Movies I Watched Instead of Writing: Junior

The NFB (ONF out here) does a free screening series on Tuesdays at their Cineroboteque downtown and this week Marie-Claude and I checked out a very interesting documentary about junior hockey called, appropriately enough, Junior.

Filmmakers Isabelle Lavigne and Stephane Thibault followed the Baie-Comeau Drakkar for an entire season, focusing not on the drama on the ice, but the drama off the ice. In fact, there is no game footage in the film at all.

For people not that familiar with the behind the scenes of Major Junior League hockey, the film is definitely an eye opener. The majority of the players have agents and the business aspects of the league are obvious. While the coaches do believe that they can turn these boys, generally in the 16 - 20 age range, into major league players, they have other considerations as well: filling seats, keeping league officials and team owners happy and potentially propelling their own careers.

The film opens with Benjamin Brault, one of the Drakkar's star players being lectured by a man we eventually learn is his agent. His face is that typically blank canvas of the teenage male visage, equal parts stoicism and dumbfoundedness. We are not sure how much of this he is absorbing, but we are equally unsure of how much we want him to absorb. For a kid who really does look like he'd rather hang out with girls and party all night, there is a lot of pressure coming from a lot of different places.

The film is particularly hard hitting because of the techniques employed by the directors. There is no game footage, and there are also no interviews. All reactions are authentic, as they happened. The sense of the audience really is that of being a fly on the wall, in the locker room, in the coach's office, on the bus, in hotel rooms. We are even privy to a secret trade negotiating meeting in a Tim Hortons (it really doesn't get much more Canadian, does it?)

Typically poker faced players and coaches are subjected to unending close-ups, the better to catch a tell-tale eyebrow twitch or shift in focus. The close-ups are so tight as to almost induce a sense of claustrophobia in the viewer, which ultimately increases the drama in what are in a lot of cases one-sided or one word conversations.

It is also interesting that the Drakkar are not a particularly winning team. They struggle through most of the season and the heartbreak of the players is obvious, particularly when they don't even manage to win the last game of the season. It is not often that you see that many teen aged boys all crying in the same room. We are also privy to last minute trades against the wishes of the player and painful surgery.

While ultimately a very quite film, but powerful enough to be recommended as essential viewing for anyone with children with ambitions of playing major league sports.

The film will also be airing on Radio-Canada on May 1st.