SPOILER DISCUSSION

1.The art-house sensibilities and the nature of the plot might remind one of Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, a comparison which many have used to decry Villeneuve’s work; but this comparison seems to superficially gloss over the formal distinctions between the works which make them distinct from one another both in tone and intent. Elephant is far more concerned with the irreducibility of violence and doesn’t attempt to find a solution in what it deems to be the unanswerable. While Polytechnique leaves parts up to interpretation, it does seem to suggest a cause and an avenue by which said cause could be addressed.

This is why the violence of the shooting is saved for the end of Elephant, as a kind of event that we unwillingly have to wait to endure, the violence in Polytechnique is presented up front and becomes the focal point around which the entire film rotates, repeatedly forcing us to confront it.

While both films focus on the intermixing of perspectives, Elephant is more focused on contrasting viewpoints for their own sakes than as explicit symbolic counter-points to one another. This is why Van Sant’s film introduces characters from start to finish with title cards noting their names as opposed and briefly following them; the characters are almost incidental. Meanwhile, Villeneuve’s film cuts between an isolated set of characters throughout to highlight the dream-like way trauma is shared.

Both films vastly distinctive aesthetic approaches reinforce this difference in intent. Elephant utilizes a series of long tracking shots whether it follows the shooter(s) or the other students, rendering violence as occupying the same position as normality – violence does not “change” the film so to say. However, violence in Polytechnique explicitly changes the way communication operates and changes the “film” as discussed in the non-spoiler section.

2.There’s a discussion of entropy in the classroom before the shooting first begins along with its initial mention when Valérie and Stéphanie discuss it in their apartment. Entropy measures disorder in a system. Any system who is subject to pressure from an external cause will need to transfer energy caused by an imbalance. The example given explains that a pot on the stove generates heat; if a lid is put on the pan, steam lifts it until there’s no more heat and water and order is restored.

The idea of entropy seems to play double function within the film. At a first level, it points to the film’s form as a conduit by which to explain the violence of the situation. This fictional retelling and the manner by which it’s told helps to take in the pain of the incident proper and open a dialogue by which to analyze the same. At a more textual level, it suggests that the characters are subject to the external pressures of violence and must find a way to transfer that “energy” to move past the trauma. In this sense, communication serves as the lid on the pan, offering a way to diffuse the trauma. This “reading” also explains why Valérie, who opens up to persons , can find a path. Meanwhile, both men, JF and the killer, find themselves closed off from persons for different reasons, and both end up dying from suicide.

3.This focus on communication is made more explicit at the 34-minute mark; JF runs to the guard at the front of the school to get police help but his initial cries for help are unheard. It’s only when the guard opens up a small window between the two that JF can make his request and then bolt off to try and provide assistance. However, the guard is still not fully convinced of what’s going on because of the “huge” barrier between the two; communication must become more open.

Without communication as a venue to dissipate his “energy”, the killer chooses violence. Yet, his choice is unable to bring him any meaningful satisfaction and ends up spilling out of the bounds of what he sets out to do. He may start off killing women but eventually his motives shift and he shoots even isolated men. Violence overdetermines the situation and makes meaningfully shifting between people impossible as they lose subjectivity and become objects.

This lack of discernibility spills over to men versus men as well. The recollection of the event in the classroom from Valérie’s perspective reveals that she and Stéphanie pretended to be dead to avoid the killer. When JF goes into the room to see if he can help, he’s mistaken as the killer. There’s no way for the girls to verify if this agent, another man, is the same as the one who hurt them previously.

Thus, violence overdetermines the situation and makes meaningfully shifting between people impossible; it obliterates the conditions of communication which requires recognition of subjects.

4. This interruption in recognition is nicely demonstrated at the 30-minute mark. We know the killer is following the girls and is set to come into the room. We wait for the moment to come. Yet, JF enters the room first and momentarily dispels our concern.

But then the film cuts to the killer outside and frames him in a close-up which positions him against an image of a bridge, a place of transition; he crosses over and enters the room, signifying a change in the space. The healthy masculinity which entered previously is over-written by a toxic masculinity which brings only ruin.

5. The killer’s intrusion into the classroom is shown from both JF’s and Valérie’s respective point-of-views. The former’s perception of the scene is from the outside. He sees Valérie and the rest of the women for a moment before the blackness of the door envelops the frame and demonstrates the absence of communication in the space. The camera continues to pan before revealing the killer alone in the opposite side of the room; his alienation oozes out and transforms the area.

The former’s perception of the scene is from the inside. She sees JF being shut out from the room and the camera arcs with her as she turns her gaze towards the killer. Then, the film cuts to an image of the killer. He’s broken the space.

In both cases, the alienating effect can be felt as one element, men who communicate, are replaced by another element, a man who refuses to do so.

6.There are two separate moments in the film where the camera starts in a landscape view and flips to a portrait view. The first movement goes from right-to-left while the second goes from left-to-right. Both movements involve JF and his reaction to “violence”. The first moment occurs at the 14-minute mark and happens after we cut from the killer delivering a letter to his mother; John is introduced after this symbol of violence and his presence neutralizes the non-diegetic score qua the killer’s presence.

The second movement occurs at the 37-minute mark and flips from the opposite side. JF’s relationship to the violence of the killer has shifted and he’s unable to neutralize its effects. He finds himself unable to go out the door and turns back to the source of the shooting with tears in his face. The choice to have him initially facing in the same direction – left – as he did at the end of the first movement makes his inability to transform the situation exceedingly clear.

7. The first moment of time-space disorientation happens near the 43-minute mark. JF runs around the hallways after helping bandage up a victim and meets with the killer once again. The killer shoots at the only woman in the hallway while ignoring the fact that his shots could hit one of the two men flanking her. The non-diegetic track associated with him plays and infects the mood.

JF manages to enter another room and escape from the moment; the killer only cares for those in his purview. However, the room JF enters is a completely separate “system”, one in which the violent energy has not entered and displaced. The non-diegetic track is replaced with a diegetic song and the camera arcs around JF as he realizes a party is going on in this space; its isolation has kept it privy and unaware of the violence happening outside.

While the music continues to play, the film cuts to a series of blacked-out-windows and then pans down to a host of beer bottles, suggesting that we’re still in the party room. But the music then fades out and a series of cuts informs us we’ve transported spaces. Now we’re in the future with JF, and he’s succumbed to an intense depression. His living space is empty, unkempt, and devoid of communication – a parallel to the killer’s apartment. The shared presence of beer bottles in the isolated space of the past and the alienated space of the present suggest that JF has been drinking to get over his trauma but finds himself unable to shake off the despair. In his room, he’s not “drinking” with friends with music; he’s drinking alone with only his thoughts.

8. The second moment of time-space fluctuation takes on an oneiric quality. It occurs during Valérie’s recollection of the shooting. After she pretends to be dead and is subsequently rescued, she sees JF profusely apologizing to her for leaving the room. She bears no ill-will towards him and forgives him, but as we know from his suicide, the scene preceding this recollection, he was unable to take her words to heart. The tragedy of what could have been haunts us.

Thus, when the film cuts to a shot of JF on a subway staring forward at the screen, the moment is imbued with discomforting uncertainty. We’re staring into a traumatic void that resists definitive interpretation. Is this a dream, a psychic connection, a remnant of JF’s guilt or something else? The film cuts to Valérie waking up, suggesting that this vision of JF is a dream. But then is it a dream connected to her thinking of the trauma of the past or has she heard news of JF’s demise and is thinking of it? The lack of clarification makes the loss of JF in her life all the more palpable and his absence confronts her; the friendship that could have been is foreclosed in the wake of violence.

But Valérie then gets out of bed and goes to smoke a cigarette, holding it outside an opened window – a reversal of the earlier shot of Stéphanie doing the same thing. A connection remains.

She goes to the bathroom and begins to vomit. Her reflection is splintered just like after her interview near the start of the film. Will she be able to find herself again? Her partner (Pierre-Yves Cardinal) comes in and holds her as the two look into a mirror. Like Stéphanie, he helps her center herself once again.

9.The film ends with what should be a nice, albeit on-the-nose, coda where Valérie writes a letter to the killer’s mother. She explains that if she has a son, she’ll teach him to love; if she has a daughter, she’ll teach her the world is hers. This affirmation seems to present a solution that would allow the sexes to communicate and reduce the presence of violence.

But Villenevue chooses not to end the film at this point; instead, he cuts to a flipped tracking shot of the empty hallways of the school. This shot serves as a counter-point to a similar flipped tracking shot that occurs at the 45- minute mark when JF goes to drive to his mom to see her one last time before his decision to take his life. Despite being told of her love for him and asked to talk, he’s unable to open up and only sees one path forward. The reminder of this moment certainly introduces an uncomfortable asterisk to Valérie’s statement. This reminder of both the violence and its aftermaths haunts like a ghost, refusing to be fully neutralized. The lack of clarity calls back to the “Guernica” and its ambiguity.

10. The “Guernica” and the dichotomy between violence and peace repeatedly come into play throughout the film, suggesting a variety of meanings. The first instance of this shows the scattered bodies of the women shot in the science classroom stacked on top of one another. Their limbs are pointed in all directions and the shot of them is intentionally blurred to make finding demarcations amongst harder, if not impossible, to identify. Violence creates an image of pain that resists interpretation.

There are two additional images of “unified bodies” that introduce a series of interpretative contradictions. The first shows Valérie and Stéphanie holding one another as they attempt to “play dead”. The friends embrace each other in a loving display in the wake of violence, life present in the image of death.

This image is contrasted by an image of the dead killer and his final victim, a woman professor. The aggressor and his victim lay dead next to one another and their blood spills and unites in the middle, forming a connection generated out of violence. Violence gives way to a connection which reveals the “same” blood sustaining one subject similarly flows in the Other; the killer’s perceived differences are revealed to be purely ideological.

The “Guernica” and these three images highlight the themes and interests of the film – communication, gender, violence, transformation, subjectivity, identity – and intermingle them in compositions which resist a wholehearted interpretation, especially when placed alongside one another.