The Fall of the American Empire

One general way to describe this film is that it's more like a series of sketches than a feature film. Each scene - from dining scene to intimate scene to hospital scene - is overly simplistic and gratuitous, without any memorable detail or cinematic/narrative angle, it's like showing someone a series of generic postcards, but there's no chance/motivation for the viewers to be engrossed in them.

Some scenes are not that believable - such as police barging in a shooting scene without taking any precautionary steps, then simply letting sole witness go after asking some silly questions - and as it's not too clear what the intention of the film is (is it a comedy? A drama? A parody?), we don't know what to make of them. The film seems to be going for some kind of dry irony, if that's the case, the sense of irony needs more development because it's only consistent in the characters of the police officers (Pete and Carla).

The script could also be more fully flushed out. Oftentimes many ideas and names are dropped, but there's no attempt to tie the loose ends. Take the opening scene for instance, there are so many great materials and it could have been one of the best opening scenes. Instead, Pierre-Paul just name-drops intellectuals without connecting them in a cohesive flow, so we feel like just reading someone's SMS. There are a lot of commentaries on our contemporary world which deserve some scrutiny, but often they're just mentioned perfunctorily, in a general, one-liner manner. As a result, one would get more emotional by reading an in-depth financial exposé about our flawed financial system than watching this film.

The half-hearted soundtrack doesn't help either.

The representation of some folks is also problematic. Criminals, dodgy business dealers in Chinatown, gang members, etc are all not from the majority community of the province. Also, the finance professor? A suave guy in douchey suits talking about gossipy tax stories in front of a whiteboard on which are written a bunch of equations that are supposed to suggest technical complexities (it's a mismatch between simple gossips and complexity). Pierre-Paul, the PhD in philosophy guy? Surprise, surprise, he reads old classics and his interests are often paired with quasi-classical music in the background. If you ask an elementary school student how do you define a nice guy? That he gives out money to the homeless? Yup, that's exactly what's shown in the film. What's a secure and secretive way to transfer data? Flash drive. How to do top-secret business transactions? Make a couple of easy video calls.

There are at least a few scenes that are disturbingly insensitive, to say the least, to be shown in 2018. You be the judge of the context: one in which a man was hung and tortured, and some in which a specific group of real-life hobos in the city are portrayed as as a cheap means to manipulate our emotions (not sure if the filmmaker got their permission to be filmed and shown).

There are various gorgeous shots of the city of Montreal, I'm not complaining, but one wonders: what's the connection between those shots with the narrative?