Polytechnique re-enacts Montreal Massacre but to what end?
Polytechnique is like a bad dream. You’re trying to get away from something evil but inevitably it keeps finding you. In this case that evil is an unnamed misogynist assassin (Maxim Gaudette) — a character based on real-life suicide-killer Marc Lépine — who walks into Montreal’s École Polytechnique and starts firing at female students. Filmed entirely in black-and-white Polytechnique opens with the bang of the assassin’s gun and repeatedly returns to that horrible explosion the camera twisting blurring and quivering throughout.
Anyone expecting insight into why Lépine went on his rampage in 1989 will be disappointed. Most of the film takes place on the day of the shooting and while the assassin is portrayed as a social outcast we don’t learn any of his backstory. His twisted suicide note is all that’s given in the film. Hence his character is cold but thin. We aren’t reminded for example that Lépine was abused by his father as a child and the absence of this information is both puzzling and frustrating.
At first Polytechnique seems like nothing more than a chilling re-enactment of a tragic school shooting. What’s the point one wonders? To simply remember that this occurred? But when the film jerks the audience back to the shooting and shows it from the various perspectives of the different victims — both the women who were shot and the men who couldn’t stop the killing — the retelling takes on more substance.
At the heart of the story is Jean-François (Sébastien Huberdeau) a good-hearted slacker classmate of Valérie (Karine Vanasse). Minutes after photocopying her notes Jean-François is forced to leave Valérie and her female classmates alone with the assassin. The women are shot; Jean-François scrambles around the school trying to offer help where he can. Afterwards he wrestles with guilt for leaving Valérie and the others. Polytechnique succeeds in portraying the survivors’ struggles with their emotional and psychological damage.
At 76 minutes Polytechnique is mercifully short given its disturbing subject matter. Still it’s vaguely unsatisfying. We’ll never know why Lépine did what he did but the fact the filmmakers never even engaged the question seems odd. It would have added more depth to a story that 20 years later still has people wondering why.
