The opening film of the Fantasia festival, Truffe by Kim Nguyen is an unclassifiable work which brings together Roy Dupuis, Michèle Richard and lethal fur stoles!

Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, 2010.  In the wake of global warming, deposits of truffles proliferate in this district in the east of Montreal.  With a nose as good as a truffle hunting dog, Charles Tremblay (Roy Dupuis) unearths hundreds of these precious fungi, which his wife Alice (Céline Bonnier) sells at a premium price in their diner.  But the truffles become so abundant across HoMa that their value drops dramatically, to the point where Charles is forced to go to work for the disturbing Madame Kinsdale (Michèle Richard), whose entourage includes a robotic servant (Jean-Nicolas Verreault) and ferocious live fur stoles …

So how did Kim Nguyen (Le Marais) conceive such a story?  “I was inspired by the process of automatic writing,” the filmmaker confides.  “It was a matter of following one’s instinct, then creating the juxtapositions that you can’t do without giving in to a sort of madness.  I truly said to myself, ‘OK, we’re off and taking chances; maybe we’ll fall flat on our face, but we’re going to have fun doing it!’”

Playing with the codes of various genres, Truffe appears like an improbable cross between a social drama like Grapes of Wrath, an Ed Wood B-movie and a Scandinavian black comedy.  Nguyen, who also cites amongst his influences the Coen Brothers’ The Man Who Wasn’t There (“I think all filmmakers dream one day of making a film in black and white”), Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (“an extraordinary balance between a world of symbols and touching characters”) and David Lynch’s Wild at Heart (“where once we talked about Kafkaesque, now we say Lynchian”), wanted moreover to root the whole thing fundamentally in a Quebecois setting.

“I took two or three years to write the screenplay, and Hochelaga-Maisonneuve only asserted itself towards the end.  To begin with it was an unidentified locale, then I thought a bit about Léolo and decided it could make an interesting mixture to play this strange story against a Michel Tremblay-like universe.”

Simply by succeeding in bringing this bold scheme to completion, Nguyen’s gamble has already paid off to a great extent.  Nevertheless one asks what reception the public will give this film which could be difficult to class as commercial.  “What do you mean?” asks Nguyen slyly.  “This could be Les Boys 5!”

 If there is one Quebec actor who is far from being unemployed at the moment, it’s surely Roy Dupuis.  Since the shooting of Truffe which goes back more than a year, he has been in five other features – Un été sans point ni coup sûr by Francis Leclerc, The Timekeeper by Louis Bélanger, L'Ennemi public n°1 by Jean-François Richet, Némésis by Marc-André Forcier and Les Doigts croches, Ken Scott’s directorial debut, currently shooting in Argentina.

Despite the passage of time and all these other projects, Dupuis still remembers vividly his reaction when he read Nguyen’s screenplay for the first time.  “I went, ‘Wow!’  I immediately wanted to do the film.  It’s a world and a cinematographic language that are peculiar to Kim.  And throughout all the absurdity of this story there’s nevertheless a social commentary; it reminded me a bit of Brazil …. It appealed to me.”

The actor particularly appreciated the enigmatic aspect of the narrative conceived by Nguyen, who has not attempted to rationalise everything.  “That’s what I prefer, when you don’t explain everything, when there’s space left for interpretation.  Because that’s life too, not everything is explained. So, in a way, it’s an image of reality.”

A reality in which Dupuis’ character sometimes finds himself in screwball situations to say the least.  Is it difficult to keep a straight face when you have to fight with fur stoles?  “<<laughs>> Yes and no … we tried to play it as realistically as possible, as if it was our reality and nothing was surprising.  But it certainly was great fun to shoot!  Even though I had to find a degree of intensity, I didn’t have to lay my guts on the line.  It wasn’t painful to do, like General Dallaire.

Footnote on the Fantasia film festival where Truffe had its first screening - Roy: “I’ve never been to Fantasia, but I’ve heard of it and I think Truffe is the sort of film that would go down well there.”