Irlande Cahier Bleu

The difficulty of finding a babysitter is something which a lot of non-parents don’t understand. One can’t leave one’s child with just anybody, and going through agencies can be very expensive, especially if you’re on your own. Ducarmel (Emery Habwineza) continually struggles to get the one babysitter he really trusts to fit her schedule around his. He’s all out of permissible days off in his job as a firefighter, and on top of that, the firefighting service’s amateur basketball team is worried – not without reason – that it won’t stand a chance in competition if he misses key games. What’s more, Ducarmel faces another pressure on his time. He is constantly given to dreaming. In his dreams, he is the greatest basketball player in the world.

Whilst it does involve elements of science fiction – including a discussion of interplanetary basketball leagues which incorporates its finest comic moments – Irlande Cahier Bleu is another of those films which appears to have found its way into the Fantasia International Film Festival line-up largely because of its peculiarly French Canadian brand of humour. It’s a film deeply informed by love of cinema, beautifully photographed even when all it’s depicting is feet running on a wooden surface (most of what we see of the basketball games) or inexplicable shots of cabbages. Habwineza brings a wistful charm to the lead, implying that Ducarmel is a man looking for work/life balance because he wants more of the good stuff rather than because, like so many people, he is exhausted by the bad.

That good stuff includes Charming Louise (Florence Blain Mbaye), a woman whom he encounters in more than one of his parallel lives and with whom he begins a tentative romance. The rules of life are complicated, and the more so because he is trying to please in multiple realms. Sometimes he wears a cape and professes his love for the trees, a prerequisite for basketballing success on at least one world. Sometimes he drinks; in another place, he has sworn off the stuff, striving to control his addiction. The vividness of his dreams prompts him to wonder which experience is ultimately more real. Perhaps it shouldn’t matter. There are secrets everywhere. He is intrigued by rumours of a secret basketball team exclusively for pregnant women.

Forget elves and dragons – this is fantasy of a purer sort, a sidelong look at the world through which we might get a clearer picture of one man’s conflicted identity. Officious bureaucracy and the complexities of sporting regulation are perplexing in any context. Through reinterpreting the complications of his life. Ducarmel gradually develops a clearer sense of what he wants from it all. It’s a meandering, deliberately vague piece of cinema which you will either love or find yourself confounded by – or perhaps both. Just don’t ask about the cabbages.