WETLANDS

Drama
In French with English subtitles
Original title Marécages

PRINCIPAL CAST MEMBERS
Pascale Bussières: farm wife Marie Santerre
Luc Picard: her husband Jean
Gabriel Maillé: their 17-year-old son Simon
François Papineau: Pierre, the town hang-about
Denise Dubois: Simon’s paternal grandmother Rejeanne

REVIEW
With everything playing out in real time it tends to drag and makes it unnecessarily too long. This story of a mother-son relationship provides very few if any light moments. In fact, chances are good you’ll come out feeling more sad and depressed than when you went in. Hardly the kind of thing you’d recommend to anyone.

Along with some editing to get rid of the redundant scenes and the ones that are too long I’d suggest they do the same with all the close-ups of Simon’s pimply face and the actual live birth of a calf.

CLASSIFICATION

for disturbing images, explicit portrayals of violence, nudity, and sexual activity.

FOR NITPICKERS ONLY
This is one of my favourites, the product placement rotating bottle: from one shot to the next the bottle rotates without being touched so that the label is clearly seen. In this instance all this takes place while Pierre and/or Marie are drinking Molson Dry.

Not having enough money to pay for all the groceries she put in the cart, Marie removes 3 of them. At most the cost of these three items would be something like $10 not $40 as reported by the clerk.

P.S.
Never did figure out how the title ties in with the movie. Apart from the opening scene with bulrushes there is no other reference to “an area of land whose soil is saturated with water either permanently or seasonally.” In fact quite the opposite is mentioned several times as the drought continues.

P.S.S.
The nude before the opening credits, the farmhand peeing, the peeping-tom episodes, the kid pleasuring himself all seem to fit the definition of
gratuitous sex: adjective
Uncalled for; lacking good reason; unwarranted.