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Reviewed by Elliot V. Kotek
(from the 2010 Newport Beach Film Festival)

Directed/Written by: Charles-Olivier Michaud
Starring: Rhys Coiro, David-Alexandre Coiteux, Lina Roessler, Marina Eva, Marianne Farley, Frédéric Gilles and Jean Lapointe

Having taken home the Feature Narrative Fiction Grand Jury Prize at the 2010 Slamdance Film Festival, this Canadian feature filmed entirely in Québec is a formidable first effort by 30-year-old writer-director Charles-Olivier Michaud.

Lightly treading a narrative path regarding Blaise (Coiro), a press photographer recently returned from Eastern Europe without his best friend David (Coiteux) and without an explanation for his missing mate, the film ambles between Coiro’s worlds , the recent past (war zone) and the current confines of a hospital rehabilitation ward where his wounds are tended to by Sophie, the girl who rounded out Blaise and David’s inner circle.

The territory of war photographers in compromised environments has received exclamatory treatment on many prior occasions, with standouts including Milcho Manchevski’s “Before the Rain”; “Harrison’s Flowers,” starring David Strathairn and Adrien Brody; and Christian Frei’s masterful documentary of James Nachtwey, “War Photographer.” In “Snow,” as in these other films, the filmmaker’s use of cinematic acuity to contemplate visual stills provides frequent photographic moments of awe.

From the outset, the audience is welcomed to Blaise’s world with off-centered photography and fluctuating points of focus. Together, the elements provide an unsettled frame that is punctuated by a stirring, hypnotic score.

The ice floes, muted massacres and stark worlds of rehabilitation each receive Michaud’s minimalist approach, and softly guide us through this piece without providing many reference points to plot. In fact, the sooner we learn to give up on being spoon-fed a storyline the better, as Michaud’s movie is a cinematic construct in which mood reigns, for his characters as much as for his audience.

Coiro, an Adam-Goldberg-meets-Dylan-McDermott-type, serves up a Blaise who is confident and nonchalant, and driven by self-concern. It seems that he may have loved, once, but he seems defined by a commitment to survival rather than any philosophical circumspect. Sophie, softly and deftly portrayed by Lina Roessler, is a brunette version of 1980s icons Rebecca de Mornay and Rosanna Arquette. Her character’s quiet support and ultimate confusion as to her pal’s final predicament mirrors the audience’s internal enquiry, “What really happened out there?”

What we’re left with is a raw haunting. Perhaps the filmmaker means to remark upon the impossibilities of war, or perhaps he is contemplating the concept of relaying war from those who’ve lived it to those whose only connection is through words on a printed page. The title’s origin, stated poetically at the beginning of the film, is that ashes, like snow, fall without sound. Similarly, “Snow & Ashes” speaks loudest with its images, not words. In a medium in which filmmakers are told to show rather than tell, Michaud is a filmmaker to watch.

Photo courtesy of the filmmaker