Quebec
Cars doing circular burnout
Training bordering on the surreal for customs officers.
Sweating must be kept under control, and to keep the helmet from fogging up, it must be worn at all times, even during daily activities.
Alexandre is an instructor at Canadian Customs, teaching how to use firearms even to those who have never used and own none.
Some are convinced of the work they do, others just to earn some money so they can study, like Alexandre's alter ego with whom he entertains himself sexually while she is busy ironing while wearing a helmet.
For this, the young instructor, after a sadistic-perverse-morbid interrogation is suspended as he is judged to be suffering from sexual addiction.
He returns home to his mother, who runs a race car track, 45 km from Montreal, in a pleasant and secluded location but close to a golf course for wealthy landowners who do not want to hear the sound of engines.
An acquaintance with a young Icelandic racing driver who has arrived at the site to participate in a car race brings some oxygen into the boy's life, but something abnormal rages over his daily routine..
Just following his return, someone begins to stick bold and scabrous pornographic drawings and graffiti on the church door whose protagonist has the likeness of the young man himself.
The latter accused by the local police forcefully and decisively rejects any responsibility, but at the second intimidation he violently bears the brunt of it.
Mr. Mastrogiuseppe, the surname of the boy of Italian descent, finds himself, both in his workplace and in his remote town, having to deal with the theater of the absurd both professionally, performing a job with which he does not identify at all, and because of the unjust accusations and the perverse and bigoted moralizing of the bosses and the police: Alexandre thus becomes the scapegoat for the countless psychic and existential disorders by which he is surrounded, including his mother's.
He describes the place where he lives as a kind of Monopoly in which two, max three families manage all the wealth.
Although that black land was originally considered very fertile and many revolutionary patriots were excommunicated after becoming from a French colony to an Anglo-Saxon dominion since the 18th century, no one now seems to remember the origins and past of those traditions.
Pressed to cooperate, harassed, beaten, and subjected to blackmail, through The Protagonist, the director says he wanted to tell the story of his biographical experience while studying.
"The only way I had to pay for my studies and shoot my first short films was to work at customs at the Canada-U.S. border. I didn't like working there at all, and it was a part of my life that I hid from my fellow filmmakers for a long time. Instead, for the first time, I had the opportunity to return to the experience of those years when, working at customs, I dreamed of making films. In all humility, Le bruit des moteurs allowed me to shed light on a part of my life that for a long time I tried to deny."
Born in Canada, he holds a bachelor's degree in film and comparative literature from the University of Montreal and a master's degree in communication and experimental media creation from the University of Quebec, also in Montreal. He also graduated in screenwriting from the Institut National de l'Image et du Son in Montreal. His short films, One Man (2016), Aquarium (2013) and Beep Beep (2011) have been screened in hundreds of festivals in more than twenty countries. Le bruit des moteurs (2021), a work of autofiction, is his first feature film.
A highly original debut that of the young director, both in form, sophisticated and eccentric, and in content so centered on the concept of privacy, existential paranoia, played out on sexual obsessions and persecutory fixations based on false moralisms and a world that rotates on itself in a claustrophobic, obtuse, circular burnout with no way out.
