Ghost Town Anthology (Denis Côté, 2019)

For years now, I have greatly admired the work of Quebecois director Denis Côté without ever exactly falling in love with it. Granted, I am not well acquainted with his earliest features. I first became aware of Côté's career with his 2009 film Carcasses, which examined the life and environment of a scrap-collecting loner, a film that had certan affinities with the documentary vignettes of U.K artist Ben Rivers. After enjoying aspects of his 2010 film Curling, I went back and caught up with Our Private Lives from 2007. These films all have aspects to recommend them, most notably Côté's successful evocation of the Canadian landscape and the enforced isolation of harsh northern winters.

To my mind, Côté's most successful feature thus far has been Vic + Flo Saw a Bear, a film in which the director gives vent to the dreamier, more surrealistic elements bubbling within the subconscious of his somewhat less experimental films. In the film, two women, former convicts, try to rebuild their lives in a woods of Quebec, while malicious forces begin organizing against them. Côté structures Vic + Flo as a kind of warped fairy tale, even implying that the women's anxiety about settling into domesticity may be manifesting as external malevolence.

Ghost Town Anthology may be Côté's most fully realized feature to date, incorporating the unforgiving locales of Carcasses and Curling with the progressive menace of Vic + Flo. For its entire first half, GTA plays like a tale of tragedy and mourning in a small Canadian town, capturing the tone and ambiance of Alice Munro or Raymond Carver. At the start of the film, a young man by the name of Simon skids his car off the road and into a large stack of cinder blocks. He is killed instantly by the impact, and it is unclear whether the accident was a suicide. Simon's death not only throws his family into anguish; it sends shockwaves throughout the entire small town, population 200, give or take. With the recent closing of the mine, the tiny town is already reeling, and the death of one of its youngest residents is a major blow.

[SPOILERS BELOW]

In time, we see that different people in the town are emotionally mapping their own needs and fears onto Simon's death. His older brother Jimmy (Robert Naylor) thinks that Simon felt trapped in the small town but didn't have the courage to leave, which may also be a projection of his own indecision. Simon's mother (Josée Deschênes) falls into spiritual collapse, while his father (Jean-Michel Anctil) abandons the family to exorcise his own private demons. The mayor of the town (Diane Lavallée) is worried that the town is dying, and tries to use Simon's death to consolidate her power over the area's citizens. 

But there are limits to the living and our understanding of the needs of the dead. In the second half of the film, the townspeople begin seeing, out of the corner of their eyes, fast moving shadows, and then eventually, solid entities. The dead have returned. They simply stand there, silent and matter-of-fact, as if to assert their claim to spatial viability within a newly vertical time structure. They refuse to succumb to the entreaties of the living. They won't communicate, and they won't go away.

Although Ghost Town Anthology is very much of a piece with Côté's previous films, it very much reminds me of the work of Japanese supernaturalist Kiyoshi Kurosawa. As in his films, the presence of an inexplicable event is treated with confusion but almost scientific curiosity and finally yoked in by the human mind's almost limitless ability to rearrange itself to accommodate new data. Côté shows us how fear of the dead evolves into hope for restored communion and then, eventually, annoyance and reluctant acceptance. People's loved ones have not returned, it seems. Instead, a parallax shift has occurred in reality itself, showing the living that they have been wandering in a shared-occupancy limbo all the while.