Courtesy of Lou Scramble; Thomas Niedermueller/WireImage
The Canadian auteur rarely strays from a fixed-camera tableau and socially distanced characters on screen, even though his 13th film has been six years in the making, well before the COVID-19 crisis.
Denis Cotes absurdist French language comedy
Social Hygiene opens with a wide shot of Antonin, a philosopher-cum-petty thief, standing in a field more than two meters from his long-suffering sister Solvieg in a scene dominated by a lush Quebec countryside.
But with with his Berlin Encounters sidebar film, the Canadian director rarely departs from a fixed-camera composition, where Antonin and five women who are forever after his neck including his wife, a pink-suited tax collector and a young woman who wants her stolen computer returned always stand at a distance to one another and never get close up physically.