Let’s be honest: a film featuring a serial onanist (albeit for compensation), 500-odd children and a class action lawsuit has the makings of a sensationalist, not terribly sensitive romp, no? So it is to the credit of Ken Scott, writer/director of the new French-Canadian film, Starbuck, that from these unprepossessing beginnings he worked out something with a very tender core.
David Wozniak has avoided growing up, despite the best efforts of everyone around him. He works, not particularly diligently, as a deliveryman for his father’s butcher business. He is the butt of his brother’s scorn; fellow employees treat him with that mixture of affection and condescension usually reserved for the feeble minded or terminally feckless.
His is very much of the latter category. His girlfriend Valerie, a police officer, is pregnant but has well-founded reservations about his future role in the life of the child; one imagines she would be even more circumspect if she knew that local heavies were leaning on him to repay an $80,000 debt. Or that his bright idea for raising the cash involved a spot of home gardening – the sort that requires spotlights and hydroponic equipment, most certainly not within either the spirit or the letter of the law.
But these relatively trivial inconveniences fade into insignificance when one day he finds a lawyer in his house. Many years ago, David had volunteered himself to science – or, to be more precise, his sperm for cold hard cash. Somehow, 533 conceptions took place on his watch: 142 of the little Davids and Davidinas, now in their late teens and early 20s, have joined a class action lawsuit to force the clinic to reveal his identity. Fight or flee? Given David’s antecedents, both seem like plausible options. But the enforced paternity strikes an unexpected chord, and he rises to the occasion – again, if you’ll excuse the pun – in a glorious way…
Starbuck (David’s nom de guerre, incidentally) is played primarily in comedic chords. It’s one that can easily go very very wrong – take the collected oeuvre of Adam Sandler for example. But Patrick Huard’s David has a very genuine amiability. One can easily see oneself giving the cheerful bumbler with a good heart more leeway that he necessarily deserves. His best mate and lawyer, played by Antoine Bernard, lends a slight hard edge to proceedings – for reasons of understandable self-preservation, David decides to fight the attempt to expose him as the world’s most prolific wanker. But Bernard (who, oddly enough, is credited as the anonymous “avocat”: this could either be an alternative spelling for advocate, a lawyer, or a reference to the word avocation, taking up a hobby outside one’s main profession. I’m not sure what to make of this, either way…) also de-sentimentalises parenthood in a way that only the parent of a small child can do without being accused of misanthropy.
But there are healthy lashings of sentimentality too. David’s back story involves an absent mother; her death when he was still at an impressionable age no doubt feeds into his psychological make up. Which is, by no stretch of the imagination, absolutely sound. “What would a normal person do in this situation?” he asks his father. “A normal person wouldn’t be in this situation,” the long-suffering family patriarch replies.
Starbuck is by no means the perfect film. There are too many narrative holes – how does a person get to owe $80,000, anyway? – and the orchestral score lays it on a bit too thickly at times. But despite the quite obvious linkage to the more salacious aspects of our thinking (be honest: what comes to mind when you try to imagine someone fathering 500-odd kids through a sperm bank?) Starbuck works well because it allows the audience to laugh with, rather than laugh at, its protagonist. It charms precisely for this reason, and the only other thing I should say is that I cannot hold out much hope for the proposed English language remake currently on the cards. Hollywood is rarely good at marking out the distinction between the one and the other.
Starbuck will be released in Israel on Thursday, April 18, 2013.
Starbuck (2011, 109 min, French with English and Hebrew subtitles)
Written and Directed by Ken Scott, Starring Patrick Huard, Antoine Betrand, Julie LeBreton
