Paul Schrader
Oh, Canada - I tradimenti

LA RECENSIONE

No one really knows who we are, perhaps not even ourselves... and admitting it is not easy without having experienced some contradictions, some difficulties, and some experiences throughout life.

Assuming that this is not a true story even though it is narrated in autobiographical form, in this film (based on a novel by Russell Earl Banks from 2021 titled “The Betrayals”) Paul Joseph Schrader once again utilizes the impeccable performance of Richard Tiffany Gere, more than forty years later, not before consulting Robert Anthony De Niro (who refused because his fee was too low), and in my opinion, it's better this way.

The plot tells the story of Leo, a former director/documentary maker who is dying of cancer, to whom two of his students decide to conduct a last interview with 25 questions to be answered directly in his home alongside his wife Emma, also a former student of his, played by a talented Uma Karuna Thurman (who also plays Gloria, a former lover of Leo, wife of one of his friends). Slowly, truths that few people know will surface. Known for his anti-militarism, almost a war hero in Vietnam, Leo will reveal how things are after fifty years; he will reveal his betrayals, he will reveal how he abandoned his second wife and their five-year-old son, he will reveal how, thanks to a misunderstanding, he became the director known and admired by all.

The whole story unfolds between the States and Canada where Leo sought refuge to avoid military service, thanks to a skillful directorial work where the past and present are revisited at different times (accompanied by a more than worthy soundtrack) which seems to show us, as if in a dream, a life of subterfuge, desires, and freedom of a man everyone thought they knew but was something else entirely, as surely happens to many of us.