The Greatest Artist Who Never Lived

“We often went submarine,” an ex-lover says of her vanished beau, the much-discussed subject of “Missing Victor Pellerin.” They would stock up on groceries and hole up together, the lithe 30-something dancer says in subtitled Quebecoise, and “shut everything. We didn’t want light coming in.” This new Canadian film, palying now at the Pioneer Theater, attempts to illuminate the size of the creative vacuum that Victor’s sudden departure to parts unknown left in Montreal’s art scene by putting the spotlight on the people who knew him.To hear the home folks talk, Victor Pellerin embodied everything good about self-expression. An art critic expounds about the rebellious energy that Victor’s work radiated. His fellow artists rhapsodize about the glory days when Victor held court in the café society of Montreal’s smock set. When Victor told a story, one comrade says with pride, the barman would become so enthralled that he would have to set down his rag to listen. Even an ostensible rival admits that Victor’s charisma was “like dope. One taste and you’re hooked.”Breathless superlatives beget yet more superlatives. Victor didn’t just cultivate “the romantic image of the 19th century artist,” as one fan and friend offers, he was apparently a kind of aesthetic Zorro, swooping down and leaving his mark on the corrupt Canadian painting establishment when he was least expected. Alternately creative and destructive, Victor stormed the Bastille of artistic complacency with such élan, his friends say, that even those gallery owner philistines in Toronto couldn’t help but love him.Before he pulled his disappearing act, Victor burned each and every one of his highly regarded and highly prized canvases. His art is gone, but clearly Victor’s legacy remains.What also quickly becomes clear in “Missing Victor Pellerin” is that writer-director Sophie Deraspe’s docu-whatsit is a forgery, and that Victor Pellerin never really existed. Though her cast is made up mostly of genuine Canadian creative movers and shakers playing themselves, Victor is a figment of her ample imagination. Ms. Deraspe’s enthusiastic, loosely woven false-history takes her and us to Paris, where Victor’s sister and surrogate brother reveal that his real name was Luc Gautier and that he was raised in mining camps in South America. Back home in Montreal, a local police inspector explains to Ms. Deraspe (when not awkwardly flirting with her) that Victor was an artist first and an art forger second. He’s not just a missing person, the cop says before asking the filmmaker out for a drink — Victor’s a wanted man.Eventually a gaggle of characters and the film crew gather and “go submarine” in a cabin in the French Canadian woods for a sybaritic on-camera Victor think tank. Together they do drugs, play soccer in the rain, cheer an unspecified revolution, and have a game of spin the bottle that escalates into a stoned combination of a truth-or-dare session and a climactic “who killed who” scene from an Agatha Christie novel.Though the film’s thesis — that “the art world’s a hoax” — doesn’t emerge from anyone’s mouth until late in the film, that point is abundantly clear by about the 15-minute mark. Ms. Deraspe has shot and edited the film skillfully and she, and everyone else in it, is interesting to look at if not downright gorgeous. Unfortunately, outside of that central point about art, there isn’t all that much going on underneath the movie’s glossy surfaces, fakeumentary zoom stick camera gags, narrative gamesmanship, and attractive smoking, drinking, and reminiscing faces.“Missing Victor Pellerin” is propelled by dialogue full of definitive descriptions and ironclad metaphors for everything. But the uniform cadence and structure of each interviewee’s speech reveals a unity borne of a single typewriter, not a multi-layered mosaic portrait made of different people’s individual experience of the same person. As the people on screen narrate Victor’s life and describe his impact, they share plenty of made-up facts about the man and about their relationships with him. But what’s not on the tip of anyone’s tongue are the kinds of character defining dramatic truths that slip out by accident in real documentaries or grow out of script and performance in better-written and acted dramas.Everyone who Victor’s imaginary life touched pines for the live wire iconoclasm that has been absent from their world since Victor vanished. But what’s really missing from “Missing Victor Pellerin” is the transcendent alchemy of subtext.Through May 8 (155 E. 3rd St., between avenues A and B, 212-254-3300).

The Greatest Artist Who Never Lived

The Greatest Artist Who Never Lived

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