Reason Over Passion

Not quite a structural film, Reason Over Passion nevertheless aggressively incorporates its own sense of space (the film almost literally traverses the vast expanse of Canada) and time (80 minutes metronomically click by as computer-generated anagrams of the title flash across the screen). As in all basically formalist work, the political sympathies remain ambiguous, but the film is clearly grounded in an ironic attitude toward the colonial status of Canada (the title is a phrase invoked by Pierre Trudeau), and perhaps even the colonial status of women. The way those sympathies are formulated - re-situating the subject in space, playing on language versus image, raising the notion of a patriotic (sic) ideology - is what gives the film a continuing freshness and surprising relevance.