Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney
(Canada, 105 min.)
Dir. Matthew Rankin
Prod. Pierre-Mathieu Fortin
Programme: Midnight Madness (World premiere)
There’s never been a film like Mathew Rankin’s Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney. Part psychotropic fever dream, part political screed, it’s simultaneously an exercise in fantastical frivolity while paradoxically having an underlying grasp on Canadian identity that makes the meetings at Meech Lake feel like a minor vacation. It’s an explosion of ideas and images, an onslaught of official statements, campaign speeches, carved up news footage, NFB archives, and Tron-like iconography.
As profound as it is batshit crazy, there’s little use in exploring it narratively in writing, as the visual presentation and the mayhem of the montage is so intertwined in the telling that anything but actually seeing the thing to experience for oneself would be a diminishment. Safe to say, this is not a film for everyone. But even the most critical audience member surely must recognize the intentionality of all these seemingly chaotic elements, a method-to-the-madness that even a reticent viewer should appreciate if not applaud.
For those more open to the film’s unabashed mayhem, the result is simply astonishing and enthralling. Taking the rise of a Prime Minister into power as its starting point, Rankin and his team wrangle thousands upon thousands of individual images and clips to craft this mosaic of Mulroney. The film is littered with fabrications and downright deceptions, and yet somehow the more overt the lies become, the more truthful the film seems to be. It’s a brain breaker, to be sure, but a brash and brilliant one.
Legends of Canada’s political class are presented like characters out of some gloomy Saturday morning cartoon show, with the likes of John Diefenbaker (“Dief the Chief”), Joe “Who?” Clark, Claude Wagner, the hapless John Turner and a terrifying Pierre Trudeau appearing in various guises. The film documents in its unique style the swath of time between the early 1970s’ fight for control of the Progressive Conservative Party, right through to the eventual election in the mid-‘80s, tracing the gladhanding, backstabbing, and full on political combat that Mulroney of which found himself in the middle.
For those around during these years, the madcap mode of memorializing is as intoxicating as it is informative. Several moments genuinely explain how we got from one part of that era to another, and, even more impressively, this kaleidoscopic vision provides insight into where we are now. It’s a bit of a miracle how such a breakdown of historical storytelling norms manages to uncover a deeper truthiness of the social experiment we call Canada, but maybe such an implausibly successful nation needs something a bit oblique and opaque to satisfactorily paint the nation’s portrait.
Rankin is no stranger to providing offbeat origin stories for political figures, as his 2019 feature debut The Twentieth Century, an expressionist and exuberant chronicling of William Lyon Mackenzie King and a slew of ice floes, can attest. His sophomore film, Universal Language, is a fantastic fable that uses a series of vignettes to explore bureaucracy, language, culture, and the fetishization of fowls, winning a top prize at Cannes and implausibly selected as Canada’s Oscar entry. (Fittingly, it didn’t win.) His third film merges the eerie experimentation of the first with the acerbic comedy of the second, crafting a cacophonous collage that, despite the chaos, manages to remain fully coherent.
Stretching the very boundaries of what a documentary can say or do, the film never succumbs to self-indulgent madness. There’s a stead hand here that creates a universe that feels almost entirely haphazard, only to notice once acclimated the fine narrative and visual filaments that keep it from floating off in all directions.
Rankin can easily rank as one of this nation’s great cinematic artists, and the sense of both exhaustion and excitement that comes from watching his latest film is an absolute delight. Speaking of feeling overwhelmed, this film may not work for all audiences, and the struggle for those watching it at midnight expecting shocks and jump scares to keep them awake may overcome their ability to stay engaged. Yet for those who become enrapt by this wildly creative and unabashedly silly symphony, with the ephemera of the past used to extraordinary effect, then, ladies and gentlemen, Brian Mulroney may just be an experience that you adore as much as this reviewer does.
