Chris Knipp
09-25-2025, 08:22 PM
http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/DOALM.jpg
GABRIEL BYRNE IN DEATH OF A LADIES' MAN
MATT BISSONETTE: DEATH OF A LADIES' MAN (2020)
A life of self-indulgence pays off
Even Bissonete's first film, Looking for Leonard, showed an obsession for fellow Canadian Leonard Cohen's songs, and they are distributed all over this one, even with accompanying song and dance numbers. They seem the fruit of an obsession, not of necessity. Josh Slater-Williams says in his BFI Sight and Sound (https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/reviews/death-ladies-man-new-skin-old-songs) review that "this is Bissonete's most explicitly Leonard Cohen-inspired work to date," adding "but just why he made this movie, besides love for the songs, remains unclear."
Addiction plays an explicit part here too. The subject is Sam O'Shea (Gabriel Byrne) an alcoholic poetry professor. The Irish actor has been in some great films, including Miller's Crossing, Little Women, Dead Man and The USual Suspects. He does not discredit himself here, though where this film is going and where it comes from is frequently in doubt. It is an inexplicable indulgence, full of fantasies, visions, obtrusive songs and group performances, with a loser's tragic downward spiral that turns into a final series of implausible successes. All is filled with overconfident imagination. Chapter headings can't hide the lack of a plausible structure or real momentum. But hey, maybe you're crazy about Leonard Cohen. Some people are. And there are some watchable actors.
One review (Cath Clarke's positive one in the Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/jul/18/death-of-a-ladies-man-review-gabriel-byrne-charms-in-philip-roth-style-dramedy)) points logically to Philip Roth, because this is indeed a literary tale. "If Philip Roth had ever switched his attention from the great American novel and decided to write a lightweight indie dramedy," writes Cath, "it might have turned out like this." This film indeed is the wish fulfillment fantasy (which turns, somewhat implausibly, real) of a hard drinking wannabe literary lion, not Jewish, of course, but certainly ethnic, and with his young Irish dead dad to add the juicy Irish brogue (played by another well known actor from Eire, Brian Gleeson), who turns up frequently among a series of hallucinations, puffing on cigarettes and (somewhat anachronistically) spouting F-words like everybody else.
This kind of tale of literary dishevelment often begins with domestic mess, and early on Sam enters his apartment to find a robust, longhaired younger man having at it with his wife, herself younger than him, in their bed. This leads to altercations and a mutual decision to make this Sam's second divorce. He embarks on a drunken spree, apparently not very unlike his daily routine. Along the way he eyes young women, but he's past his prime and they smack him or give him the finger - except in an inexplicable borderline offensive extended fantasy late in the film when a beautiful ex-model with the implausible name of Charlotte LaFleur (Jessica Paré) instantly falls madly in love with the man who admits to sixty-two (the actor was ten years older).
Sam goes next to the lecture hall, where he throws up into a bin and then addresses the bank of students; but that fades into another hallucination and the students all get up and dance to Leonard Cohen. Hurrah! A friend later advises Sam to see a physician, and he goes to the improbably named Dr. Sarah Savard (Pascale Bussières), who never once sounds or looks like a doctor, but tells Sam, following an initial interview and an MRI, that he has an inoperable tumor infecting every high functioning part of his brain. What can be done? he asks. Well, she more or less says, you can die. She gives him a few months to a year.
From here on Sam looks better than ever. This is partly attributed to his acknowledging his alcoholism and entering into sobriety. He winds up in one of those AA meetings you see in movies where a small group of people sit in chairs in a circle with nice lighting in a big open space and one person shares, and then the protagonist. Except that Sam gets to have a share liberally laced with colorful flashbacks before he says his "thank you for letting me share."
This is where things look up for Sam. Relations may improve with his gay son Layton (Antoine Olivier Pilon) and he helps look after his heroin addict daughter Josée (Karelle Trembley). There are several scenes in French in the film, by the way, which in my screener version lacked English subtitles and I was unable to decipher. He embarks on that project he has said earlier he has always wanted to do: writing a book. It is a memoir, containing many of the incidents alluded to in this film in conversations with the dead dad or the hallucinations and other scenes. And the book is a success, signaled by the obligatory book reading and enthusiastic signing pointing to the presence of admiring fans, including close friends and family members and, in the back of the audience, Frankenstein, for the monster has featured, inexplicably, in several of Sam's hallucinations.
I don't know whether to say Philip Ross would have done better than this, or would have done this better. Roth concocted some far-fetched tales. This in some form indeed might have been one of them. But his would have contained very little Leonard Cohen, fewer hallucinations, and more wit.
Death of a Ladies' Man, 100 mins., debuted Sept. 24, 2024 at Calgary, also Cinequest, Sonoma, Galway, Mallorca, UK internet Jul. 25, 2022, US week of Sept. 22, 2025.
GABRIEL BYRNE IN DEATH OF A LADIES' MAN
MATT BISSONETTE: DEATH OF A LADIES' MAN (2020)
A life of self-indulgence pays off
Even Bissonete's first film, Looking for Leonard, showed an obsession for fellow Canadian Leonard Cohen's songs, and they are distributed all over this one, even with accompanying song and dance numbers. They seem the fruit of an obsession, not of necessity. Josh Slater-Williams says in his BFI Sight and Sound (https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/reviews/death-ladies-man-new-skin-old-songs) review that "this is Bissonete's most explicitly Leonard Cohen-inspired work to date," adding "but just why he made this movie, besides love for the songs, remains unclear."
Addiction plays an explicit part here too. The subject is Sam O'Shea (Gabriel Byrne) an alcoholic poetry professor. The Irish actor has been in some great films, including Miller's Crossing, Little Women, Dead Man and The USual Suspects. He does not discredit himself here, though where this film is going and where it comes from is frequently in doubt. It is an inexplicable indulgence, full of fantasies, visions, obtrusive songs and group performances, with a loser's tragic downward spiral that turns into a final series of implausible successes. All is filled with overconfident imagination. Chapter headings can't hide the lack of a plausible structure or real momentum. But hey, maybe you're crazy about Leonard Cohen. Some people are. And there are some watchable actors.
One review (Cath Clarke's positive one in the Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/jul/18/death-of-a-ladies-man-review-gabriel-byrne-charms-in-philip-roth-style-dramedy)) points logically to Philip Roth, because this is indeed a literary tale. "If Philip Roth had ever switched his attention from the great American novel and decided to write a lightweight indie dramedy," writes Cath, "it might have turned out like this." This film indeed is the wish fulfillment fantasy (which turns, somewhat implausibly, real) of a hard drinking wannabe literary lion, not Jewish, of course, but certainly ethnic, and with his young Irish dead dad to add the juicy Irish brogue (played by another well known actor from Eire, Brian Gleeson), who turns up frequently among a series of hallucinations, puffing on cigarettes and (somewhat anachronistically) spouting F-words like everybody else.
This kind of tale of literary dishevelment often begins with domestic mess, and early on Sam enters his apartment to find a robust, longhaired younger man having at it with his wife, herself younger than him, in their bed. This leads to altercations and a mutual decision to make this Sam's second divorce. He embarks on a drunken spree, apparently not very unlike his daily routine. Along the way he eyes young women, but he's past his prime and they smack him or give him the finger - except in an inexplicable borderline offensive extended fantasy late in the film when a beautiful ex-model with the implausible name of Charlotte LaFleur (Jessica Paré) instantly falls madly in love with the man who admits to sixty-two (the actor was ten years older).
Sam goes next to the lecture hall, where he throws up into a bin and then addresses the bank of students; but that fades into another hallucination and the students all get up and dance to Leonard Cohen. Hurrah! A friend later advises Sam to see a physician, and he goes to the improbably named Dr. Sarah Savard (Pascale Bussières), who never once sounds or looks like a doctor, but tells Sam, following an initial interview and an MRI, that he has an inoperable tumor infecting every high functioning part of his brain. What can be done? he asks. Well, she more or less says, you can die. She gives him a few months to a year.
From here on Sam looks better than ever. This is partly attributed to his acknowledging his alcoholism and entering into sobriety. He winds up in one of those AA meetings you see in movies where a small group of people sit in chairs in a circle with nice lighting in a big open space and one person shares, and then the protagonist. Except that Sam gets to have a share liberally laced with colorful flashbacks before he says his "thank you for letting me share."
This is where things look up for Sam. Relations may improve with his gay son Layton (Antoine Olivier Pilon) and he helps look after his heroin addict daughter Josée (Karelle Trembley). There are several scenes in French in the film, by the way, which in my screener version lacked English subtitles and I was unable to decipher. He embarks on that project he has said earlier he has always wanted to do: writing a book. It is a memoir, containing many of the incidents alluded to in this film in conversations with the dead dad or the hallucinations and other scenes. And the book is a success, signaled by the obligatory book reading and enthusiastic signing pointing to the presence of admiring fans, including close friends and family members and, in the back of the audience, Frankenstein, for the monster has featured, inexplicably, in several of Sam's hallucinations.
I don't know whether to say Philip Ross would have done better than this, or would have done this better. Roth concocted some far-fetched tales. This in some form indeed might have been one of them. But his would have contained very little Leonard Cohen, fewer hallucinations, and more wit.
Death of a Ladies' Man, 100 mins., debuted Sept. 24, 2024 at Calgary, also Cinequest, Sonoma, Galway, Mallorca, UK internet Jul. 25, 2022, US week of Sept. 22, 2025.