For lonely and troubled Canadian teenager Billy Poulin the video camera became the friend he never had when Lawrence Côté-Collins put him in the frame, inadvertently recording his worries, outbursts of anger and deep-rooted confusion and sadness. Years later, after he has been jailed for murder, the footage she [Lawrence] shot offers a striking insight into the inner turmoils of a young man whose life had taken the darkest of turns.
“I want to be somebody new,” says Billy, dressed up with woolly hat and sporting a snowy fake moustache, into his camera. This is the opening for Lawrence Côté-Collins’ compassionate delve into the life of Billy, a journey made all the more intriguing given they were friends as young short-film makers, separated after he assaulted her, but then brought together again after he asked her to view his old video footage after he was arrested.
Without knowing it, he had documented all aspects of his lonely, addictive youth, his desire for fiction and his interest in violence. But thanks to the friendship and support of Côté-Collins, that self-same material is absorbed into this film about Billy, allowing him to see and even understand himself.
Early footage from 2002 sees him talking to the camera as he rolls a joint. ”I have no friends,” he says. “I smoke pot. I’m almost out of cash. I have nothing to do. I’m bored. Sometimes I wonder if I can be natural on camera,” adding that he is “a loser”.
The film initially intercuts brief footage of Côté-Collins as well as material from news broadcasts of when he was arrested in 2012 for his involvement in the deaths of two people, as well as video from police interviews as Billy wears a white jumpsuit and is patiently questioned about what happened.
In her voiceover, Côté-Collins says she met Billy in 2008 at Kino Montreal with other wannabe filmmakers making short films. “We all thought he was a bit weird, but people like that are par for the course,” she says. “We made a short film called Pas de Pain, Pas de Gain, which brought us closer.” But after a short film screening in 2010 there was an incident.
“We were partying pretty hard,” she says. “Smoking in an alley next to the bar. And Billy accosted me. He grabbed my wrists really hard. He pushed me against the brick wall to kiss me by force. He was scaring me. He was squeezing my wrists really hard. I screamed and fought back. I managed to push him off me and I ran away. It really came out of nowhere.”
She didn’t report it (she had been assaulted before and had poor experience with the legal system), so just unfriended Billy on Facebook. “He became more and more violent,” she says. “Some people [were] scared of him and we stopped inviting him to parties. He left Montreal in 2011 and went back to Matane, his hometown.” In 2012 she saw he had been arrested and linked with the two deaths – he is accused of the murder of Bruno Desrosiers and the involuntary homicide of Ghislain Bellavance. Subsequently he pleaded guilty for a life sentence, with conditional release after 11 years.
In 2022 she got an email from Audrey Poulin, Billy’s sister, who had received a telegram from Billy haying he needed friends and role models. “I had watched all news segments and that is where I learned Billy was schizophrenic.” She managed to call him, confronted him about the incident with her and they discussed their mutual descent into alcoholism.
He later asks her to get the film material he stashed in a suitcase from a friend’s attic. “I had a front row seat to Billy’s past,” she says, and uses this material as the backbone for Billy, with footage providing a collage of his life, set alongside TV archive and occasionally trippy animation to help link the narrative. “He understood he was sick and needed to address responsibility for the deaths,” she says, “and thinks the film can make a difference.”
She even visits him in prison to record material about his life there. A few months after the prison shoot he goes to parole board. Released from prison they watch the film together and he records a message “to ask forgiveness for what I did.”
He says: “While those homicides were an accident, I am to blame for those people’s deaths – I’m not crazy, I’m sick. I know I’ll suffer from schizophrenia my whole life. I’m remorseful and ashamed. I’m sad. I regret it. So many people who don’t deserve to suffer are suffering because of me. I know you never get over a death…I was so ravaged by illness it took two victims for society to notice how serious my situation was. I needed to be committed.”
“I wasn’t made to kill. It was never my intention…my violence came out of nowhere. I was at the end of my rope then. Overwhelmed, drowning in my hallucinations,” he adds.
Though perhaps the film runs a little too long and can be a little repetitive, Billy is also a deeply compassionate and rather unique film which attempts to deconstruct mental illness with genuine understanding. It is an overwhelmingly sad story with Billy’s film material offering challenging insight into the mind of a troubled and tormented young man, but it is also testimony to Lawrence Côté-Collins’s willingness to face her own demons and help in a way only she as a filmmaker could.
Canada, 2024, 107mins
Dir: Lawrence Côté-Collins
Production: LC2 Productions
Producers: Vuk Stojanovic, Lawrence Côté-Collins
Cinematography: Lawrence Côté-Collins
Editors: Alexandre Leblanc, Josiane Lapointe, Lawrence Côté-Collins
Music: Martin Roy, Luc Sirois
