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| Léokim Beaumier-Lépine and Élia St-Pierre in Invincible |
Following the last 48 hours in the life of a teenager who has been sentenced to juvenile detention, French Canadian short Invincible is one of the strongest Oscar nominees in its category, a beautifully crafted piece of cinema which makes a powerful point. It’s no surprise to learn that it’s based on events that haunted its director, Vincent René-Lortie, for many years. I meat Vincent just a few days before the nominations were announced. “We really cross our fingers, but at the end of the day, it's okay if we're not nominated because we just feel so lucky that we're here already,” he told me, explaining that what really matters to him is that people see the film and it makes them think.
“It’s the story of my friend Marc-Antoine Bernier, who passed away at the age of 14,” he says. “The way it happened was very tragic. At the time he was in a juvenile centre, and then he escaped from that place. He stole a car, followed by a police chase. And then that ended up in the river, near where I grew up. So when it happened, as you can probably imagine, it really affected the whole community. It affected the family and the friends, of course. It affected me as well.
“Everybody, at that time, said it was an accident. A few years ago, that story was still really with me. I kept thinking about it, so I decided to contact the family again, contact the friends as well. And I went for a coffee with them separately. One of the first things that came from this conversation was it was that it was probably a suicide more than an accident. There was no proof around that, but they were thinking that maybe there was more to the story. There wasn't just an accident. And so from that moment, I understood that I didn't know my friend really well.
“In the next couple of months following these meetings, I decided to do a lot of research around the subject. Meeting people, working in a juvenile centre, working with a mental health professional, meeting again with his family and friends. After all of this, the idea of doing a movie about him started to grow up in me. I felt that maybe that process could help me to get closer to Marc-Antoine in a way, so I could to get to know him a bit better. And so that's why I decided to make a story about the 48 hours before he passed away. I felt that's probably the moment that something changed in him.”
I tell him that there's a scene that really stood out to me, where Marc-Antoine has just gone back into the detention center, and he's in his room, and he's too hot. Not being able to do anything about it when you're too hot is something that a lot of people will relate to, but it's also verging on torture, at least as he experiences it. I ask Vincent if he spoke to people who've been in that kind of environment about that kind of experience.
“Yeah, I did. First, just to give you a little bit of an idea of the film process, we filmed in the exact same juvenile center where the whole story really happened. It wasn't exactly that same room, but it was where we filmed. Most of the scenes in the juvenile center are really in the same kind of room that Marc was in. With that research, we did meet with some kids who were there at the time, and people working there, too. Those rooms are very small. To have a teenager in that kind of room is, like, unimaginable. I cannot imagine the feeling of staying there, of having to sleep there.
“When we filmed that scene, it's a long shot, so we did really close the door behind the actor and the camera operator and the boom operator as well. They had to do the whole choreography in this very little room. And at some point, it does feel claustrophobic. It does feel like you cannot breathe and you don't have any space to run or to move. And this idea of having to stay there for a long period of time – I did have people telling me that you have that feeling of a lack of air, a lack of breathing, and again, that feeling of claustrophobia as well.”
Although the film is a short, it also makes room for the stories of some of the other young people in the institution.
“It was always important,” he says. “Again, in the process of doing some research, I understood that the kids that are there, they are full of stories, full of life experience, sometimes much more than we have at our age. They went through very difficult stuff in their lives. For me, it was important to showcase that in the film as well.”
He resisted suggestions that he cut that material, he says.
“It was to give an idea to the viewer that, okay, this is a space full of kids with a lot of talents, a lot of love, a lot of important things to say. I think it did help the film in the end, even if it made it a little bit longer. There is so much more to these teenagers. Sometimes, as a society, we can look at them as being bad kids or delinquents. I think that's very wrong and bad. It's a way of looking at them without any research or without any knowledge of who they really are and what they've been through.
“My friend Marc, he was supposed to come out of the juvenile center for good just a few days before he escaped. For him, going into that place was just the end of the world. It was like he could not even think. He couldn't even imagine staying there for one more minute. He might have had the chance to go back to his family, but he couldn't see more than the walls that were surrounding him. He was like, ‘I cannot breathe and I cannot be myself in this place. So I'm going to do all I can to escape.’
“There is a moment in the film where he does wonder, ‘Okay, can I actually stay a little longer? And can I actually stop behaving the way I behave, and just do my time here and then go back to my family?’ There's really a moment, I think, in the film where he does ask himself that. But I think for him, very deep down, he knew that he could not be around these adults. He could not be in this place. Just to go a little bit further in that kind of discussion, I think the film is also about someone that felt like no matter where he might be, he would always feel like he was not in a place where he could really be himself. He felt stuck everywhere he was.”
In that situation, I suggest, a lot of directors would have been tempted to just keep the camera on Marc the whole time and focus on what was happening to him. Instead, Vincent chooses to look at what's happening to Marc’s family, and we see something of how this is going to affect them. Why did he make that decision? It’s connected to the start of the film, he says, and his decision to frame the story as he did rather than opening with the car going into the river.
“For me, the film was never about that moment,” he says. “I think it was very intense. It was very tragic the way that happened, too. And I didn't want the film to be about like, ‘Okay, we are following this kid until he drives the car into the river. I think it would have been too much, and it would have been putting all the attention on the ending.
“For me, the idea was to have a film that let us discover that person, that let us get to know him a bit better, and know how much love he had, and how many things he had to say, and how intelligent he was. And how bright he was, as well.
“As I was doing the research, obviously one of the things that very stayed with me a lot was the fact that the family had to live with that grief for their whole life. They will always miss their son. There will always be an empty chair at the table. I could not let that thought go. The film is about Marc, but it's also about how grief can affect the people around you. That's why I finish with the family, because they will always have that pain in them. Even though now, though they are doing better, they went through many years of difficult times. So it was important for me to finish with them.”
There’s another scene I liked, where the young people are reading out the poems that they've written, and Marc chooses not to read his. Instead, we hear the teacher reading it while we look at his face. Why did Vincent decide to tell that part of the story that way?
“That's a good question,” he says, taking a moment to think about it. “I think Marc would have never said that out loud, but I think he wanted people to hear him. He was too proud, I think, to do something like that. The film is also about that. I think people really tried to listen to him, but they lacked the tools to do that. For me, that's why the teacher got to read it.
“I think the decision to stay with him, the fact that he didn't read it, also made it easier for us and for the actor, to feel that emotion as the teacher was reading it. Because when we filmed that, we really had the actress who was the teacher read it, and it was very powerful moment.”
He reflects on the process of casting Léokim Beaumier-Lépine to play Marc.
“It was my first live action short film. The story had become really important to me through the years. I had to find the perfect person. How could I do that? We did do a lot of casting and we met a lot of kids for a few months before we finally met Léokim. He had never acted before, so were both first timers. The way he entered the casting room, and in the first discussion that we had with him, we understood that he was very close to his emotions, and that was really what were looking for. Someone at his age, someone that could understand, someone that could act his emotion in a way that was really true and honest. So it became clear that he would play the character of Marc.
“Then we saw each other every week for almost two months every week. I'm from Montreal, he was two hours away from Montreal, so he came to Montreal and we rehearsed. But we also just read the script together, changed the dialogue, talked a lot. We talked a lot about emotion. That's something that I really like to do with him, talking about how he interprets emotions like anger, pain, sadness, love for his family or for his sister. And so in that process, we built a language of emotions together.
“When we got into filming, it was so much easier to work together. We had the same language. My job really was to let him do his thing in front of the camera. We talked and we communicated together, but I think he was very good. He really understood, at that point, the character of Marc. My job was really to talk to the teams and give him the space to do what he had to do, because it was very emotionally difficult to portray that character.”
It felt surreal to find himself on the Oscar shortlist, he tells me.
“It's my first film. We did this film with so much love and with all my friends that I made at university. We worked so hard on this, but we would have never imagined that it would have made it that far, to the Oscars. It's a dream. When you're a kid, you watch the Oscars and you kind of grow up with that award ceremony that is always the big names.
“The big films of the history went to the Oscars. Not all of them, but a lot of them. So it takes you back to that feeling. It's a childhood dream. And it's also kind of a recognition as well and a way for us to have more people to see the film. Since the announcement, we have had so many people watching it online and commenting and sending us emails and writing to us, to just tell us so many beautiful things about the film and the emotions that they had when they watched the film. It's incredible.”
And hopefully more people will understand the message of the film now, I say.
“Exactly. That's really why we made the film. It's for people to watch the film and reflect on different subjects. With this film, it's really about mental health. The fact that it was shortlisted really helped us to talk about the message of the film that's so important. People I didn't know came to me and told me ‘I knew someone like Marc when I was young,’ or sometimes they told me ‘I was a kid like him.’
“The film made me think about so many memories of when I was younger. And that's exactly why I made it, for people to reflect and to think about things that happen in their lives, in the hope that sometimes they might realise, ‘Oh, maybe that person that I know is not doing very well. Maybe he's going through something difficult.’ If I can help with that, it would just mean the world.”
