Fantasia 2025 Short Film, Short Review: LE TOUR DE CANADA

Fuelled by strong beer, broken glass, and raw fish, John Hollands' Le Tour De Canada is a frenetic race from St. John’s to Vancouver somewhere in an alternate 1970s - if the chroma keyed backdrops of Toronto are to be trusted, or that Vancouver is somehow both anti-bicycle and trigger-happy. It features a soundtrack that seems lifted out of Wes Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel, or at least the chase scenes from that film. It is a bloody and break-neck five-and-a-half minute ride that demands you not breathe, embrace the absurdity, and hang on.



I love that there now is a post Guy Maddin nano-genre of superimposed, double-exposed, collage-montage hyper-kino Canadiana where the miracle of artifice is miracle enough. Filmmaker Matthew Rankin is the cheery narrator who sets the stage before the starter pistol head-shots a moose. (Note that Rankin's Hydro-Levesque and Mynarski Death Plummet are signature shorts in the genre and he would go on to make a full feature in this style with The Twentieth Century, before turning out the most delightfully specific Canadian film of last year, or perhaps ever, Universal Language.) He speaks only for a few seconds, but nevertheless, has all the dialogue in the film.



Ben Cockell and Zander Eke star as rival Franco and Anglo cyclists, who pedal side by side, standing out from the anonymous pack of other competitors while exchanging non-specific but still somehow cheeky entendre, in subtitle form only, of course, as they navigate daffy Canuck provincial stereotypes, and avoid the territories altogether. Theirs is the stretch of dangerous road only 100km from the USA border, where gas stations abound, traffic is hell in the cities, and the tumble-weed is murder. What Le Tour De Canada may lack in thematic or cinematic substance (compared to Maddin’s platonic ideal of the form Heart of the World) it more than makes up with in gags-per-minute. Indeed, there are enough contained here to fill a feature. Viva Canada.