Prowling the Montreal night in search of his stolen "future" (an heirloom engagement ring), Sam wanders into a strange home and espies an argument of the I-want-a-divorce variety. He waits for things to cool down before approaching the man of the house, who offers the intruder a shot of Blue Curacao. This is such an endemic detail, it probably wasn't given a second thought--I can say with confidence that, as a lifelong resident of America's neighbour to the north, I've never attended a party where I wasn't furnished with a little of the azure venom, and its presence in the engrossing Expiration emblematizes a film that's Canadian in its DNA, not, as most of our national cinema is, by proxy.

It helps stave off the aseptic nature of Perspective Canada fodder that precocious 23-year-old writer-director-star Gavin Heffernan has a more unaffected vibe than most Canuck actors. In fact, he resembles a Cassidy brother, which lends the film a comfort level that buys it a grace period to acquaint us with its jagged editing rhythms. This is not to say that Expiration lacks polish--nothing is farther from the truth. But it's one thing to use staccato mind's-eye/flashback inserts in a 35mm narrative feature (Midnight Cowboy springs to mind as an influential example), another altogether to apply them to a DV production. Expiration's technical refinement on the whole actually takes some getting used to; after watching the reminiscent Low Self Esteem Girl a few years back, I wrote that I anxiously awaited the renaissance of the tripod, yet a comparison between the rigid close-ups of Expiration and the herky-jerky aesthetic of classical Dogmé yields the lesson that, where video is concerned, handheld peels a layer of artifice away while static compositions apparently add one. It would be interesting to see a 35mm blow-up of Expiration to gauge the integrity of its professionalism, but the direct-from-tape DVD screener I viewed can make the film look even more overreaching than it is.

Sam (Heffernan) is robbed of the aforementioned jewellery in a convenience store hold-up. He leaves a note on the windshield of his car for girlfriend Niki (Erin Simkin, outstanding)--who's sleeping in the backseat--and gives chase, eventually teaming up with another victim of the hold-up, Rachel (ethereal Janet Lane (above), last glimpsed in George Clooney's Confessions of a Dangerous Mind), a shattered free spirit with only a few hours to recoup a stash of drugs that will lead to either the biggest score of her dealing career or an altercation with her pimp of sorts, a snowboarder-chic pusher. Meanwhile, Niki falls down the proverbial rabbit hole upon awakening, landing in a flat where an unconscious man is on the verge of being castrated.

As the characters sink deeper into the night, Expiration becomes increasingly Stygian. And as it become increasingly Stygian, Expiration also becomes a more self-assured piece of work. What surprises about the urban-legendary aspects (Sam and Rachel's discovery of an underground casino where roulette is played with hypodermic needles; the way those same two obtain a speakeasy's password) is how organically Heffernan weaves them into the picture--you feel as though you're in a dream/nightmare state because you're never tempted to intellectualize the peculiarities of Expiration's latter half. The great unifier of the film is its Skittles colour palette: as much as you wonder if the vérité treatment would've reduced the amateur handicap on Heffernan's grandiose vision, you're relieved that the auteur stopped short of a simulated bleach-bypass. Just as the film is inherently Canadian, so, too, is its grit unsanctioned; I was reminded throughout of Jon Shear's Urbania, a picture that revels in the brilliant manmade colours of nightlife, refusing to blanch at the sickly inner lives of its characters à la the current 21 Grams or last year's abhorrent My Life Without Me.

For all its elegance, Expiration amounts to a series of jejune, if soulful, ruminations: betraying Heffernan's age, it's familiar but not particularly lived, receptive but not particularly perceptive, bright but not particularly learned. (The quote from Colton that more or less opens the film--"Our minds are as different as our faces; we are all travelling to one Destination--Happiness; but few are going the same road"--is so basically reflective of Expiration's structure as to remind that young men take their philosophical cues from Bartlett's.) Fortunately, the film is unjaded enough that its very guilelessness is often at least vicariously moving.-Bill Chambers

I wonder if it's ever possible to avoid the Heisenberg Principle--the idea that the nature of a thing is changed essentially by the act of observing it--in any film or photograph where the subjects know they're being captured. Just the term "captured" suggests something invasive, after all, as does the term "subject." I've long been suspicious of documentary filmmaking as distinct from fiction filmmaking, and, indeed, the line between the two is consistently blurred by the filmmakers themselves: "based on a true story" for fictions on the one side, documentarians Errol Morris and Michael Moore on the other. The days of Dziga Vertov are hazy now, and films like his are experimental instead of commercial, Warholian instead of narrative.

The overpraised and mildly subversive Winged Migration begins with the disclaimer that no trick photography was used in the filming of its subjects--and so we spend the film watching for any signs of trickery (and there is some, making me wonder if the disclaimer is an ironic challenge), just as we watch fictions for traces of contrivance. This is the lowest form of observation, the easiest, the sort of thing that children do when they first begin to develop discretion, as destructive and distracting ultimately as it is disingenuous to pretend that as an audience, we aren't aware of the presence of a director, a cameraman, a camera, an editor, an editing process, and, at its root, prearrangement. It's not to say that films don't have a responsibility to avoid grotesque perversions of fact (U-571 swims to mind), it's to say that Truth deserves to be treated with more respect as something protean and intimate.

So the dialogue isn't irrelevant so much as it is a matter of great existential importance-- when the question of "truth" in identity is raised by a documentary, the dialogue becomes obsessed with cursory explorations of themes of exploitation. Are the subjects willing participants or have they been duped? Do they understand and more importantly do they have a responsibility to understand how their images may be interpreted by New York intelligentsia, by film and art critics, or by the arthouse crowd assembled to watch a documentary? A film like American Splendor, based on a fiction of a real life and directed by a pair of documentary filmmakers, featuring actors recreating a comic book that at least began as autobiographical, is one of the by-products of this dialogue, skirting responsibility with an unbecoming air of smug superiority and doing so to almost universal, and notably desperate, critical praise. The message is a dangerous one: that the level of comfort offered by a condescending voice--"existentialism for dummies," if you will--supercedes very basic personal judgments of discretion, enjoyment, and outrage. Exploitation? At least--and not on a cursory level.

And yet American Splendor isn't singled out for derision the way that photographer Shelby Lee Adams has been for his stark depictions of backwoods Appalachia--the pity that we feel for a Harvey Pekar has been sprayed with an easy-to-swallow coating (Paul Giamatti is cute, the picture is cute, social anxiety disorder is cute, manic depression is cute); we're all patronizing assholes for feeling sorry for Pekar, we're something worse for laughing at him (self-congratulatory assholes), but American Splendor makes that derision comfortable and okay (not okay was Pekar's genuinely pathological outburst on his last appearance on Letterman--and so we don't get to see it in the film, though the filmmakers confess that they had it to show). Though the pity that we feel for Adams' dirt-poor, illiterate, sometimes deformed subjects is likewise born of our being assholes, we're made to feel uncomfortable for our superiority, which is only right.

Undeniably posed, meticulously lit and framed, Adams' work recalls Annie Liebowitz's portraiture, his subjects the below subsistence residents of a reality most would prefer quarantined and forgotten. Just the existence of these people seems an effrontery to the cream of society--quotes from art critics and sociology professors underscore scenes of rural Appalachia, giving lie to their anger at Adams' "wallowing in stereotype" when all evidence before our own eyes suggests that what Adams has done is treat his poverty-stricken subjects in the same way that Liebowitz (or Helmut Newton) treats her celebrity subjects: with attention to detail, theatricality--with respect. After Adams proclaims that he never uses a picture in one of his exhibits or collections not approved of by the subjects, making the compelling argument that he can't afford to ever offend these objects of his eye, an art gallery proprietor apologizes for seeming like a patronizing asshole before saying, "I'm sorry, but these people aren't sophisticated enough to know when they're being exploited."

But what is this man suggesting, exactly? That Adams has imported elements into his photographs? That the houses don't look like they do, that the people don't live as they do? Or is he suggesting, more troublingly, that "these people" have no way of knowing how much they're mocked and hated by the American culture at large? A clip from John Boorman's Deliverance is used as an example of how unfair these scholars believe is popular culture in the portrayal of rural Appalachia--my question would be if the people of rural Appalachia don't see the terrifying hillbilly villains of the film as the heroes, protectors of their land and their heritage. I think Boorman might. In fact, I think that the power of Deliverance, and the explanation of the last scene of surfacing, lies in the understanding that we ignore and minimize these people to our peril.

Consider the banjo kid from Deliverance, the victim clearly of some sort of physiological deformity whom Ronny Cox's character tries to befriend, but who clearly has no appreciable social mechanisms. Consider that in a more "enlightened" culture, this child would have been institutionalized from an early age, most likely separated from "polite" society, and treated with the kind of derision that Cox, et al treat the banjo kid. In The True Meaning of Pictures, we're presented first with Adams' portraits of a pair of siblings afflicted with what appears to be the same defect as the banjo kid, interacting with one another and unafflicted children in stark tableaux that elicited in me a feeling of horror and revulsion. As the segment progresses, Adams is seen having dinner with the Childers family--accepted as a trusted friend by every member just as these deformed children are accepted as productive members of their family. We see them at play with one another, comforting one another, and more importantly, we see them as a matter of fact of these peoples' existence. While we're watching this we hear Adams ruminate about a brief stint he had volunteering at a mental institution back in civilization--and then we're presented with those portraits again: an opportunity for us to reassess our repulsion at these two people who are completely integrated into their community in a way that most of us would reject.

Like the touchingly devout snake-handling preachers captured by Adams in his meticulously framed compositions, the film we're invited to handle is elusive and dangerous--threatening at every moment to undermine comfort with an immense power and savagery. There's something poetic about the wryness of the title, the boast that any sort of meaning can ever be held as true seems to be the worst of deconstruction's reductivism (nothing can ever be known), but is in fact an invitation to a conversation about the ugliness of--the limitlessness of--our own notions and prejudices--the only dialogue that ultimately matters. The True Meaning of Pictures is difficult stuff to watch, with a pig slaughter, the necrotic results of a snakebite, and the New York art crowd all portrayed in a way so unflinching as to suggest exploitation. And of course at the end of the day, that word doesn't mean that much anymore.-Walter Chaw