Oh, Canada

A fascinating, unintended counterpoint to David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds, which is also the Festival, Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada likewise sees its protagonist confronting mortality through radical, wilfully Canadian acts of self-definition. Schrader's hero makes a documentary.

Richard Gere, reuniting with Schrader 44 years after American Gigolo, plays Leonard Fife, who left the US for Canada as a young man during the Vietnam war draft. Fife became an acclaimed documentary filmmaker in Montreal. Now, riddled with illness and palliative medicine, he allows former film students, led by Malcolm (Michael Imperioli), to interview him. Uma Thurman, playing Fife’s watchful wife Emma, stands guard to protect her husband’s legacy. But as Fife’s memories pour out to the camera and come to life in flashbacks, the great man’s official story fractures.

In a casting masterstroke, Jacob Elordi (also at the Festival in On Swift Horses) plays the young Fife, unleashing the same enigmatic charisma Gere brought to American Gigolo. Seduction came easily to young Fife; as his older self recounts and immerses himself in those memories, he’s finally ready to admit where selfishness and cowardice led him.

In adapting Russell Banks’ 2021 novel Foregone, Schrader brings uniquely cinematic tools to the story. His play with aspect ratios, colour palettes, and the shifting certainties of flashbacks give Oh, Canada an interior perspective that only movies can offer. There is artifice here, but also devastating truth.

Content advisory: sexually suggestive scenes