Perspective (film)

Production

Subtitled Variations on a Love Triangle in 9 Chapters, Perspective is unique in that it is a feature-length fiction film in progress, started in 2012, and that will continue to evolve until 2020. Every year a new chapter of the film will be presented exclusively at Cinéfest until the project is complete. Each chapter runs approximately 10 to 20 minutes, with the completed film expected to be approximately 120 minutes. The time lapse between chapters is integrated into the narrative.

At the premiere of each additional chapter, the preceding chapter(s) are replayed. To date, the first five chapters, titled, respectively, Chapter 1: Salt & Soda (2012), Chapter 2: Chris and Other Beards (2013), Chapter 3: Hush, hsuH (2014), Chapter 4: Reflecting (2015), and Chapter 5: Triangulation (2016), and Chapter 6: The Saddest Lines (2017) have been completed, and the duration of the film thus far is 103 minutes.

Shot and set in Northern Ontario, the film features music and sound design (the onscreen credit states "soundscapes") by Daniel Bédard, production design by Joseph Kabbach, and cinematography by Ivan Gekoff.

An accomplished educator, filmmaker B. P. Paquette is using Perspective as a teaching tool for his film production students in the Motion Picture Arts program at Thorneloe University (federated with Laurentian University). In this context, Perspective offers students a unique opportunity to work on, and observe first hand, a professional production. "It was to encourage the students that they don't need millions of dollars, big movie stars and huge crews to make a feature-length film," said Paquette. When he led the creation of the film program, Paquette was inspired by Orson Welles, an innovator who used his films as incubators to experiment with new techniques. "When he got to Hollywood he was kind of shocked that none of the big studios had any kind of department that was meant for research and innovation," Paquette said.

Casting

From Rolf Leslie playing twenty-seven characters in the life story of Queen Victoria in the silent feature Sixty Years a Queen in 1913 to Eddie Murphy playing eight characters in Nutty Professor II: The Klumps in 2000, the casting of a performer to play two or more characters in a film is, and always has been, common. The history of casting a single actor as multiple characters in a play is perhaps as old as acting itself. Excepting Old Comedy, there is a well-known but little discussed rule in the drama of ancient Greece that only three actors played all the speaking characters in a tragedy. Over two thousand years later, even Shakespeare had a limited number of actors to cast in his plays (scholars’ estimates vary from eleven to sixteen), a theatrical exigency that occasioned much doubling and tripling of roles. This theatrical troupe mentality of having various actors playing various characters may also be located in the movies, such as those featuring the comedy group Monty Python, like Life of Brian in 1979. Regardless, the casting of an actor in multiple roles in the movies has been primarily conceptual, and not due to a lack of other performers.

The opposite concept, that of casting multiple actors to play a single character, is extremely rare. In the first chapter of Perspective, Stéphane Paquette and Patricia Tedford play a domestic couple, and Pandora Topp plays Patricia's best friend who, at a house party, discreetly propositions Stéphane. Each of these three characters is named Alex. The chapter then restarts with the identical narrative except the actors have switched characters: now Patricia and Pandora are the domestic couple and Stéphane plays Pandora's best friend who propositions Patricia. Again, the chapter restarts with the identical narrative except now Pandora and Stéphane are the domestic couple and Patricia plays Stéphane's best friend who propositions Pandora. In the second chapter, the three actors continually rotate the three characters they play, not only within the same scene, but sometimes during the same dialogue exchange. “We’re not letting the audience identify a character with an actor,” said director Paquette in an interview. “So, at all times, all of the actors are all of the characters.”

Other films that employ two or more actors to perform a single character include Todd Solondz's Palindromes, wherein eight different actors of different ages, races, and genders play a 13-year-old girl named Aviva during the course of the film, and Luis Buñuel's That Obscure Object of Desire, wherein is two actresses, Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina, play the role role of Conchita; the actresses switch roles in alternate scenes and sometimes even in the middle of scenes.

Chapters

To date, the film contains only three actors who all play, at various points, each of the three characters named "Alex." Within the narrative, each chapter occurs months to a year apart from the proceeding chapter, and the duration of each chapter is between 10–20 minutes.

Festival recognition

The first five of the nine chapters that compose Perspective have each premiered at Cinefest in, respectively, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016. The latest and sixth chapter is scheduled to screen at Cinefest in September 2017.

Theatrical release

Perspective will be released commercially in theatres across Canada when it is completed in 2020.