I loathe karaoke because it viagra now interferes with the three things I cherish most: drinking, uninterrupted conversation, and good music. It was apparently meant to enhance all of these activities, but its only role in my life has been to drive me outside, away from the drag queen singing Dusty Springfield, away from the trio of we-like-just-don’t-give-a-fuck undergraduate girls shrieking the chorus of “It’s My Life.”

Thankfully, Jean LeClerc’s experimental Karaoke Dreams isn’t restricted by the trappings of any sort of karaoke night I’ve ever been to. It’s also daringly free of reference points in most cinema, experimental or otherwise; this is narrative unmoored, a violent, musical riff on love, violence, and meaningful silences. Leclerc generic cialis online canada has long been known as Jean LeLoup, the handle he adopted for the stage persona he has embodied throughout a long and successful music career. Leloup’s music has toyed with convention while striking out towards originality, and Leclerc’s first feature appears to be an even more extreme motion toward finding new form.

Karaoke Dreams alternates between settings in Montreal and Vietnam, but its true setting is the human subconscious. The occasional genre handholds in the plot—a gangster scene, a sci-fi moment—become slippery and undefined almost as soon as they manifest, processed through a dream-filter. The film is described by LeClerc as “excerpts of 100% pure human subconscious,” and the director ensures that the imagery remains consistently fascinating enough to atone for the purposeful lack of plot coherency. It’s dream logic that allows the protagonist, played by Huy Phong Doan, to flit between the film’s two settings. Huy Phong Doan’s performance is a mirror-refraction of acting, almost like karaoke itself—he incarnates his odd character and slips between different languages with an ironic distance, creating a gap between action and thought that nails the position of an actor in a dream.

Karaoke works better on film than it does in most bars; one gets a sense of characters “dreaming” in the sense of ambition or fantasy, projecting themselves into a role that they can’t hope to occupy. The consistent binding element of Karaoke Dreams is that it presents both sorts of dream—a subconscious vision of characters imagining themselves as something else. Distilling LeClerc’s deliberately anti-logical film into a tight statement will simply never work, though; each separate element of the movie speaks for itself, and the only way to gather all of the separate ideas into one is to accept that it is all a dream.

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KARAOKE DREAMS has its World Premiere on August 5^th at 11:30pm in the hall Theatre, with writer/director Jean Leloup in person. More info on the film page HERE.

An Exclusive Video Interview with Jean Leloup:

About the author:

Nathan Ripley

Nathan Ripley is a pen name of award-winning writer Naben Ruthnum. Published in QWERTY, The secure places to buy levitra in canada visa White Rabbit Quarterly, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Maple Tree Literary Review, Dark Tales and more, Ruthnum is currently stacking up short stories and completing a pseudonymous thriller as Nathan Ripley.