Guidelines

When I think back on my high school years, a very specific feeling comes over me. A mix of grand ambitions and claustrophobia. An open horizon filled with possibilities, immense desires, infinite power. And, at the same time, the feeling of being trapped in a repetitive cycle—an absurd and soporific loop—, a suffocating apathy, and the certainty that my life would never really take off. The hundreds of bus rides, the faded-colored hallways, the depressing smells of lunch. Sisyphus and his math homework.

With the blend of tenderness, benevolent detachment, and open-minded curiosity that characterizes his work, Caissy creates in Guidelines a remarkably metaphorical and perceptive portrayal of adolescence. This is perhaps what is most impressive about his work. Without fuss, staging or contrived construction—even as he seems to remain as close as possible to reality and to a “neutral” observation—Caissy creates representations. He is less interested in the individuality of his subjects than in what they tell us about ourselves at these particular stages of life. The young people portrayed in Guidelines are at once exhausting in their predictability and magnificent in their uniqueness. They are young people with young people’s problems. There’s never anything extraordinary in Caissy’s work. But his cinema is anything but boring. It drifts between eras, between people, between the rigid concepts we invent to bring order to this strange thing called life. A cinema of the ordinary—allegorical and full of humor—that seeks to capture what makes a gaze light up. The interplay of bodies in space. A face illuminated by a question. A forest path filling with smoke. A leap into the river. Time passes and the horizon opens up. Sisyphus will have other homework to do.

Naomie Décarie-Daigneault
Tënk's Artistic Director