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Smooth trumpet jazz, the roar of well-dressed crowds, dilapidated hotel rooms and an icy blast of gallic cool: nominally, we’re in New York and Paris, 1949, the stomping grounds of musician Miles Davis and surrealist director Jean Cocteau. But the odd crack starts to show. French-Canadian writer/director/auteur Robert LePage can’t quite commit to his existential setting. In fact, he’s having some existential doubts himself.
On its debut, his landmark 1991 play ‘Needles and Opium’ was hailed as a masterpiece for Carl Fillion’s mind-meltingly cool design: three sides of a giant cube, which endlessly rotates to show us a series of floating monochrome worlds. The plot’s pretty head-spinning too. LePage is the central character, and played himself back in the day, but here the role is taken by Marc Labrèche. He’s the narcissistic maestro at the heart of ‘Needles and Opium’: queasy as his wildly ambitious vision spins out of control. He splices Cocteau and Davis’s stories with scenes from the present day, where he’s recording a documentary about the movers and shakers of the existentialist scene.
Labrèche plays LePage with a French accent that’s sludgier than boeuf bourguignon, spiked with a vinegary soupcon of self-pity. He’s haunted by the parallels between his own heartbreak and the drug-addled troubles of his two artistic heroes, and uses ropes and harness to navigate their sloping world. Adopting the persona of Cocteau, he floats in the centre of a projected galaxy, expounding on his literally high-minded philosophy: that the Americans should treat their ills with opium, not therapy. Meanwhile, Miles Davis silently refutes him. The trumpeter is heartbroken after deciding to leave his lover Juliette Greco, so as not to subject her to the scandal of a mixed-race marriage. He's played by agile performer Wellesley Robertson III, who slumps and slips down the angled sides of the cube in drugged desperation.
LePage’s script isn’t short of self-deprecating asides. Sat on an American therapist’s couch, our hero compares himself to Orpheus and begs to skip a torment or two. And his homeland of Quebec comes in for plenty of wry mockery. He derides its faltering attempts to become independent of Canada: ‘it’s like a bad play’. Perhaps he could do with a little more introspection when it comes to the stories of the artists he uses: Davis and Greco are both silent, tragic ghosts in a world narrated by white men. But this isn’t meant to be a flawless creation - it’s shot through with pain, fractured egos and self-conscious cool. And with visuals this dazzling, it’s enough to make opium seem like a really, really great idea.