Montreal: In the opening scene of the new Max Films comedy La Vie apres l’amour, an everyday, prosperous dentist is summarily abandoned by his wife of 20 years. The result is a downward spiral of breakdown and midlife depression, but told at a tender and hilarious pitch.

Gabriel Pelletier is directing the $3.5-million, 30-day shoot based on an original screenplay by Ken Scott. The producers are Roger Frappier and Luc Vandal.

The film has the essential ingredient for commercial success at the Quebec box office – top acting talent in the form of Michel Cote as the devasted dentist, Sylvie Leonard (Un gars, une fille) as his departed wife, Patrick Huard (Reseaux, Les Boys) and a strong supporting cast, including Yves Jacques, Guylaine Tremblay, Denis Mercier, Pierre-Luc Brillant, Norman Helms and Dominique Levesque.

In an on-set interview at the Moli-Flex White studio, versatile actor Cote (Omerta, Cruising Bar, Broue) says the approach is ‘pure comedy,’ including over-the-top gags, ‘but always within the boundaries of realism.’

In his desperation, Cote says his character tries all manner of coping – drug-taking, dubious therapeutic solutions, other women, even a night in jail.

Cote says the good doctor’s descent into hell ‘always remains under control,’ falling short of pure tragedy and madness. ‘Because it’s comedy, the furthest we go [in that direction] is to be touching,’ he says. ‘Sometimes, he cries, but that’s funny, too!’

Director Pelletier says the fundamental challenge on this shoot is to take a dramatic life-altering event – the loss of a beautiful, vivacious wife – and turn it into a something funny.

Pelletier (Karmina, Reseaux, The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne) says he declined a gig on 2001: A Space Travesty to work with Frappier on La Vie apres l’amour. ‘I was seduced by this project,’ he says. ‘This is a good screenplay with good actors, [although] I had been tempted to shoot an English movie.’

The film has a busy 85 scenes (about five pages a day), including setups in the dentist’s apartment in Iles des Soeurs, a dentist’s office and the old Palais de Justice.

Max gets funny

Max Films has an long-established reputation in producing innovative film d’auteur movies, but with La Vie, the house now has a one-two punch in the comedy category, with last year’s Matroni et Moi set for a wide release (about 50 screens) by Alliance Atlantis Vivafilm in October. By next year, Frappier says, the house will be fully launched as a producer of international English-language movies as well.

Screenwriter Scott, 29, is a member of the international comedy troop Les Bizarroides and working on a Max Films sitcom, Le Plateau, a thirtysomething half-hour series about life in Montreal’s hip, residential Le Plateau district. Scott says the plan is to shoot in front of a live studio audience.

Cayla works color

La Vie’s dop Eric Cayla (36 Hours to Die, Cher Olivier, Karmina, Babel) is primarily shooting on 250 Fuji Daylight film. Filters and diffusion are used to reflect and contrast different periods in the film’s time line, especially for scenes in which actors have to look younger.

‘It’s a comedy, therefore, it doesn’t have a dramatic lighting setup, although there are certain atmospheres that you have to respect,’ says Cayla. ‘I can’t go too far into underexposure or very moody contrasts. So the look is softer, not through filtration, but I found the 250 Daylight is softer in that it has less contrast than, for example, the 500 ASA, or faster film stock. It responds really well in the highlights, so I try to burn out the window, and it has responded very well.’

Cayla says drama cinematographers are now working much more on color representation, changing the color of stock using different laboratory procedures. He says the impetus is mainly modern production design, resulting in a saturated, nearer to a monochromatic black-and-white look. The dop expects to use between 6,000 to 7,000 feet of film stock a day, a little more (20 to 25%) than the producers had anticipated. ‘Because it’s a comedy, we have to do a lot of angles and cutting with [the director].’ Rushes are being done at the Covitec (Astral) lab, mainly to Betacam.

Cayla’s next date is the Media Principia hd theatrical feature The Baroness and the Pig, slated to shoot later this fall.

Serge Bureau is La Vie’s art director. Denis Sperdouklis is costume designer, and the sound-recordist is Yvon Benoit. Nicole Hilareguy is supervising producer. Murielle La Ferriere is in charge of casting.

New English-track slate

Frappier (Jesus de Montreal, Le Declin de l’empire americain, Ding et Dong, le film, Cosmos, 2 Secondes, Le Onzieme) says Max Films’ trademark is its film d’auteur productions, but the house intends to produce one comedy a year, the first being the $3.1-million Matroni et Moi, adapted from the Alexis Martin stageplay.

‘At the same time, we’ve just opened an English-language film section. We’ll produce one English movie a year,’ says Frappier.

English projects in development include the contemporary drama My Brother Alex and The Confession of a Flesh Eater, a US$6-million ($8.9-million) black comedy from two young European filmmakers now resident in l.a. Financing on the latter includes international coproduction talks with producers in the u.k., Switzerland and Germany. Frappier’s first English movie was the 1992 Denys Arcand film Love and Human Remains. The intention is to shoot at least one of the films next year.

Frappier and Vandal are also prepping on a new feature drama, Maelstrom, from Denis Villeneuve, director of Un 32 Aout sur terre.

The $3.3-million film begins principal photography mid-September and goes to late October. Frappier says he’s especially pleased to have producer Vandal on board at Max Films. ‘He’s the perfect alter-ego producer that I needed. He’s a full producer [on the French side], but will not be working on the English projects.’

Costs are up

The growth in the volume of u.s. location action continues to heat up production costs for all, says Frappier.

Talented craft people are in strong demand, on u.s. and Canadian shoots, and location costs are up drastically. ‘Objectively, we have less money [for La Vie] than we did last year for Matroni et Moi, [which cost $300,000 less],’ says Frappier. ‘One of the locations that we used last year for Matroni et Moi cost us $750 a day. The same location that we had to use on this set costs us $3,000 a day, non-negotiable. And that’s roughly the kind of [increase] you’ll find anywhere in the city. Now, if you want to place your camera on the roof of a building, it’s $2,000, even if it’s for two hours. The crews are a little bit bigger, but there is so much [high-budget] work in Montreal now that nobody [among technicians and department heads] is negotiable. It’s not that they’re not worth it; it’s that we can no longer negotiate because they each have two, three, four offers. I understand that’s the way the market is at the moment, but for [Quebec producers], we’re obliged, because of the rise in budget costs, to cut the number of shooting days. On [La Vie], we could have used 35 days, but we had to cut it to 30 days.’

Frappier says technicians have a choice to make: work more days for more pay on a u.s. shoot, or work for less pay and fewer days on a Quebec movie. ‘That’s why I respect a lot of Quebec technicians because they say, `I did my American film this year; I want to do a Quebec film now,’ and they adjust themselves to that reality,’ says the producer.

Encouraged by the ’98 box office for Quebec movies (8% of the total take), Frappier says the extra $9 million a year from sodec in funding has provided an important push for Quebec cinema. If talented filmmakers are permitted to shoot on a regular basis, and with workable budgets, he believes Quebec and Canadian cinema will develop a greater international following.

Funding sources on La Vie apres l’amour include Telefilm Canada, $700,000; sodec, just under $1 million; the Canadian Television Fund Licence Fee Program, $800,000; an advance from distributor Alliance Atlantis Vivafilm and broadcaster Reseau tva.