Search The Archive
Denys Arcand directed this French-Canadian film about corruption and collusion between government and financiers. The occasion is the opening of a new super-highway, and the contractor, Padovani. is giving a party for government officials and businessmen. From this beginning, Arcand develops a carefully detailed story about the misuse of power. In one of the film's more horrifying incidents, the financier's ex-wife appears suddenly, and is killed by one of his bodyguards, then buried in the highway before its opening. But almost all the film is shot indoors, using the dinner-party a microcosm of Canadian politics.
'Depicts in the quietest and most silvery of tones a really terrifying Watergate-type story.'
Richard Roud, Sight and Sound
'The characters are blocked out with a cold, visual precision that gives them the air of decadent Romans as well as shrewd exploitive locals.'
Mosk, Variety
The Pavement
Bruk
MIFF 1974
The Sun is Red
Solen er Rød
MIFF 1974