Quebec animator Felix Dufour-Laperrière in Death Does Not Exist (La mort n’existe pas) centers his fourth feature on two main characters, Helene and Manon, as they strike a Faustian bargain.
Believing radical change requires violence to overthrow the old order, the two women and their fellow comrades launch an armed attack on wealthy landowners in a stately villa. It doesn’t go well. Helene freezes and, after escaping into a magical valley filled with shifting colors and tension, Manon comes back to haunt her.
Together, in a series of dialogues and monologues, the two women, after the bloody mayhem behind them, explore violence, love, commitment and how, in challenging the status quo, only good can possibly come from something bad happening.
“Life. It’s movement,” Manon tells Helene at one point. “And movement has a cost, inevitably. It’s hard. Save your skin, or dirty your hands. And maybe change things. Or save what you love. It’s true, it’s hard. But crying like a baby doesn’t change anything. You have to choose. What are you loyal to? To whom?”
As Death Does Not Exist heads to Cannes for a world premiere, before also screening at Annecy, director Dufour-Laperrière tells The Hollywood Reporter he sought in his poetically hand-drawn animated feature to combine the scenario of a tragic friendship with the fallout from a botched terrorist attack. “They experience, first and foremost, the impossibility of violence,” he explains. “You don’t control the consequences. It gets immediately out of hand. And yet they experience it in a world where violence exists.”
As part of the tragic tale, Manon offers Helene the chance, after ditching her accomplices during the failed armed attack, to return to the landowners’ villa and complete the terrorist mission. “Manon is offering the possibility to maybe save her friends and save her love and save her conviction, yet and risk it all in the same moment. That’s a tragic choice,” Dufour-Laperrière recounts.
The director adds Death Does Not Exist is also inspired by a dark and turbulent time in Canadian history, the fall 1970 October Crisis when a radical Quebec separatist group, the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ), kidnapped high profile politicians to escalate their battle for independence from Canada and lead Ottawa to impose the War Measures Act.
“In the beginning, I saw the October Crisis-meets-Alice in Wonderland,” Dufour-Laperrière says of the FLQ using violence against symbolic targets for political gains. As for his minimalist animation style, the director insists abstraction with a blending and overlapping in visuals and sound better explains a tumultuous world using his film.
That’s especially true with Dufour-Laperrière’s use of a color palette to illustrate characters rendered with only a couple, yet ever-shifting details. “It makes a whole. The (characters) are part of the context, of the backgrounds, and the background is part of them,” the director recalls. “They’re not independent. And it was fun to be very free in the use of color and to approach it like a painting.”
Dufour-Laperrière says about his Cannes world premiere for his Canada-France co-production: “It’s a real pleasure to get an adult animated feature out there and to put it in a very beautiful general cinema context like the Cannes Film Festival. So the joy is greater than the stress.”
Death Does Not Exist has a voice cast that includes Zeneb Blanchet, Karelle Tremblay, Mattis Savard-Verhoeven, Barbara Ulrich and Irene Dufour. UFO, BFF and Maison 4:3 are distributing.
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