“It’s something I need to do,” phys-ed teacher David (Steve Laplante) unconvincingly tells his long-suffering wife Isabelle (Marie-Laurence Moreau) about the space-simulation program he’s signed up for early in Stéphane Lafleur’s Viking, a droll, bone-dry satire of escapism and white-collar office workers’ delusions of grandeur. A step up in thematic complexity, concept, and set design from the charmingly small-scale Tu dors Nicole (2014), Viking mines a similar thematic vein to that film about an insomniac small-town woman whose dispiriting environment is punctuated by her incongruent visions of a world beyond it. Here, too, Lafleur employs magic realism to probe the tension between David’s lofty self-image and earthbound surroundings, his frequent astral projections of himself into the vast expanse of space taking him light years away from the drab, sub-community-college-level theatre…
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Cinema Scope (Digital) - 1 Issue, Issue 93 - Winter 2023