Paul

Subject to depression and social anxiety, Paul has found refuge in serving women who invite him to clean their homes. By sharing his gently eccentric routines on social media, he combats loneliness and takes it one day at a time.

In every city the world over, you find Pauls – Pauls like this young Paul, with his anonymous shame, his discreet courage, the secret compulsions in which he tidies away his shame and finds a faint desire to exist. Denis Côté is not unaware: he well knows that by filming Paul’s life, one Montreal winter, he is burdening his character’s shoulders with the crushing weight of an archetype, and the film with the risk of having extracted from the crowd a single face only to immediately return it to generality. He knows, above all, that viewers won’t hesitate to do likewise, as soon as they spot the flagrant symptoms of a very contemporary ill that condemn him to becoming an emblem. The ingenuity of the film, the scrupulous attention it gives to its character, is perhaps because the film has grown in the shadow of this threat, monitored by two symmetric risks: bungling Paul by caring too much about our times, or bungling our times (as the present is indeed mirrored in Paul’s wretchedness: it is too flagrant to hide) by focusing solely on him. The success of the film, which skilfully weaves an observant seriousness and a clear taste for magic, is doubly admirable: Paul is both unique and exemplary. He is both the very likeness and the mystery of a man – a man incapable of choosing (like all of society, but in his very own way) between pride and shame.

Jérôme Momcilovic