MOVIE REVIEW: Death of a Ladies' Man ~ FILMYWAPAS

Images courtesy of Buffalo8 Entertainment and Transmission Films

DEATH OF A LADIES’ MAN— 3 STARS

LESSON #1: THE DEFINITION OF A “LADIES’ MAN”— Dissecting the title of Death of a Ladies’ Man, the idea of a “ladies’ man” comes with a few misnomers. Many pigeon-hole them as being jerks, players, and womanizers. Those folks are simply meeting the wrong kind of guy. A traditional dictionary will tell you a “ladies’ man” is “a man who shows a marked fondness for the company of women or is especially attentive to women.” Even the fast-and-loose Urban Dictionary will reinforce that to add:

“A man who the ladies love, easy to talk to, or love being around. A man who has the respect of them and well doesn't need to kiss and tell, they do it for him.”

Following the correct behavior, the attentiveness and respect are honest rather than deceitful. Nowadays, that very straight-shooting archetype might feel antiquated in this Tinder-tinted era. Not hiding a bit behind his then-70 years of age to exude dashing flair, the prodigious Irish actor Gabriel Byrne reminds us that the genuine article is still possible in Death of a Ladies’ Man.

I would say the “ladies’ man” is “alive and well,” but that’s the catch of Diary of a Ladies’ Man, a 2020 film from writer-director Matt Bissonnette that toured the festival circuit and finally arrives this fall on VOD platforms. The Miller’s Crossing and The Usual Suspects leading man plays Samuel O’Shea, a literature professor of multiple marriages in Ontario, who learns he likely has less than a year to live. He wouldn’t have even known such grave news had his latest weekend drinking bender—spun out of control more than usual after discovering his wife Linda (Moonfall’s Carolina Bartczak) banging bedroom furniture against walls with a younger man—not put him in his doctor’s (Pascale Bussières of When Night is Falling) exam room for a headscan. As it turns out, Samuel has a growing glioblastoma tumor that is inoperable and entrenched in the areas of the brain responsible for thought, reasoning, behavior, memory, hearing, vision, and emotion.

LESSON #2: CAN YOU FEEL BAD FOR THE LADIES’ MAN?— Broken into three very distinctly labeled acts, each poetically emphasizing fate and understanding, Death of a Ladies’ Man locks audiences into Samuel’s secret march to finality. He decides not to tell his previous ex-wife (Mommy’s Suzanne Clément) and their two adult children, Layton and Josée

(Antoine OIivier Pilon of Most Wanted and Karelle Tremblay of The Fireflies are Gone, respectively). Gallows humor is nothing new, but the film asks whether viewers can feel bad for a ladies’ man and laugh along with its type of frankness, especially if they are still associating that personality with something more misogynistic and lecherous. What would it take to find empathy beyond cursory sympathy for a character like Samuel O’Shea? What does comeuppance look like for a potential asshole?

Matt Bissonnette answers those quandaries with a fantastical rub taking shape in Death of Ladies Man, which sets it apart from the typical “woe is me” sad sack story of abrupt mortality. During this most recent binge drinking escapade, Samuel keeps seeing people and things that aren’t there in vivid hallucinations, most notably and repeatedly being a younger version of his long-dead father, Ben, played by Brian Gleeson of Logan Lucky. Moreover, they are triggered by and narrated to—get this, especially if you know the homage represented by the film’s title—the smoky songs of the late great Leonard Cohen.

Death of a Ladies’ Man presents Samuel’s many visions in quirky cinematic splendor with practical makeup and effects. From surprise appearances from Ben to sharing conversations with a very Karlofian Frankenstein’s monster at a bar and seeing two semi-professional hockey teams break from the performance of the national anthem to engage in a lengthy ice dancing number set to “Bird on a Wire,” the sequences get more elaborate as the movie continues. The cast dives headfirst into the stellar choreography and dance coaching from Sandy Silva, Milena Todaro, and Siobhan Manson. The reflective and entertaining pauses created by these artistic asides break the depressive streak of the subject matter and become welcome performative indulgences.

If there’s a place where the morbid whimsy of Death of a Ladies’ Man sways slightly errantly, it’s in the middle section of the film. After getting his diagnosis and flaming out a bit professionally, Samuel O’Shea puts his life on pause to go back to his family’s oceanside cottage in the Galway area of Ireland to write the novel he never attempted earlier in his life. There, he meets a new tough cookie love interest in the form of Jessica Paré’s Charlotte Lefleur. While Samuel rediscovers a measure of his vigor amid the lovely photogenic excuse to show off the Emerald Isle’s rustic beauty for a movie, this portion of Bissonnette’s film feels like it’s a separate fantasy from a different era. It flatly clashes with the initial aim of presenting an older Lothario in modern, mature times.

LESSON #3: PUT YOUR FEELS TO A SOUNDTRACK--- Luckily, the intentionally curated selections of Leonard Cohen’s catalog lift everything about Death of a Ladies’ Man. After his debut caper film Looking for Leonard in 2002, Matt Bissonnette has had an unabashed soft spot for the Canadian crooner. Seven songs in total are included in this film, each transforming its respective scenes with surreal levity. Cohen’s poignant lyrics match wonderfully with the plot and add a twinkle in everyone’s eyes, especially Byrne’s. What could have been a morose, listless slog about a bitter whiner is energized into something of a soul-stirring seance in many layers and moments. If you’re taken away for 100 minutes to think about your life—what you’ve done and haven’t done—and what kind of man or person you want to be, one could do far worse than swoon to Gabriel Byrne and groove to Leonard Cohen.