Today I learned that Wife doesn’t like “Hallucination movies.” She told this to me while I was watching the first spotlight film of Cinejoy 2021. “Hallucination movies are dumb because nothing is real. Unless something marks the hallucinations–unless something signals we’re in a flashback or a memory–then it’s just this adversarial relationship where the director’s trying to trick you, which is stupid because it’s a movie, nothing’s real.” This leads me to believe that she would’ve hated Joker, so I’m kind of glad that she wasn’t there for that. I have to say, Death of a Ladies’ Man is mostly spectacle and ego-soothing. There are moments of what feels like it might be subversion, like when the music playing underneath his romantic montage with the timeless Jessica Paré asks if she wants to “step into his moonlight” and be his fantasy, but too much of the second and third parts of this movie are fantasy fulfillment for a washed up alcoholic. The movie is chock-full of dried up aphorisms, delivered drunkenly, “the heart wants what it wants,” “everything that’s broken can be fixed,” “actually, you were a terrible father–half the time–the other half the time you were okay.”
Wife unfairly tars the great podcaster Starlee Kine with the same brush as Death of a Ladies’ Man (she has a longstanding one-sided beef with Starlee, because she feels like Starlee lied to her about the veracity of some of her podcast episodes from years ago, chiefly whether or not any of those episodes actually happened or if they were just publicity stunts for Gimlet). I don’t think it’s entirely healthy for someone to constantly question whether or not an artist is “lying” to them, regardless of it’s a movie or a podcast, but in this movie particularly, having Jessica Paré (40) attracted to the painfully weathered Gabriel Byrne (70) really took me out of the suspension of disbelief. I felt bad first for Paré and then I felt bad for everyone who watched the movie and would internalize a world where she might be interested in him, but ultimately I felt bad for myself for investing so much emotional labor in the poor decisions that had brought the film (and me) to this point.
Ultimately, Death of a Ladies’ Man is a movie that few people will ever see, but a (very) select cross section of second and third generation Irish Anglophone Montreal natives may enjoy picking out the buildings in their neighborhood briefly before shuffling off to bed. The poster for this movie is freaking nuts.
