There is a theory that, should a filmmaker have a long enough career, they will at some point make a film about themselves. For some, this comes towards the start of their career, in the form of ambitious coming-of-age stories where they use their limited knowledge and paltry life experience to tell energetic, compelling stories. For others, this comes in the final stages of their careers, where they undergo a process of looking backwards, quietly meditating on their own life, even if not in the form of explicitly autobiographical works, weaving extraordinary yarns that are as poetic as they are inspirational. As difficult as it is to say, many of our great filmmakers are getting older and their time with us is now limited – even at their most audacious, they are still ageing and no one is immune to the passage of time. Paul Schrader has known this for years – he’s looked at several great masters in his work, paying tribute to their exceptional work and looking at how they influenced his vision. Now he is in his twilight years, and while he is still wonderfully active and constantly in the process of writing and directing, he is also someone who has started to reflect on his journey to get to this point, which is somewhere that he perhaps didn’t even expect himself to reach – and perhaps his most personal work, in the sense that all of these ideas come together to form a cohesive and enthralling film, comes in the form of Oh, Canada, which he adapts from the novel Foregone by Russell Banks, with whom he had previously worked over a quarter of a century ago when adapting another one of his novels. A poignant examination of the past as seen through the perspective of a legendary documentary filmmaker who is standing on the threshold of his death, and forced into a position where he has no choice but to reveal the inner workings of his personal life, the film oscillates between the past and the present, using the two in tandem to create a vibrant and captivating portrait of a man questioning his choices and the reasons for each one, some of which he merely resigns may not have any logical explanation, and instead simply occurred because that was what fate decided was most appropriate for his journey. Complex, engaging and beautiful in a way that Schrader has not explored in years, Oh, Canada is a remarkable achievement and one that has more layers than we initially expected.

Schrader has always been fascinated by the idea of deconstructing literary and cinematic tropes in such a way that they are entirely reconfigured to have a much deeper meaning, even at their most fundamentally simple. In the case of Oh, Canada, he is focusing on the idea of an old man reflecting on the past, providing testimony to the places he saw, the people he met and, perhaps most importantly, the mistakes that he made. Structured as a lengthy interview that transitions into flashbacks that show the juvenile Leonard Fife navigating life in the late 1960s as he examines the past and attempts to question everything he previously held to be sacrosanct and true, the film is a fascinating portrait of the artist as an old man. It is difficult to watch this film and not feel as if Schrader is putting some part of himself in the character of Fife – but any director of a certain age would do the same since the ambiguity of the role combined with the automatic artistic intuition to insert oneself into such a challenging story means this was not entirely unexpected. Rather, it’s the way he navigates some challenging narrative territory that truly makes Oh, Canada such an extraordinary achievement. Primarily, we begin to wonder whether the character’s decision to participate in this interview is actually earnest, or if he has ulterior motives – and gradually throughout the film, we start to see the lines between fawning interview and shattering confession begin to blur. Throughout the film, Schrader places the protagonist in a position where he is questioning his past – Fife is an unreliable narrator, but one whose intentions are not nefarious, but simply the product of a declining mind that has not only been ravaged by age and disease, but plagued by guilt and regret, which can entirely dismantle one’s grasp on the past and make them view the world in a decidedly more unconventional lens. It’s not so much a case of looking at the past through rose-tinted glasses, but rather seeing the only future that seems to make sense, and which the director carefully pieces together as he forces his protagonist into a position of self-interrogation, where he reveals aspects of his past that were neither known nor required, but which paint a vivid portrait of his own life, and allow him the catharsis of knowing that he has parted with this internal turmoil – whether or not is all true is entirely up to interpretation.

Nestled right at the heart of Oh, Canada are a set of performances that draw us in and allow us to become immersed in this fascinating and unconventional world that Schrader is composing for us. Centrally, we have the character of Leonard Fife, who is played by Richard Gere in the present day, as well as the years immediately preceding it, and Jacob Elordi in the major flashbacks. In theory, it seems an odd pairing – the physical resemblance is tenuous and their acting styles are mostly very different. Yet, it’s not difficult to see theoretically why Elordi was chosen to play the younger version of Gere, especially considering this was the first collaboration between the veteran actor and the director since American Gigolo, which was made right at the height of Gere’s peak as a sex symbol. Elordi has a certain swagger and charisma that was present in most of the older actor’s most notable works (and even here, in a few moments), creating a fascinating link between the characters. However, Gere is the one doing career-best work, taking on a decidedly more challenging role than he’s played in quite some time. Fife is a complex character, a man with a dark past and secrets that he has allowed to fester into a sense of remorse and paranoia. Having Gere, a more traditionally handsome and dashing leading man, playing a character ravaged by disease and regret pushes him further than we have seen him go before, and his performance is exceptional. Uma Thurman is also a welcome presence as Leonard’s most recent wife, a woman grappling with her realization that her husband is not entirely who he says he is, and whose own personal quandaries begin to interfere with her efforts to be a dutiful wife. A number of smaller supporting parts (including from Michael Imperioli, who is finally starting to be given the roles he deserves, and is rapidly developing into a consistently great character actor) add nuance to the film, but it is all ultimately about Gere and Elordi, who turn in spectacular performances as they set out to create a vivid portrait of this complex, unconventional character.

Yet, the character that perhaps looms largest throughout this film is not a tangible individual, but rather the entity that is the country of Canada, which takes on a personality of its own. It’s difficult to discern exactly what the purpose behind using it as a motif is – neither Schrader nor Banks were Canadian, so it can’t be viewed as merely a love letter to the Great White North (although you would not be able to tell looking at this film – it is a wonderfully affectionate and heartfelt ode to the country and its people), but rather needs to be viewed as something much more profound, which is perhaps the most impenetrable aspect of the film as a whole. Canada represents an escape – a country that is culturally somewhat close to the United States in terms of general structure, but just off-centre enough to offer a major shift. It starts as a sanctuary for Fife as a way for him to dodge the Vietnam War draft, but eventually becomes a hiding place, a country where he has the chance to leave his entire life behind and start a new one, despite not realizing that those who are left behind have a habit of following, even if it is decades later. This ultimately all becomes a story of identity, with the film essentially being based around the growing desire to escape oneself and leave them behind, not realizing that certain aspects will follow wherever they move. Schrader employs a decidedly more unconventional narrative – there are at least four different timelines that intersect throughout the film, and the boundaries between them are already paper-thin. Yet gradually and methodically, it becomes a poetic deconstruction of a man who has slowly lost his sense of self, which he soon realizes is the main reason he has not been able to be truly authentic, and which necessitates that act of confession. Many mysteries are lingering beneath the surface of Oh, Canada, which is a film that is profoundly more unconventional in structure than we may anticipate, but this is all part of the incredible nature of the film, and it ultimately provides us with some valuable insights in the process.

Oh, Canada is not only narratively quite ambitious, but it also features a tonal and stylistic quality that is very much emblematic of both Schrader’s incredible visual prowess, as well as his desire to do something quite different with challenging material. Despite the bold premise that could have very easily lent itself to more bombastic styles of storytelling, the film is a far more subtle affair – it is driven by atmosphere more than anything else, with Schrader implementing the self-reflective tone in absolutely every area of the film, including in the way he tells the story. As he has grown older and more focused on capturing the essence of the human condition in its most raw and brutal form, the further he has allowed himself to be taken by more abstract storytelling techniques. He is not interested in conventional boldness any longer and instead expresses himself through a more subdued, earnest examination of these characters navigating ambigious moral and ethical territory. It’s a beautiful approach that speaks a lot to Schrader’s instincts as a director – the quiet, ruminating mood establishes these characters and their origins, allowing us to glean valuable insights into their lives, all the while gradually growing bleaker as it becomes clear that this is not a film about celebrating a legacy but atoning for the past. Every character in this film has some kind of vendetta against Fife, which manifests in their quiet disdain for his status, and which they may not even realize that they possess until quite late into the film and we start to see the cracks beginning to appear in every relationship. It’s harsh, callous filmmaking that still has an abundance of soulfulness behind every frame, and which contributes to the film’s more challenging, unnerving tone that drives so much of the narrative and keeps us thoroughly invested and engaged from those first melancholic frames to the unforgettable final shot, both of which are absolute perfection in terms of conveying exactly Schrader intended to say, just doing so through a decidedly more subtle, elegant lens than anything else we had previously seen from him, at least to this profound level.

Bold and uncompromising in his vision, but far more subtle than he has been in quite some time, Schrader takes this beautiful novel and develops it into one of the year’s most ambitious endeavours, and one that will undoubtedly stand as one of his most important, or at least honest, works of storytelling. Oh, Canada is a film about the ghosts of the past, and how they tend to haunt someone until the very end, the only way to achieve some kind of catharsis being the challenging act of simply allowing those regrets to dissipate through speaking them out to anyone who will listen, letting them know your past so that you may transition to the next stage of your life without the burden of secrecy lingering so heavily over their sanity. Whether or not Schrader was using this film as a chance to address his demons, or was simply captivated by the subject matter remains to be seen, but what we can find scattered throughout this film is a story of a man forced to reckon with the past, albeit one that he doesn’t necessarily regret. Leonard Fife doesn’t regret doing what he did, but rather the way he chose to do it and the people he left behind – his journey has been an unorthodox one, and this film explores his life as if he were a real person, adding layers of detail and nuance that we don’t always expect, having emotional resonance contained in every recess and becoming a truly magnificent, well-defined psychological drama that is as heartfelt as it is challenging, exactly what we have come to expect from the director in this stage of his extraordinary career.