Liverpool

Ten years after her breakthrough film La Turbulence des Fluides Manon Briand mixes 60s style with Internet-era activism in her third feature, the romantic comedy-thriller Liverpool. Émilie (Stéphanie Lapointe) is a coat-check girl in a popular nightclub, where she watches others have fun, night after night; Thomas (Charles-Alexandre Dubé) is a computer nerd with a megabyte crush on her, hampered by an inability to interact with people in the real world. When a female patron is rushed to a hospital for a drug overdose, Émilie finds a hotel room key in her jacket pocket and decides to investigate. She gets mistaken for the mysterious woman, Clara Miller—who, it turns out, is not Clara Miller, either. The real Clara Miller is in big trouble, but is nowhere to be found.

It’s not long before Thomas and Émilie are on the run, and on a roll. The plot involves: a father trying to reconnect with his long-lost daughter, cartoonish bad-guy bikers, a big business ploy to dump electronic waste in Third World countries and the rallying power of the Internet. This last, prescient thread is Briand’s biggest coup. The film’s climactic scenes of young people rising up for every cause under the sun (including a flash mob) evoke uncanny parallels to Quebec’s student protests.