Currie's Dilemma
2018 · 5m · Canada
Directed by Philippe Baylaucq
Genres: biography, historical, war
Tones: contemplative, tense
Sir Arthur Currie, commander of the Canadian Corps, weighs whether to commit his men to the perilous Canal du Nord crossing in dramatized archival footage.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A five-minute historical re-enactment of a war general's internal monologue—it's exactly the kind of prestige-doc formula that puts me to sleep, even if the Canal du Nord crossing did matter. Where's the reversal, the formal ambush, the thing that makes you question why we're watching this at all?
Baylaucq's restraint in staging Currie's deliberation within dramatized archival space shows real formal intelligence—the tension between documentary gravity and theatrical reconstruction creates a dialogue with how we memorialize military command. It's the kind of disciplined historical essay that lingers at a programmer's table.
The decision to layer Currie's voice over bodies in period costume rather than casting a talking head—that compression of interiority into silhouette—does something economical and haunting on a five-minute budget that a bigger production would've wasted on period detail.