Missing Victor Pellerin finds first-time Quebecois director Sophie Deraspe occupying center stage, and taking her cameras on a quest for knowledge about the titular subject. According to the interviewees who turn up for reflection, Victor Pellerin was a strange, enigmatic Montreal painter who led a life of byzantine complications, but nevertheless rose to the zenith of the contemporary art world. On a snowy night in early 1990, he inexplicably amassed all of his tableaux in a Montreal warehouse, burned them to ashes, and vanished into thin air, leaving behind no trace of his whereabouts and incensing pretty much everyone. As the story unfolds, we see tangible evidence of Victor's existence - for example, a few lingering illustrations that he drew, and several black-and-white snapshots of him. And the commentators are legitimate - actual gallery owners, art forgery investigators, and other cornerstones of the Montreal art community, all with established reputations.
But is Victor himself a real person, or is this an elaborate, Alan Abel-style ruse? We're never quite sure. This slippery question lingers beneath the surface throughout the picture, and it ties into Deraspe's deeper and more profound thematic trope that announces itself straightaway. The first shot of the film is a first-person perspective, darting back and forth around the screen, attaining and then losing focus. And on a similar note, Deraspe periodically gives us interviews that resonate with a cinema interruptus -- we feel our traditional suspension of disbelief violently disrupted by sudden, deliberate Brechtian misalignments of image and synchronized dialogue. Aesthetic devices such as these call attention to the movie's core issue - a questioning of how it is possible, and if it is possible, to validate truth whenever a subjective camera (or if you will, an idiosyncratic directorial voice) is present. It's the same theme that saturated Blow-up, but Deraspe is a bit wilier than Antonioni - she omits any fictional signifiers that would give us firm, comfortable ground on which to stand and judge the movie's philosophical divertissements. We're constantly made to question everything - is Victor real, is Deraspe trustworthy, how much of the on-camera testimony is straightforward and how much is left unspoken, or invented by participants - especially when the commentators contradict each other?
That the movie emerged in 2006 is both a crippling disadvantage and a stunning boon. It's a liability in the sense that we're now living in the information age, when anyone who wants the inside scoop on Pellerin/Gauthier can, in about 10 seconds, Google the names or check the New York Times archives and find out definitively. Had Missing Victor Pellerin hit theaters thirty years earlier, for instance, its central mystery probably would have seemed far more beguiling to a 1976 mind. But the timing is also, paradoxically, crucial to the movie's success: Deraspe gleefully riffs on the form of early 21st Century reality television - much of which is foolishly scripted, of course, but poses as "real" for unassuming minds. We get the constructed relationships of reality television characters, the hints of deeper backstories, alliances, and resentments that come bubbling to the surface in little furtive implications. The difference here is that Deraspe uses the form tongue-in-cheek, and undercuts it with a satirical comic edge.
That jocularity is what gives the movie buoyancy and longevity, what keeps this outing fresh and rescues it from the pitfall of being an empty intellectual shell game. Deraspe has the same comedic voice that the great French director Nelly Kaplan has often exhibited - where you have to look beyond the veneer of sobriety to see the nuttiness beneath. As the movie rolls forward, we get into revelations about Victor that are increasingly wacky but played with a poker face. And especially with repeat viewings, you can sense Deraspe standing in the wings and winking puckishly at the audience. For instance, the interviewees introduce us to something called a "submarine" - where an artist and his friends hole up together in a flat with amassed food and beverage, shut out all light, and kibbutz together. Then we're told how Victor's friends knew that he was in trouble - "One day, he decided to go submarine alone." At another point, a gallery owner bemoans one of her interactions with Victor - he infuriated the proprietress by wandering around and getting blood all over the tableaux. "Luckily, she says, it wasn't his blood." (beat). "He had hit some wild animal on the highway between Toronto and Montreal, and put it into his car." "What kind of an animal was it?," Deraspe inquires. "I'm sorry, I don't know," she responds. Once you start to detect these absurdities, Pellerin succeeds at generating one belly laugh after another.
And yet, the movie is neither frivolous nor flippant. The more you think about it, the more you realize what an incredible logistical feat it represents. In her sophomore outing Vital Signs (a more traditional fictional narrative), Deraspe unveiled a facility for harnessing an intuitive understanding of a particular contemporary subculture; here, in an earlier effort, as a complete newcomer to the art world, she does this to such an extreme degree that she's actually able to establish enough credibility and leverage for brilliant inside satire. Equally amazing is the fact that she somehow convinced these art icons -- traditionally thought of as so pretentious and so self-important - to skewer their own images and the image of the community to which they are indebted.
To be certain, this movie isn't as overtly clever as, say, Orson Welles's reality-illusion documentary F for Fake - it lacks Welles's structural devilry and narrative machinations. But that may be for the best: this is a lighter and more blissful meditation on the same themes. Especially as a debut outing, it announces Deraspe as a heavyweight talent and a real original.