'C.R.A.Z.Y' exudes the beauty,
the poetry and the madness
of the human spirit in all
its contradictions.
'C.R.A.Z.Y' is a story of two love affairs. A father's love for his five sons. And one son's love for his father, a love so strong it compels the son to live a lie.
That son is Zac Beaulieu, born on the 25th of December 1960, different from all his brothers, but desperate to fit in.
During the next 20 years, life takes Zac on a surprising and unexpected journey that ultimately leads him to accept his true nature and, even more importantly, leads his father to love him for who he really is. A mystical fable about a modern day nomad-like figure, "C.R.A.Z.Y" exudes the beauty, the poetry and the madness of the human spirit in all its contradictions.
'Extraordinary lives of ordinary people in search of love and happiness'
Zac Beaulieu (Marc-Andre Grondin), the fourth child of a middle-class Quebecois family comes into the world on December 25th, 1960. Have you ever wanted a pram for Christmas and been given table hockey instead? As a child, his Christmas/birthday presents are always large, but somehow disappointing, since they are never what he truly wants. His father Gervais (Michel Cote) disapproves of the aforementioned pram, which his mother reluctantly returns. Zac worships his father, an active family man with a passion for Patsy Cline and Charles Aznavour, but Gervais senses early that Zac is not like his brothers.
Bookish Christian spends much of the film quietly reading food labels. Raymond is the black sheep who turns early to motorcycles, drugs and casual sex. Antoine is the jock who never seems to outgrow his childlike flatulence. After Zac, there is Yvan, the baby, who is cosseted and overfed, with pettishly long hair. It is not until much later, in a mishap over a cherished Patsy Cline import, that Zac realises his father has (rather campishly) named his five sons to spell out the letters of his favourite Patsy Cline song. A testament to Gervais's sentimentality, as well as his connoisseurship of music, it also sums up the tone of this pleasantly surreal family drama/coming-of-age story.
Much of the film's action takes place in the Seventies and early Eighties, during Zac's teen years, as he struggles to come to terms with his sexuality. The early religiosity of Zac's childhood, exemplified in the figure of his devout and frequently pregnant mother, is soon replaced with teenage rebellion, memorably expressed in a scene where he tells us in voice over: "Midnight mass was so short and sweet ever since I became an atheist," as he levitates over the congregation to the tune of Sympathy For The Devil.
Although he professes to have abandoned his faith, Zac is the kind of teenager who is always getting caught in his transgressions and then submitting himself to trials of atonement. In order to overcome both his asthma and his sexual longings, he races a red light on his moped and ends up bedridden with whiplash for several weeks. Another time, he trudges all the way home in a blizzard after simply looking at another man in a record shop.
Throughout the film, Zac's quest to come to terms with his sexuality is expressed via a longtime crush on his cousin Brigitte and her Travoltaesque boyfriend, who early on bestows a "shotgun", the passing of marijuana smoke between pursed lips in an almost-kiss that provides Zac with his first real sensual experience with another man. When a psychiatrist finally suggests that he is being "subconsciously deliberate" in his actions, Zac still cannot accept that he might be gay and drives himself into the arms of his childhood friend Michelle (Natasha Thompson).
His bid for heterosexuality lasts until a watershed confrontation at his brother Christian's wedding in 1980 sends him running off to the Holy Land to escape. In Jerusalem, he has his second sexual encounter, this time with a guy who looks like a blond version of the hunky Jesus you sometimes see in "youth" versions of the Bible. Only after coming close to death in the desert, does Zac return to Quebec and his family.
Although C.R.A.Z.Y is in part a gay coming-of-age story, it's told without the explicit sex one might expect, making this film much more in line with the work of Gus Van Sant than Gregg Araki. The privacy that is accorded to Zac's experiences (his two sexual encounters with young men happen off camera) with a subtlety that seems in keeping with the character's reluctance to come to terms with being gay. The film is also a sometimes bizarre family drama infused with a mixture of the qualities that make French Canadian cinema great: devout spirituality, odd folklore and the kind of irreverent humor that fundamentalists think ought to go straight to hell.
It is filled with quietly hilarious, but also cringe-making moments, such as the time Zac earnestly sings along to Ziggy Stardust in full Ziggy make-up, until the moment Antoine storms in and tackles him. It is only then that Zac realizes half the neighborhood has been viewing his performance through an open bedroom window. It also doesn't hurt that the actor who plays Zac is considered Canada's Gael Garcia Bernal and spends a lot of time looking quite the mark in tight jeans and eyeliner.
By turns moving and funny, but always ringing true, this is a quietly remarkable film.
Film Information: 'C.R.A.Z.Y.'
Web: Cast, Bios and Additional Details at IMDb
Director: Jean-Marc Vallée
Writers: François Boulay & Jean-Marc Vallée
Cast: Full Cast, Crew & Credits
Genre: Drama / Romance
Awards: 37 wins & 6 nominations
Runtime: 127 min
Spoken Language: French
Subtitled in: English
Film Preview Clip: 'C.R.A.Z.Y.'
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| Method 1.) File Self Extraction. (For PC) Download files into the same folder. then click on the 'xxxx.part01.exe' file and the film will self extract. (For Mac) You will need a Command Line Archiver like Rar for Mac OS X' |
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