Hot Docs 2021 | "Archipelago" and the Islands of Our Own Creation
8/12 ForReel Score | 3.5/5 Stars
The Thousand Islands region of North America is a vast stretch of the Saint Lawrence River bisecting Canada and the U.S. that is dotted by some 1,800 or more islands, depending on where your definition of an island begins and stops. For Quebecois filmmaker Félix Dufour-Laperrière, what mystifies the region aren’t the objective definitions of these islands, but how the region and the islands have manifested themselves through the culture, the politics, the stories, and the dreams of its people.
Archipelago (Archipel) is a spellbinding experiment with words, animated images, and occasional snippets of archival footage, combined to often transfixing effect as the island clusters of the director’s native Quebec are surveyed across time and channelled psychically. This “docu-fantasia” (to borrow Winnipeg filmmaker Guy Maddin’s term for his own reimagining of the film form) is a tour of sorts, at times historical, anthropological, and ethnographical in intent, but primarily a means of unraveling the traces left in spiritual terrains via poetic and lyrical musings. Our guides are two voices—one female (Florence Blain Mbaye) and one male (Mattis Savard-Verhoeven)—who seem slightly at odds with each other (the man questions the woman’s existence), but who nonetheless bring curiosity and a simmering passion to their inquisition. A third voice appears for a passage (Innu poet Joséphine Bacon), and while this voice adds a vital layer to the story via a First Nation’s perspective, it is mot subtitled, and thus ends up further obfuscating an already nebulous film. A fourth voice culled from an old newsreel recording of a man boasting the Saint Lawrence River’s cultural milieu provides the film with its most recognizably educational content.
On first viewing, Archipelago is a documentary that is felt and swam in, rather than understood. Its gorgeously rendered images surface and submerge as if they belonged to a dark pool of memory and imagination. In one sequence, flecks of gold paint texture ghostly inverted footage of the flowing river water. Various animation styles and mediums are employed throughout the film, and these give the different sections distinct moods and auras. Two years of polishing by Dufour-Laperrière’s animation team assures all styles swirl and comingle as a cohesive whole. A scintillating and hypnotizing score aids in this harmonizing, as do the film’s distinct rhythms, which always compliment the prose vocalized by the narrators. But most prominent in Archipelago is Dufour-Laperrière’s pen, and this he wields with mastery, his words sometimes becoming more colourful than the imagery.
When asked why he mixed up truth and falsehoods, dreams and reality in his film’s text, Dufour-Laperrière answered, “[t]o account for a territory that is both tangible and intangible, it seemed necessary to me to bring fiction and fantasy into the reality.” The concerting documentary viewer in us may choose to watch Archipelago with the intent of interpreting the non-fiction, but a more rewarding and beguiling viewing experience may open up to you when you give in to the film’s impressionistic ebbs and flows. We can never take a complete, factual, and photographic account of the places we visit, after all; sometimes, we can only take a mood, a sound, or a dream. It is in this notion, I think, that Archipelago proves most affecting.