by Hudson Moura
Jacelyn Forgues’ Et Maintenant is a cancer film that refuses to be only a cancer film. On le papier, the premise looks familiar: Vincent (Pierre-Paul Alain), young, talented, kind, on the verge of finally breaking through with his band, learns he has stage-four, highly aggressive cancer. The shock is intentional — Forgues wants us to feel the arbitrariness. Vincent is the “good” one: he does not drink or smoke, he cares for his father with Alzheimer’s in a full-care home, he is renovating (literally) a family house in ruins, and he is just about to start a real tour in real venues across Québec. In other words: it makes no sense that he is struck. That senselessness is the film’s moral ignition.
Formally, the film keeps pushing toward the light. The palette is colourful, the secondary characters are diverse, often funny, and Forgues resists the temptation to sink everything into hospital-grey realism. Yet the music tells the truth: in the most solitary and intense moments the score tightens, and Vincent articulates the core wound — “I feel like I don’t have control anymore, that I’ve become a walking cancer. It’s in my body, in my head, in my music, everything.” The reply from Mike (Vlad Alexis), the nurse — “In your condition, it’s okay to be selfish for a bit. Don’t let it get you. Concentrate on yourself.” — is the film’s ethic: cancer here is not a punishment or a moral verdict, it is a condition that demands a re-centring of the self.
One of the film’s most intelligent moves is to look at the orbit, not only the patient. Renée (Debbie Lynch-White), the hospital volunteer who drives patients and follows their treatment, is not there for easy sentiment. She once accompanied her boyfriend through cancer and lost him; now she stays in proximity to the same pain. Why does she keep doing it if she “cannot save them”? The film quietly suggests that care is sometimes a way of negotiating one’s own unresolved grief. In that sense, Et Maintenant widens the field: cancer affects not only the sick body, but the micro-community that stands around it.
The parallel between demolition and rebuilding is a bit overt, but it works because it is anchored in Vincent’s actual life: he is renovating a ruined family house, he works in construction/demolition, and his own body is now a site under threat. Forgues keeps asking two good questions: What does it mean to “lose” to cancer? and, more original still, what does it mean to live after surviving — after you have already made peace with death? The film’s answer is reassuring: after demolition comes rebuilding. This is why the film is ultimately more about reconstruction than about decline.
There are limits. The narrative sometimes leans on a positivity that the situation would not always sustain; a couple of transitional scenes feel written around the message rather than out of character. And because Forgues is at once writer, director, and producer, one occasionally senses the didactic line: the film wants to console as much as it wants to show. But the humanity is real, the performances are warm without being saccharine, and the musical through-line — writing a song about a story that is still being lived — gives the piece a moving, unfinished quality. 
Rating: 4/5
The film will be screened at Cinéfranco: Francophone International Film Festival 