Wilcox (Denis Côté, 2019) (Patreon)

It's strange. It seems patently obvious that Denis Côté is the most consistently interesting director currently working in French Canadian cinema, but you wouldn't necessarily know that to judge by his overall reception. His films have mostly gone unreleased south of the border, and although he has the support of a few of the major international festivals (most notably Berlin and Locarno), he's neither an aging wunderkind (Xavier Dolan) nor a budding Hollywood player (Denis Villeneuve). He's too odd for all that.

Wilcox is a featurette that adopts a stance that is rather uncontroversial in the arthouse aesthetic of our time. It assumes that it is impossible to really know anyone, that "interiority" is the false promise of a bourgeois realist mode that goes back several centuries. But Côté takes this proposition further. He offers us a world drained of communication, a period after the end of listening. Wilcox is an almost completely silent film. Aside from some grunts and a low, wavering hum of a soundtrack, this is Leave No Trace as it might have conceived by Stan Brakhage.

We know very little about Wilcox (Guillaume Tremblay). In fact, we only know his name because we can see it on his military uniform. We are granting him a backstory simply by assuming that it's his, although Wilcox's facility with tools, fire, and freeze-dried pouch meals would seem to indicate that he has gained survivalist know-how somewhere. The army is a reasonable assumption. We see him walk from across the screen, covering various types of terrain: weeds, forest, dirt. He encounters a junk dealer who sells him an old car, which shits out almost immediately. Wilcox abandons it at the side of the road, and start walking again.

Occasionally he breaks into abandoned houses, to gain temporary shelter and stock up on supplies. But these are the only moments when Wilcox appears less than self-reliant. Unlike Debra Granik's film, Wilcox is about a solitary figure, and he is not on the run from the law. There is virtually no tension in Wilcox. Rather, Côté's film is observational, inviting us to hover alongside a man who exists on the margins of conventional society, for reasons unknown. 

There are a few moments when Wilcox stumbles. The film features two dream sequences, both composed of black-and-white, silent found footage. These peeks into our subject's psyche are more distracting than anything. By remaining an impenetrable mystery, Wilcox refutes our tendency to slot him into sociological categories, to "liberalize" him. The silence of Wilcox is more than an artistic choice. It is a rhetorical refusal, an insistence on all that we don't know.