(Credit: TIFF)

Quebec-based director and scriptwriter Stephane Lafleur is a perennial, prize-winning favourite at film festivals around the world. Known for excellence in everything from coming-of-age stories to quirky comedy dramas, as well as giving his film editing expertise to 20 years of excellent films such as the Oscar-nominated Monsieur Lazhar, Lafleur has established a solid reputation. With the French-language feature Viking premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival, Lafleur tries his hand at the unusual category of science-fiction comedy, pulling off an insightful, hilarious film that is part science spoof, part character study. 

The premise: the first manned mission to Mars is underway, and American organisers want to forestall any technical or human glitches. The project managers recruit a team of volunteers, each scientifically chosen to match the personality of one of the actual astronauts. These volunteers are kept in an underground duplicate of the Mars ship and asked to replicate the astronauts’ daily activities to foresee any personal conflicts or psychological problems that may arise with a team in space.

Director Lafleur was inspired when he saw a documentary about the Voyager interstellar probes. An exact duplicate of each probe was kept on earth in a laboratory, providing the means to identify and fix technical problems that may occur in space. It occurred to Lafleur that the same might be done with humans, with less predictable consequences. Spurred on by his admiration for great science fiction films over the years and moved by an impulse to play with and reconstruct their standard tropes, he joined forces with fellow writer Eric Boulianne to put together a script. 

The central character is David, played by popular stage and television actor Steve Laplante. A schoolteacher who is vaguely dissatisfied with his uneventful life, David is thrilled when he is chosen as one of the participants in the Viking Project. He is to enter the replica spaceship as the surrogate for aerospace engineer John Shepard, whose dignified and inspiring portrait hangs in David’s quarters, and live with four other surrogates for a period of two years. An excellent team of comic actors play the other four crewmen: actor and improv comic Fabiola Aladin; actor/director Larissa Corriveau; Hamza Haq; and popular television actor Denis Houle.

The story finds humour in contrast between David’s dreams of importance and influence in a significant scientific breakthrough and the dreary reality of the actual work. The screenwriters commented that this was a central theme: “one of the first things we agreed on is the concept of dreams and disappointment, expectations versus reality”. Much of the comedy centres on the contrast between the supposed glory of the Mars mission and the mundane tasks, pointless rules, and petty squabbles that take up more and more of the group’s time. Hoping to help forward scientific research, David instead spends a ludicrous amount of time dealing with bureaucratic trivia and debating sugar rations with the rest of the crew.

A consistently funny aspect of the film is the script’s zany but surprisingly apt vision of how NASA scientists would equip a mock spaceship and what sort of routine activities and data exchanges would be deemed helpful, subjecting the crew to bizarre and annoying rituals on a daily basis. The film also finds ways to parody even the serious aspects of a space mission. This starts with the crew’s introductory briefing, given by a purposely and inanely stereotyped American representing the fictional space agency, offering them a series of patriotic moments (including a random quote from Ronald Reagan) but little helpful information. The simulations of work on the Mars surface are particularly absurd, requiring the crew to don space suits and move crudely made fake versions of actual equipment around the perfectly tenable earth outside their bunker.

As the crew grow familiar with each other and their daily routine, the project’s overseers become a factor, investigating the team but also providing tidbits of information and dropping hints about the condition of the actual Mars crew. The story takes a twist, as both the crew and the audience are uncertain of whether the information is true or merely part of the study, whether the crew members are each receiving different data, and why. The script turns up nearly endless ways in which a small group of people can resent, fear, and practice quiet one-upmanship on one another while remaining outwardly cordial, as well as ways authority figures can subtly play with their minds. The comedy even takes aim at the original project itself, the optimistic effort to overcome human failings with absolute scientific precision, and the incongruities that can involve using serious sci-fi tropes as figures of fun. Even grandiose notions about the triumph of reaching other planets are made absurd with a well-aimed touch of realism here and there.

All the humour in Viking is entirely relatable; the crew’s problems, the minor breakdowns in discipline, and the constant decline into human pettiness are all the funnier for being perfectly believable. Perhaps its main source of humour is the way the purely scientific and logical tends to be swallowed up by human nature. The conclusion, in which David finally deals with his dreams and ambitions in the only way that makes sense to him, can only be described as distinctly down-to-earth.