By MICHAEL GINGOLD
Starring Sara Montpetit, Félix-Antoine Bénard and Steve Laplante
Directed by Ariane Louis-Seize
Written by Ariane Louis-Seize and Christine Doyon
Drafthouse Films
Based solely on the title and little other foreknowledge, I expected HUMANIST VAMPIRE SEEKING CONSENTING SUICIDAL PERSON to have a punk, DIY aesthetic. Catching the movie at the Boston Underground Film Festival (where it won the Audience Choice Award for Best Feature) revealed that it is handsomely shot in widescreen (by Shawn Pavlin) and less aggressive than warm-hearted, even as its central activity involves emptying hearts.
An award-winner at numerous other fests around the world and headed for wider release later this year, the Montreal-shot, French-language HUMANIST VAMPIRE introduces its eponymous heroine Sasha as a little girl (winningly played by Lilas Rose-Cantin). In a rare genre-film sequence involving a clown in which that painted funnyman is not the object of fear, writer/director Ariane Louis-Seize and co-scripter Christine Doyon most amusingly and sympathetically establish that Sasha feels too much empathy to feed on humans. Her reluctance means she can’t even sprout fangs, and has to drink from baggies; her father (Steve Laplante) is understanding, while her mother (Sophie Cadieux), cousin Denise (Noémie O’Farrell) and aunt (Marie Brassard) are concerned and frustrated with her unwillingness to join in the family tradition.
Her hesitancy continues into her late teenage years–in this particular mythology, vampires do age, albeit much slower than us humans–when she’s played by Sara Montpetit, and her family resorts to tough-love attempts to bring out her taste for taking blood from the source. One night, she encounters Paul (Félix-Antoine Bénard), who works at a bowling alley and is subject to abuse from his peers both there and at school. He’s starting to think about ending it all, which as the title suggests makes him a good match for a girl struggling with her inherited destiny to take lives. But the burgeoning friendship between the two means that this is the rare romcom variation in which audiences will root for its two leads not to consummate their association, at least in the way it initially seems set up.
HUMANIST VAMPIRE is a humanist movie too, even as lives are claimed and plasma is consumed along the way. While Louis-Seize and Doyon’s humor can be pitch-black at times, the overall tone is sensitive to the troubled psyches of its central duo, both struggling against, and brought together by, a world in which they don’t fit in. The filmmakers have a good deal of fun playing with the conventions of vampire cinema and our expectations based on them, and handle the touchy issue of suicide in a way that largely eschews the savage satire of a film like HEATHERS while also avoiding sentimentalizing the subject. Some of the movie’s most wicked laughs result when Sasha agrees to help Paul realize his “dying wish,” and the ensuing events come to threaten the lives of others.
Throughout, the tone is both straight-faced and playful, and Louis-Seize clearly loves her misfit couple, who are so well-drawn and well-played that we love them too as we follow them through a long night of darkness, lighter moments and discovery. Montpetit and Bénard have terrific, initially awkward and later partner-in-crime chemistry, and with her long, jet-black hair and big dark eyes, Montpetit possesses a perfect vampiric visage. In fact, everyone in the movie looks absolutely perfect for their roles, from Sasha’s family members to Paul’s disapproving school principal (Micheline Bernard). Kudos to casting directors Tania Arana and Johanne Titley for the great collection of faces they found to populate this film.
HUMANIST VAMPIRE SEEKING CONSENTING SUICIDAL PERSON is part of the long tradition of movies mining both comedy and pathos from creatures of the night co-existing with contemporary society. Yet its offbeat romantic spirit, streaked with the occasional bloodletting, is very much its own, gently driven by its pair of individualistic protagonists. Stylishly filmed, and funny in a few different ways, it is among other things a perfect date movie for horror fans.
