Nick Pinkerton
Isolation, frustration, flirtation, friction, friendship: Philippe Lesage’s latest film is a subtle study of the playing out of power dynamics during a Quebec wilderness vacation.
Cast in Who by Fire. Courtesy KimStim.
Who by Fire, written and directed by Philippe Lesage,
opens March 14, 2025 at Film at Lincoln Center, New York City
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Who by Fire, the fourth fiction feature by the Quebecois filmmaker Philippe Lesage, is a turn-the-screws drama that at times recalls the early slow-burn thrillers of his countryman Denys Arcand—in fact, there are two scenes in Lesage’s film of extravagant dinners dissolving into rankling incivility that rival the suffocating family squabble near the beginning of Arcand’s Dirty Money (1972). Lesage’s cast of characters, however, aren’t the Francophone rednecks that proliferate in early Arcand, but closer to the well-heeled intellectuals of the elder director’s The Decline of the American Empire (1986); the setting of Who by Fire is one of those sprawling rural “cottages” where the Canadian haute bourgeoisie flee to the north after the winter thaw.
Aurélia Arandi-Longpré as Aliocha and Paul Ahmarani as Albert in Who by Fire. Courtesy KimStim.
Middle-aged Albert (Paul Ahmarani)—accompanied by his two teenage children, Aliocha and Max (Aurélia Arandi-Longpré and Antoine Marchand-Gagnon), and Max’s best friend, Jeff (Noah Parker)—is the guest of his old friend Blake (Arieh Worthalter), at Blake’s home in the wilds of Quebec. Albert is paunchy, bespectacled, weak of chin; Blake is fit and balding, but in a virile, Continental way. They were, we learn via a slow-feed drip of backstory-filling, former collaborators—Blake as director, Albert as screenwriter—on fiction films that, judging from the look of Blake’s retreat and the presence of a household staff that includes an on-site editor, a chef, and a hunting guide, left him with a significant personal fortune. Albert drives a Benz, is sending Aliocha to Bard, and has the pecuniary resources—thanks to a mildly demeaning TV-writing gig—to pursue his passion for European wines, so evidently isn’t hurting too badly himself. After he’s polished off one of the many bottles he’s brought along for the trip, however, his bitterness concerning the dissolution of their partnership has a tendency to bubble up like a bout of indigestion. Blake has turned his back on fiction for documentary—the opposite of Lesage’s trajectory and, for that matter, Arcand’s. As to whatever resentments Blake is holding on to concerning Albert, he proves to have more underhanded ways of expressing them.
Sophie Desmarais as Millie, Irène Jacob as Hélène, and Aurélia Arandi-Longpré as Aliocha in Who by Fire. Courtesy KimStim.
Lesage’s choreographing of his ensemble cast—which grows to include a once much in-demand actress and her husband (Irène Jacob and Laurent Lucas) visiting from Paris—photographed frequently in deep-focus long takes with a half-dozen actors or more in frame, shows a dexterity that’s become dispiritingly rare in the age of Netflixized cut-to-dialogue talking heads. There is a scene—one of two, and by far the more effective, in which the film abruptly becomes a musical—of the group erupting into an impromptu dance party to the B-52’s “Rock Lobster” that is the finest floor show in a two-and-a-half-hour-plus “art film” since the Kinks’ “This Time Tomorrow” needle-drop in Philippe Garrel’s Regular Lovers (2005), with an ebullient Sophie Desmarais (the live-in editor) meriting special honors. A three-minute tracking shot of the vacationers fly-fishing in a river is packed with complicated bits of business—an errant hook, a foot dangerously caught in the riverbed, the reeling in of a trout—yet has an air of absolute effortlessness.
Aurélia Arandi-Longpré as Aliocha and Noah Parker as Jeff in Who by Fire. Courtesy KimStim.
Curled up within this film of group dynamics is another film, a study in emotional isolation and mounting frustration, its focal point the most extraneous member of the coterie: Jeff. Parker plays the part with the air of a sullen, overgrown second-grader in permanent time-out, and as soon as the camera pans up on him sitting next to Arandi-Longpré in the back seat of the car after a furtive attempt at brushing his hand against hers, it’s clear that his pining for her is both excruciating and destined to come to naught. A porcelain brunette with thoughtful gray-green eyes and the sort of warm, easygoing demeanor that vain hope and delusion-inducing horniness can mistranslate into flirtatiousness—Aliocha is named for the saintly youngest brother Karamazov and shows the forbearance of her namesake—such a prize is not for the clammy, clumsy fingers of Jeff. His attempt at a lunged kiss is an abject catastrophe; its aftermath suggests the young man may be more than a tiny bit emotionally imbalanced, or maybe just your average inept, testosterone-addled teen, simultaneously obsessed with and terrified of sex. An aspiring director, Jeff takes some solace in the prospect, dangled by Blake, who calls the kid “Spielberg,” that the established auteur will emerge as a mentor and teach him the secrets of assertive manhood and professional success—not calculating for the fact that rich, swell-headed, ultra-competitive macho filmmaker cocksmen aren’t necessarily overeager to train their own replacements.
Arieh Worthalter as Blake and Noah Parker as Jeff in Who by Fire. Courtesy KimStim.
In its attention to the dynamics between the sexual haves and have-nots, Who by Fire may recall another much-lauded film with similar thematic concerns, Lee Chang-dong’s 2018 Burning, which attracted no small amount of attention thanks to the momentary fascination of the chattering classes with “toxic masculinity.” There’s even a whiff of Faulkner in Lesage’s film, as in Lee’s: Aliocha, whose interests run to prose and poetry rather than cinema, is in the middle of The Sound and the Fury when Jeff decides to make his move. She is working on a novel herself, of which we learn just slightly more than we do of Albert and Blake’s films, utterly unimaginable from their titles alone (The Raid and Lorenzo’s . . . something or another, for the record). The first chapter of Aliocha’s book is called “The Desire to Lose,” and it describes the universal tendency toward self-sabotage—in her reckoning, a means for humans “to punish themselves because they feel guilty for existing,” a fairly concise analysis of the fate of the chronically unfuckable.
Aurélia Arandi-Longpré as Aliocha in Who by Fire. Courtesy KimStim.
Lesage is interested not only in conflicts based on sex, age, and status, but also the friction between the interior art of the written word and the exterior art of cinema. His depiction of the neurotic, symbiotic relationship between director and screenwriter—the latter a chimerical creature, poised somewhere between literature and film—is fantastically acute. There is, however, a sense of desperation in the attempts to “open up” the pensive, decidedly literary Aliocha in the homestretch, which play like a series of unsuccessful auditions for an ending. (All the more unfortunate is the fact that Arandi-Longpré’s superbly modulated, close-to-the-vest performance doesn’t need such concessions.) Blake, too, will come in for his humanizing moment before the credits roll. I do not consider it a revelation that a man who in many regards seems a bit of a prick can love and be loved by his dog, as we learn is the case for Blake; this is what dogs are for.
Noah Parker as Jeff in Who by Fire. Courtesy KimStim.
Who by Fire has more to recommend itself than its not-inconsiderable achievements in performance and nimble blocking, though. Lesage takes pains not to put his finger on the scale when presenting his characters, and my own judgment of Blake I suspect says more about my feelings concerning successful, virilely balding men who love their dogs than it does about Worthalter’s performance or Lesage’s writing and direction. That Who by Fire includes spectacular views of Quebec’s natural splendors is no staggering feat by itself—it would be difficult for a cinematographer to make such vistas ugly—but the air of placid menace sustained by Lesage and his DP, Balthazar Lab, is something beyond the merely picturesque, and there is an unusual, real satisfaction in a film of the great outdoors that leaves one with room to think.
Nick Pinkerton is the author of the book Goodbye, Dragon Inn, available from Fireflies Press as part of its Decadent Editions series. His writing on cinematic esoterica can be found at nickpinkerton.substack.com, among other venues. The Sweet East, a film from his original screenplay directed by Sean Price Williams, premiered in the Quinzaine des Cinéastes section of the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.