Final Rating: 3/5
Et maintenant? (What Now?), a Franco-Ontarian drama, is the latest from director Jocleyn Forgues. It follows the journey of Paul (Pierre Paul Alain) an aspiring singer/songwriter who is diagnosed with tongue cancer. This puts a huge dent in his plans to tour the east coast with his band and finally branch out beyond the small venues they’re accustomed to.
To compound matters, he needs the money the tour would bring in as his father (Jean Pearson) is in a long term care facility dealing with dementia and he’s helping to cover the costs. In order to pay for this he was going to fix up his dad’s old house and flip it, but given his condition this work is now put on the back burner, meaning he can’t get the money for the assisted living facility.
At his doctors urging, he begins undergoing treatment and soon befriends his health care nurse Mike (Vlad Alexis) and the transportation volunteer (Debbie Lynch-White) who lost her husband to brain cancer and has worked at the hospital ever since. This forms the core of the narrative, as like many in the genre it charts his ups and downs, and the chaos that a diagnosis like this thrusts the patient and all those in the orbit into. The cast has solid chemistry and play off each other well, with moments of humour and heart interjected to help solidify that bond.
As he starts radiation and chemo, he tries to soldier on and fight through the exhaustion that comes along with it and practice with the band, as well as write new material. His long-time friend and band mate Dave (Mathieu Bourassa) worries about his condition and what this means for the band, and the tour, but at first is willing to let him try. However, as time progresses it becomes more and more obvious it’s not going to work. Speaking of work, his day job as a home builder relieves him of his duties as he can’t be relied on, through no fault of his own, but this is simply a reality of this insidious disease.
Before long the band replaces Paul without informing him, with the assurance it’s only temporary, as they can’t cancel the tour on such short notice. These compounding struggles are all a textbook screenwriting example rooting influences, in this case piling as much hardship on our antagonist as possible in order to generate empathy and therefore invest in their journey. It’s much like his treatment itself, where he’s left wondering how much more he can take. We as an audience want him to fight, as his new friends encourage him to do so and, as you’d imagine, it’s about finding things to fight for that drive us.
It certainly tries to play on our emotions, often not subtle in doing so, which goes with the archetype of the genre, but never gets to the point of being too saccharine. The plot and tropes it leans on are certainly familiar within the genre, (learning who our real friends are, the emotional struggles, discussions of one’s bucket list, a care taker taking their patient out for some fun only to see it backfire and face being reprimanded, the heartlessness of the medical system, etc…) and don’t do much in the way of pushing the envelope, or offering much new.
However, the performances help to keep it engaging and the viewer invested. It’s the sort of movie that deals with a heavy subject matter that has unfortunately touched all our lives, but not so bleak as to feel dark, so will have that resonance regardless of where you come at it from.
Et maintenant? was seen during the 2026 International Film Festival of Ottawa.
