Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on MUBI. Denis Côté's Ghost Town Anthology is exclusively showing April 21 - May 20, 2020 in MUBI's Luminaries series.
There is a certain point in any winter where it becomes unending. Long past the picturesque first snow fall, what Canadian author Mavis Gallant wisely calls “the only clean thing in a dirty year,” the snow becomes grey, packed down, blending into the constantly overcast sky. Very little breaks up this eyeline, some barren trees, long snaking highways linking what few towns remain. Northern Quebec is dotted with these landscapes, towns once prosperous and now a shadow of their past selves.
Not much happens in these dreary winters of Irénée-les-Neiges, the titular town of Denis Côté’s Ghost Town Anthology. But breaking up the winter is a sudden car crash, and when the life of a young man is taken with it, the rest of the town struggles to stay alive. But we’re at the point in a winter where the snow doesn’t hide what’s beneath it, and we’re soon faced with the claustrophobia of wide open spaces.
At the funeral of 21-year-old Simon Dubé, whose car swerved so suddenly in the opening moments of the film, it’s not his family who speaks, but the mayor (Diane Lavallée). She speaks of community, and future, and how the loss of this young man is felt by all, but together they, all 215 residents of Irénée-les-Neiges, can get through it. Later we find her drinking in her office, and rebuking offers of outside support. She insists the car crash was an accident, but others in the village, including Simon’s slightly order brother Jimmy (Robert Naylor), remain uncertain. The insistence of community is echoed from others, but it’s not one based upon mutual support. At a New Year’s Eve party an older couple discusses only wanting to go to a party if it involves “people they know.” When Simon’s mother Gisele (Josée Deschênes) spends this same New Year’s Eve insisting her son would never kill himself, Simon’s father Romuald (Jean-Michel Anctil) flees. He drives into the night along unending highways, leaving a voicemail explaining his actions, Côté explicitly making words and actions disconnected. Even Simon’s body cannot be buried because the ground is frozen; the process of mourning is stagnant in this season. Connections fracture under pressure, and both Jimmy and Gisele would rather plead with the dead Simon to give them a sign, knowing they can’t get support elsewhere.
The community which Irénée-les-Neiges prides itself on is built on exclusion. When outside help does arrive, a woman named Yasmin, she’s explicitly rejected by the mayor for being “from Montreal,” but treated with a fearful distance by the townspeople for being Muslim, a banal xenophobia. Gisele reaches out to a stranger for emotional support, but he’s unaware of her loss, not being “from around here” but instead a temporary worker at the nearby quarry. That the town was formerly a mining community makes this all the more literal; a place which only exists to take from the land can never create life. Côté’s sense of landscape expands on this paradox. Inherently attached to the land they take from, mining towns should be as permanent as the ground beneath our feet. Instead they’re fleeting, false promises of progress, their resources finite. And the people who’ve upended their lives for work are adrift, unsure whether to leave for something unknown, or remain with the dregs that they know. With constant shots of barren landscape and abandoned buildings, the parallels between the people and their places are clear, and Côté spends his time considering those left behind.
This isn’t the first time Côté has come to a town like this, or considered the kind of people who would hide from the world. There are ley lines from Ghost Town Anthology all the way to Our Private Lives (2007), about a recently connected Bulgarian couple who spend a few weeks during the summer in rural Quebec. In their isolation they realize how little they know about one another, and things turn sinister. In Vic + Flo Saw a Bear (2013) we have two women, both recently released convicts, attempt to make a home in rural Quebec, only to have their pasts follow them. In Côté’s best known film, Curling (2010), we have another small town in rural Quebec, but with a Ghost Town winter, but this time the focus is on a father and daughter. The father, in his attempts at raising and protecting his child, has her completely isolated from the world he’s afraid of, to the point where she is emotionally and intellectually stunted. All these outsiders attempt to make communities, but their attempts are seasonal at best. This fear of others comes from somewhere within, and for Côté’s there’s always already bodies hidden in the woods.
As the citizens of Irénée-les-Neiges attempt to continue their lives, more and more strangers appear. Adele (Larissa Corriveau), whose mental illness has kept her on the outs from other villagers, notices them first. Small figures in masks play in abandoned buildings, people are in homes they shouldn’t be. Gisele, after much pleading, is visited by her dead son, though his appearance is met with concern. But then her fleeing husband looks in the rearview mirror and finds his dead son sleeping in the back seat. Jimmy’s solo ice skate is interrupted by the return of his dead brother, amongst others. Soon people standing off in the distance become as commonplace as the bare trees, the dead blending in with the scenery.
Though the return of the dead is a cataclysmic event, the citizens of Irénée-les-Neiges take it in stride. At a town meeting, Yasmin, the outsider, is able to confirm that all the ghosts are former citizens, and that this is happening all over Quebec, but only in the rural areas. Rather than treating the return of the dead with doubt or terror, there’s mostly incredulity. One woman asks why they would come here, of all places. The quarry’s closed, there’s no work. Why would anyone, living or dead, choose to come to a place where the landscape has won?
This easy acceptance leads to a return of day to day life, and even with another miracle, one that is a nod to Pasolini’s Teorema, very little changes. It becomes clear for some that this town has always belonged to the ghosts, and change will never happen. For Côté the tragedy is not the loss of life, but the revelation of what little life there is in Irénée-les-Neiges. When initially approached with the offer of support, the mayor insisted that “our problems are our own.” The return of the dead might pass, but if it doesn’t, there’s a cold comfort in one’s own problems.