While wandering through the rooms of an abandoned building, a young woman questions our relationship to time and space as well as the meaning of existence.
“I’m like in a very, very slow suspense, as if there is nothing that moves and nothing that tells me what’s coming next,” Larissa Corriveau, who doesn’t appears only after eight minutes of static shots of empty or disorderly rooms in an abandoned building. The serious face, the inquisitive look, the actress that Denis Côté directed in Directory of Disappeared Towns, Hygiène Sociale and A Summer Like That haunts with her enigmatic presence this perfect hypnotic hybrid between fiction, documentary and essay that is Miss Kenopsia.
To kill time, the guardian, or captive, of the place indulges in reflections on our relationship to time and space, on the urgency of living and on the meaning of existence. He is visited by an unknown woman (Evelyne de la Chenelière, who signs the magnificent ten-minute monologue on Eternity), the concierge (Olivier Aubin, with whom Larissa Corriveau performs an astonishing motionless pas de deux on the Potochkin’s haunting Possessed song) and the steward (Hinde Rabbaj).
With the precise framing and almost subliminal camera movements of cinematographer Vincent Biron, as well as the rich sound design of Terence Chotard, Mademoiselle Kenopsia immediately exerts a fascination tinged with anxiety. Added halfway through are 16mm projections by visual artist Philippe Léonard, which help not only to maintain the sensation of disturbing strangeness that each image provokes, but also to give the whole thing a fantastic, dreamlike dimension.
Since the start of his prolific career, Denis Côté, a former film critic nourished by horror films, has made films for discerning film buffs. Understanding for those who are not afraid of being jostled by proposals that are the opposite of formatted and comforting productions. If he seemed to care nothing about spectators with his first short films, the director has since demonstrated a desire to invite them to have fun with him in his formal explorations.
His new offering, Mademoiselle Kenopsia, filmed for the modest sum of $10,000 in two monasteries, one in Saint-Hyacinthe, the other in Pierrefonds, and in the former Royal Victoria hospital, is a very good example of this. Evoking Kevin Lambert’s novel Que ta joie remain, a reflection on our relationship to work, this work, which marks the end of a cycle in Denis Côté’s career, flirts with genre, lightness and humor. Which does not prevent it from being overcome by sincere emotion and real depth.
