Les chambres rouges

Juliette Gariépy

Pascal Plante's Les chambres rouges (Red Rooms) is one of the more compelling and technically interesting films of the past few years. Set in Montreal, the picture commences with the criminal trial of a serial killer named Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos) who is accused of torturing and killing three young women. The film's main character, Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy), is in attendance and it becomes obvious that she is obsessed with the case. Kelly-Ann lives a hermit-like existence in a sleek high-rise, making a very good living modeling and playing online poker. She befriends a fellow trial groupie named Clementine (Laurie Babin) who thinks Chevalier has been framed. Clementine is a drifter from the sticks who gladly accepts Kelly-Anne promise of shelter. However, Kelly-Anne, who is a techno wiz, reveals to Clementine that she has copies of the videos of two of the murders, acquired with her hacking skills on the dark web on what are referred to as red rooms.

These videos were shown at the trial, but only in camera with the exclusion of spectators. Naturally, Clementine wants to see what is forbidden, but it upends her. She finally grasps Chevalier's perfidy and disassociates herself from the trial and Kelly-Anne. Kelly-Anne's attendance at the trial does not go unnoticed and her modeling career suffers. She loses herself to her obsession, even dressing up as one of the victims. She is sucked into a media vortex and reacts in a, somewhat justifiably, paranoid fashion much like the protagonist in this film's main influence, David Cronenberg's Videodrome. The themes of surveillance and loss of identity that underpinned that film are very much in evidence in Les chambres rouges. Plante shares with Cronenberg a clinical and very Canadian rationalism that is contrasted with more unconscious forces in their scenarios. In Les chambres rouges, the blinding white light of the courtroom, where truth and justice are sought, is contrasted with Kelly-Anne's dark lair where she consorts with the pitch black elements of the world wide web.

The gaze of Pascal's camera is largely an objective one. Sleek camera movements eye the participants in this drama in all their three dimensionality, even when they are playing a "role" in court, but also neutrally. The exception occurs when Kelly-Anne shows up in court dressed as one of the victims and is promptly ejected. As the bailiffs manhandle her out of court, the camera point of view shifts to her perspective. She sees Chevalier acknowledge both her and her complicity, like Manson to one of his chicks. As with Clementine's moment of realization, this changes Kelly-Anne's perspective, but, unlike Clementine, not her obsession with the case. She devotes herself, in her own twisted fashion, to bring justice to Chevalier. 

The Lady of Shallot by Elizabeth Siddal

One aspect of Les chambres rouges that intrigued me was the use of motifs and references from Arthurian legend. In the film, Guinevere is an AI computer assistant to Kelly-Anne. Kelly-Anne's internet moniker is "Lady of Shallot" who, if I remember my Tennyson, also spends a lot of time cooped up in a tower. Chivalric crests come into (cos)play and the murderer is, of course, named for the French word for knight. A very errant knight, I suppose. The dark web is rendered as modern necromancy in which all shapes, including the shape of truth, can be hacked and fracked into fractals. The rituals and romance of Arthurian legend are debased in Les chambres rouges. Pascal seems to intimate that truth is as illusory in the modern world as the Grail. All we are left with are the hollow rituals of streaming news and talk shows, mere phantasms of truth and bodyguards to lies.