Crazy for trying...

The title of Jean-Marc Vallée's C.R.A.Z.Y. (2005) pulls double duty. It's most obviously a reference to the Patsy Cline/Willie Nelson song, which finds multiple iterations on the film's soundtrack. The way it's punctuated, though, indicates that it's an acronym, consisting of the first letters of the names of the five brothers whom the movie is about. They are: Christian, Raymond, Antoine, Zach, and Yvan. The film itself is primarily interested in only two of the brothers: Raymond (Pierre-Luc Brillant), a drugged out, burned out fuck-up, and especially Zach (Marc-André Grondin), who struggles from early childhood with his sexuality, and with their father, Gervaise (Michel Côté). The main conflicts in the movie are fueled by Zach's denial of his own homosexuality, and by his father's intransigence when it comes to accepting anything that might be tainted with a gay brush. We experience the movie from Zach's point of view. He narrates the film, and we are privy to his vision of the world and his fantasies about how he would prefer the world to be. On a basic level, the narrative of C.R.A.Z.Y. is kind of banal. It's a queer coming of age story. It covers twenty years of Zach's life, from birth to adulthood. The relationships between Zach and his brothers and between Zach and his father follow well-trodden queer narratives. And that's fine, I guess, because what the movie lacks in narrative originality, it more than makes up for it with both its cinematic elan and its tendency to completely blow up those well worn tropes in unexpected ways.

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