Rock Paper Scissors (French: Roche papier ciseaux) is a 2013 Canadian thriller film from Québec directed by Yan Lanouette Turgeon, which he co-wrote with André Gulluni. The third film to be produced by Camera Oscura (after Marc Bisaillon's well-received La vérité and La lâcheté), producer Christine Falco described it as a work of hyperlink cinema (film choral). Lanouette Turgeon's debut feature is the story of three men—Boucane (Samian), Lorenzo (Remo Girone), and Vincent (Roy Dupuis)—whose lives are brought together through a strange sequence of events.
The film features music by composer and performer Ramachandra Borcar (also known as Ramasutra or DJ Ram).
Plot
A young Aboriginal, Boucane, whose home life is mostly broken, leaves his reserve one summer night: freedom and a better life await him in Montréal. With only a bag containing clothes and a few possessions he heads south. He hooks up for a lift with Normand, a quirky old gangster whose truck contains suspicious cargo.
Lorenzo is an old Italian immigrant on his last dime, walking the streets in search of scrap metal that he then tries to sell in order to survive. His wife Rosa Maria suffers from Alzheimer's and Lorenzo's goal is to fulfill the promise he made to Rosa Maria—to return her body for burial in Italy. His efforts at raising money for the trip are not enough.
Vincent, a doctor stripped of his medical license, works for the Chinese mafia, treating a clientele of thugs he secretly despises, while managing the organization's pharmaceutical needs. He is married and a few months away from becoming a father; the double life eats away at him. He is desperately seeking a way out.
Originally from France, Shaw Mue-Fan, known as "Muffin", is the common strand bringing these three men together. Well placed within the criminal organization, he is an enforcer with a knack for building alliances which has made him the youngest right arm in the history of the Montréal Triads.
Their fates collide on the night of a lunar eclipse beginning with a new kind of Russian roulette.
Cast
Genres, style, and influences
Lanouette Turgeon and Gulluni had a hard time categorizing the film's genre themselves, the director saying the phrase "dark fairy-tale" () came up at one point, because it corresponds well to the conventions of the thriller, and because while their past short film collaborations have also been quite dark, Rock Paper Scissors has a lighter side to it due to the presence of the element of random chance (le hasard). Several different genres have been used by critics to describe the film, from simple drama to black comedy and film polar, a francophone subgenre of mystery or detective film (). Charles-Henri Ramond suggests the film is reminiscent of the Québec B-movie films polars of the 1970s, particularly Denys Arcand's La maudite galette and Jacques Godbout's .
The film's title refers not only to the game Rock–paper–scissors but also stands for the three main characters in their respective story or character arcs, each filmed in a different style: Rock is Boucane's story (he wears a good-luck charm made from a stone), filmed in wide-open spaces, with elements of Western movies; Paper is Lorenzo's story (the "paper" he seeks is the money he desperately needs), filmed in warmer colours, accompanied by classical music and a stable frame; finally, Scissors is Vincent's story, marked by cold colours, chrome in particular, and shot with a hand-held camera.
The filmmakers, being great admirers of other films, in particular directors like Alejandro González Iñárritu and the Coen Brothers, included many nods to other films: the drug injection scene is inspired by the Russian roulette scene in Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter, while the scene in which Boucane learns to shoot at bottles is an homage to Francis Mankiewicz's . The overall form of the film was inspired by González Inárritu's masterwork . A certain amount of the Paper part of the film is influenced by the films of Jean-Pierre Jeunet, while the way the Triads are presented is greatly influenced by Park Chan-wook's Old Boy.
Production
Writing and casting
The director and his co-writer began working on Rock Paper Scissors after they had produced a pair of successful short films, and , after which Gulluni approached Lanouette Turgeon with a title and an idea for three different films which would be linked by their supporting characters; they quickly realized they could make a single feature if they worked hard enough on the script. They had to find something which would connect the three main characters, which was "easier said than done", as the entire process took them eight years with the re-writes.