During a report carried out several years ago, a journalist discovered the talented skater Violeta Martínez. But the latter disappears overnight. Armed with a love letter as her only clue, the reporter goes to a village on the Mexican coast in the hope of finding the young woman. What follows is a nocturnal sensory journey tinged with dreaminess and full of enigmas where a range of characters are probed in order to unravel the affair.
The first feature film written and directed by Ariane Falardeau St-Amour and Paul Chotel is a real UFO. Straddling fiction and essay, but sometimes shot in the style of a documentary, Desvío de noche (Night Detour) is a film of risk-taking and experimentation. It benefits from a boldness and an artistic determination which make it an accomplished and careful work.
However, it is a slow and demanding film which, despite its short duration, struggles to sustain our attention. The mix of genres allows the story to be enhanced in an interesting way, but the idea is at times underdeveloped. The unresolved investigation exists as a narrative pretext to free oneself from the accuracy of the facts and thus leave more room for the interpretation of the signs. But we sometimes get lost in this labyrinth of possibilities, which quickly becomes repetitive and almost boring in the second half of the film.
The splendid direction of photography by Ariane Falardeau St-Amour is one of the strong points of Desvío de noche. And what about the soaring and haunting soundtrack by Gabriel Chwojnik? The first close-ups of the missing skater are intriguing and are perfectly accompanied by Marie Brassard’s narration. An excellent choice, moreover, the Quebec actress being ideally suited to guide us through this investigation, with her enveloping and enigmatic voice.
Unfortunately, these qualities did not save us from a certain boredom, which partially overcame our interest. The voyeuristic posture into which the shots force, as if we were spying on the characters from a distance, the hidden clues and the banality of the dialogues: so many detours which ultimately do not take this film where it seems to want to go.
