C.R.A.Z.Y.

It all begins to go wrong for eight-year-old Zachary (Emile Vallée) when his father (Michel Côté) finds him in a dress. After a relatively idyllic young childhood in Québec – during which the strains of being younger brother to a tearaway, a jock and a bookworm are offset by the extra indulgence his purported gift for healing earns from an already doting mother (Danielle Proulx) – a persistent shadow is cast by dad’s suspicions that Zac might be ‘un fifi’. Then mum goes and gets pregnant again and he isn’t even the baby any more. Fast-forward seven years to 1975 and teenage Zac (Marc-André Grondin) is agog over Ziggy Stardust and his cousin’s boyfriend – not, he insists, that that makes him gay. Meanwhile family life hasn’t got any more harmonious…

A zippy, colourful coming-of-age tale, ‘C.R.A.Z.Y.’ is buoyed along by engaging central turns, iconic pop tunes and a pleasingly meandering narrative that can take a left turn at a family wedding and wind up in the Sahara. Loosely based on the life of a friend of the director, it has a firm grasp of period and a plausible sense of the stubborn ructions and unarticulated tendernesses of family life, but also offers fantastical touches apt to its religiose undertones: during one especially stultifying midnight mass, Zac messianically levitates to ‘Sympathy for the Devil’. Indeed, the film is better at conveying the ecstasy of music – a passion shared by father and son – than the particular tribulations of growing up fifi, a subject with which, like Zac himself, it is notably reluctant to engage.