the sharper because Lep-age's theatre background enables him to stage his scenes with deceptive clarity, set the eidetic nerves tingling with extraordinary images, and infuse his scenario with tantalising hints of another reality about to become manifest (though it never does).

All this brilliant scene-setting is rendered productively negative by the absence of one simple imperative among Lepage's talents: he can articulate, but he cannot communicate. He has yet to make an unambitious film, but he also has still to make one with wider and clearer appeal to his public than his own complex thought-structures permit him.

Copyright 2001
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