Oscars 2024: Vincent René-Lortie On Honoring A Childhood Friend’s Final Days for ‘Invincible’

Léokim Beaumier-Lépine’s face carries immense weight, pain, and resilience throughout Vincent René-Lortie’s Live Action Film contender, Invincible. When you are in your early teenage years, you can see adulthood at the end of a very long tunnel. You don’t know when you will get there, but when it’s that close, you crave freedom non-stop. René-Lortie’s Invincible taps into the restlessness of youth, and, by extension, honors the legacy of a childhood friend.

**We have linked René-Lortie’s thoughtful film below. Please watch the film and then scroll up to read our interview.

After I watched René-Lortie’s film, I couldn’t shake Beaumier-Lépine’s performance. When his character, Marc-Antoine Bernier, is spending time with his family, we get the true sense of him being in his early teens. He is carefree and spends time with his sister, Justine. What we soon learn, though, is that Marc is on furlough from a juvenile detention facility, and his demeanor changes entirely when he is confined. Whenever Marc is around older people, his face hardens, and he looks older than his young, teenage years.

“You are the first person to tell me that he sometimes looks older in some scenes,” René-Lortie says. “Sometimes he looks mature–like a grown-up. It was my first live action narrative short film, so, for me, the process of finding him was very important. We took a few months to cast. Before I met Leokim, I wasn’t sure about him because he had a different haircut at the time, and he looked very young. As he entered the casting room, he was phenomenal, and I discovered that he was very close with his own emotions. For almost 2 months, we worked together and rehearsed, but we also changed the script a bit. It was his first movie in front of the camera, so, for both of us, it was important. He understood the character of Marc in a way that was very mature and intelligent. I appreciated that so much from him.”

When Marc enters the facility, he appears like a caged animal–we can almost feel his body shaking.

“The main thing about Marc is that he was very against grown-ups,” he says. “He would never listen to anyone that was older than him. “He got closer to his parents towards the end of his life. But when he entered the juvenile center, he saw an adversary in Luc. It’s like he was entering the ring with an enemy, and we knew that he was going to fight him.”

In one of Invincible‘s most powerful moments, Marc writes a poem as part of a school assignment. When he is asked to read it, he cannot look at anyone else in the room, and the teacher reads it alloud. Marc’s words signal his immense isolation and fear that he has for his own future: “There is the world I dream of and the one I live in/The illusion in the waves of immense freedom/So I keep swimming against the current in this dark infinite barren ocean.” Even though these words weren’t written by the real Marc, René-Lortie handles the moment with such delicacy and tenderness.

“Marc was a very creative and brilliant person,” René-Lortie says. “I wrote the poem with two friends. We looked at everything he did, including a letter he wrote before he passed away. We wanted this text to be as close as possible to the real Marc. We even rewrote it multiple times until the day of the shoot because it was challenging to capture. In a way, we also aimed for it to metaphorically reflect where he stood at that moment in his life. He allowed the teacher to read it because he wanted people to listen to him.

Invincible is bookended by the same moment shown in different perspectives. We open with Marc near the end of his rope, his stress and desperation dripping off his face. His mother calls him after she hears that he has fled from the facility. René-Lortie ends his film with the same conversation, and it was important to him to finish with Marc’s family since they are the ones grieving a big loss.

“Starting with the end was part of the script from the first draft,” he says. “I didn’t want the film to focus on how he passed away but rather on who he was. My intention was to get to know my friend better since I was so young when I knew him. It’s the same for the audience. Marc left a lot behind for his family and his sister, and there was a lot of pain for a long time. There were so many questions, so that’s why it ends with his sister and the candle in her hand. She truly wants to believe that her brother was invincible. We wanted to conclude with the family because that’s who we are with now. It’s about how we evolve with our grief.”

We ended our conversation thinking about Marc’s sister, Justine. Marc was surrounded by older, authoritative figures, but Justine looked at him in a way that gave Marc comfort.

“I think his relationship with his sister allowed him to be himself and allowed him to be close to his emotions,” René-Lortie muses. “He could breathe, and that’s why I wanted to start and finish with her. When this happened, she was so young, and she didn’t understand what was going on. From what she told me, she truly thought nothing could touch him. He was invincible to her.”

Being shortlisted was something beyond René-Lortie’s imagination. He set out to make a film about his friend, but, thanks to the mention, it means more people will discover Marc’s story.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbEqhKOGH-I