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| Hunting Daze Photo: Fantasia International Film Festival |
A stranded sex worker forced to take shelter in a hunting lodge with a group of men. An initially friendly bond which lets her get a taste of freedom. The arrival of a stranger, and the rapid social disintegration that follows. Hunting Daze – aka Jour De Chasse – is an immersive thriller by Québécoise director Annick Blanc. It has been a hit on the festival circuit this year, and a few hours before it was due to screen at the Fantasia International Film Festival I had the pleasure of meeting up with Annick to discuss it. I noted that some critics have described it as a response to, or reinvention of, the bachelor party film, but she tells me that’s something that wasn’t on her mind when she was developing it.
“At first, I wanted to talk about some toxic relationships I had been through. And of course, toxic masculinity was an important subject. That's why I chose the bachelor party, because I think it's often one of the clichés. What I like in genre film is you can always use the stereotypes, you know? So I think the only woman I have is a prostitute. All the guys are, white males, and the stranger is an immigrant. I think it's always interesting, in genre film, to use the stereotypes and reinvent them, so that's why I chose the bachelor party as the background.”
We see Nina become very much part of the group to begin with and think it's all wonderful. Then, as it changes, she realises that she's not able to express herself, I suggest.
“Exactly. And it's often the case in toxic relationships. At first, the person really makes you feel powerful, makes you believe that you're in power and that you’re very important in that relationship – and that, of course, you're rediscovering yourself and you're becoming more yourself. This is what she goes through, and then slowly it disintegrates as events unfold. Little pieces get stolen from you, but you still think you're really strong and that this is the relationship for you because it made you feel so good in the beginning. Right?
“I think Nina here really feels, for the first time, like she's really looked upon for what she really is. You know, a strong woman, one of the boys, one that's not scared of the boys. And so that's what happened.”
Despite her evident vulnerability, we do also see her, all the way through, as quite a tough person.
“It was super important for me to show that, because I believe that in every one of us, there is a lot of strength,” she says. “No matter how many times people try to break us, we can find back that strength. That was kind of my cathartic way of letting go of an old part of myself that was weaker, but that became stronger through experience. And I wanted Nina to not be a victim. Until the end, she will fight. Even at that great cost of loss, she will decide that she can be the strong one and she can overturn the group. I think we do do films to give a message, and for me, it was the most important message to give.”
I tell her that I like the fact that the men call themselves a wolf pack because, of course, wolves are matriarchal. And then there's a wonderful scene where Nina meets a wolf in the wild when she's gone off by herself. How did that work?
“Yeah, Maya the wolf. It's actually a real wolf. It's not a dog. She was abandoned when she was a little baby, so she was trained as of that age to live amongst dogs and people. It's kind of interesting because she's a very nice dog, but she's still a fierce beast. The actress Nahéma said ‘Can I bring my dog?’ Maya’s owner asked ‘Is this a female?’ And she said ‘Yes,’ and he said ‘She will kill it.’ If another female was in her pack, she would kill it.
“It was also very touching because he was controlling her with her boyfriend. She's in love with a dog, and that's how he makes Maya look this way or go this way. It's because her male is there.” They all thought that was showing her soft side, she says, and then they saw the two of them together. “She puts him back in his place. And so I think it's interesting what you say about the matriarchal, because that's also what a mother is. You know, it's strong. It needs to keep you in place. It's loving, it's cute. So it's all those sides of a woman that I think this can represent, and what this film is, because I think that the guys, they're not totally bad. We love them. They have a good side, they have a bad side, and I don't think anything is purely evil.
“I am very interested in my films about this, about this bipolarity of humans who can do the most beautiful things, create the most beautiful piece of art, raise a child, give so much love to somebody, and can also break it, take it away and all that. it’s really interesting. The wolf was a good metaphor for that as, like, it's the creature of. So it's a creature of love and bonding, but it can also be very savage or animal-like.”
We talk about the early part of film when everybody is having fun and the men put Nina through a hazing ritual which is much sillier and less dangerous than anticipated.
“For me, something that is really important is to do immersive filming,” Annick says. “Often the camera moves kind of freely, but not in a very shaky way, more in a dreamy way. So I try to kind of seduce people to feel like part of this group and to feel welcome into it and to feel the warmth of it. Often, we would shoot with camera in the middle of the group, and the group turns around, just like what she goes through. And we do use slow motion when they use drugs or when they're more into an altered state, so that we really see the movie the way they experience it.
“As the film goes toward the darker side and you kind of feel more distant from the group, then the camera settles in and stops moving and becomes more cold, the way that she feels towards them. It really helps the viewer to experience the movie as the characters are.”
There are some interesting shots early on, when the camera is really close, because there are parts where we really notice how much smaller Nina is, and she's squeezed in between these big men. It feels like it could go very wrong very fast.
She nods. “And this was very tough also for her to play. That was true for most of the actors. Some of the scenes are absurd, but I wanted them to play them as if they were totally realistic. So in the first scene where she's welcomed into the group, she's blindfolded and she has five guys screaming, turning around her, whispering in her ears, not touching her in a sexual manner, but just moving her around. Every time we would do it, I would have to warn the actor that this will be almost like a violation because we're told as women, since we're little girls, to run away if that happens.
“It's really inside of us to just have this feeling, to just run away and not be comfortable in that. But I wanted Nina to feel strong. She's in that moment. She doesn't show any fear. She's tougher than that. She's not scared of them, but the whole day was for her, just combating her primal instinct. To look tough and funny in that moment was really tough for her as an actress. She was exhausted after that.
“As we were using stereotypes and pushing them to the extreme, it was often about finding a way for the actors to really believe what was going on, even though it was against their instinct. And they were all very good at doing that.”
The blindfold thing stands out because most sex workers say that one of the primary safety rules is always being able to make eye contact, to control a situation.
“Exactly. But there's a whole theme in the film about opening your eyes, all along, and seeing what goes on. That was the other metaphor I really wanted to talk about: how I feel that as a society, we are just blindfolding ourselves right now and letting the world crumble around us. Like letting political fights around us grow out of hand, and letting ecological problems grow out of hand. We're just like continuing to live our daily lives, continuing to party like they did in the film. That was the other metaphor. They continue to drink, there's a problem, they just smoke. They make another joke when they're facing the hard stuff. And we always, I feel, relate to the idea that the government will fix it, the corporation will stop polluting. Like, ‘It doesn't change anything what I do as a single person.’
“That's also what I wanted to point out, and that's why also there's the blindfolding. The movie opens with her eyes closed, opening them. There's a lot of eye things. I wanted us to tell people, ‘Look at yourself, look at what you're doing, even when you're a victim. Look at what you're doing to yourself, to others, when you're a victim. Or if you are in a position of power, look what you're doing with your powers.’”
That’s also interesting, I suggest, because the problems in the film, the danger in the film, seem to be connected to wider society – such as the fact that the immigrant is afraid to go to a hospital and can't get help that way, so they get into difficulty. There's that background racism and background misogyny. Was it important to her to bring in that sense of wider social ills?
“Very much. It was for a long time the main subject I wanted to tackle. I think at first I was a little bit scared to go into such a personal subject as a toxic relationship. It was easier for me to also talk about this, but I also thought it was one of the most important thing to discuss right now with my peers. I think there's a lot of power in the minorities and that more and more we should try to give them the power, it's a long stretch to give them as much power as that right now.”
We move on to talk about casting.
“It was a very interesting process,” she says. “I mean, some of them were very clear, some of them were not. Nahéma, the main character, she had done nothing of the sort before. Her last movie, that was really engraved in people's minds and in my mind, was a movie where she had a shaved head and she was tomboy, and she was very fragile in a way. And so I refused to see her three times. We sent three casting calls, and every time her agent would propose her. And I was like, ‘No, it's really not right. I'm looking for someone with sensuality.’ And in the end, like, we couldn't find anybody that had the rage and the strength. So I was like, ‘Okay, well, we never saw Nahéma. Maybe we give her a shot, you know?’
“At the first audition, we were like, ‘Oh, it was there all along, but we refused to see it.’ You know, sometimes you should give actors the chance to audition for any casting because it really works fine and it was super interesting for her to explore that part of acting. We did give her a lap dance class, even though there is no lap dancing or sexuality in the movie, just so that she could feel what it's like to move this way and to have that in her tools. And she really enjoyed that. She says that was really interesting, and she says that changed her for not only this role, but for the next, because she hadn't been in touch with her femininity ever.
“It was really an interesting thing for her to go through. That was also very important for me, because sometimes people were asking, about the script, ‘Why is there no sex scene with Nina? She's alone with all those guys? Why doesn't it never go this way?’”
My instinctive response to that shows on my face, and she seems to be encouraged by it, clearly feeling the same way.
“I was like, ‘But I'm a woman director. Why would I justify the existence of my main character by having her sleep with the one of the men? I mean, why are we even discussing that? It’s exactly the contrary of what I want to say.’ I want to say, ‘We're not just that. There is so much more.’ Even in the case of a prostitute or an escort, she is something more. She is something else. She can decide what she is.
“So it was important for me that those scenes did not exist, but I wanted her to feel comfortable in her role, too. So we explored that. And the casting – I mean, the first grant for the script was in 2011, so that those characters had lived in my mind for so long, I could hear the way they were talking. I had it very clearly in my mind, but I was really lucky to find each of the guys exactly the way I imagined them. And whenever we would audition them, it was very clear. But it was interesting for Philippe, who is the veterinarian. We first made him come for the role of Bernard, the chief. He wasn't that. And then we make him come for Kevin.
“As he was doing the Kevin scene, which is like, a very nice guy, my casting director and I were like ‘Oh, no, he's Philippe for sure.’ And my casting director was like, ‘Okay, but I'm not making him come a third time, so make sure.’ And so I asked him to play the Kevin scene in the Philippe way without telling him. I was just, ‘I know this is really counterintuitive, but just be mean to her. You know, you don't really like her and you think she's a bit ridiculous.’ And so he played along and he did it. And that's also how I saw his flexibility, because he saw it. He acted on the spot a text that was written in a completely different way.
“I'm so amazed with actors. They have so much power and intelligence in their work that it's really interesting to see. They have this muscle of emotion and they can use it in all those directions. So I really love directing actors. It's one of my favourite parts of the job.”
The film has been doing really well at festivals. Did she expect that?
“We hoped it could, sure. I mean, it's so important nowadays, for the life of a film, to be seen in that context, even before it can go to the cinema. And we've been just super happy. It was stressful because at first were always getting almost selected. Like, we're always in the final round. Cannes told us that. Many told us that. And we were like, ‘Oh, we hope that we're not going to be almost in the final every time.’ And then one festival finds you and thinks they're right for you. And I think South by Southwest, where we had our première, was just the best fit for our film, because it's exactly the energy of the audience and what they're looking for. And it’s such a great festival! That was amazing.”
She has a number of interesting projects in the works now, including a science fiction film and a children’s film involving witches. Always with strong women and a strong female viewpoint, she says. Given the success of Hunting Daze, which opens in Quebec on 16 August, there will be a lot of people looking forward to them.
