The relationship between an artist-photographer and a 14-year-old boy provides the basis for this semi-documentary set in the bohemian section of Montreal. The actors use their real names, and much of the story is improvised as it follows the friendship between the two. When the boy's parents (the actor's real parents) begin to get suspicious as to the nature of the relationship, they begin trying to break it up.Full of equivocal relationships, "Montreal Main" constructs a world of moral ambivalence. On one level, it is a love story, exploring, as Natalie Edwards wrote at the time, " the diversity of sexuality, the shades and shifts lying inherent and unacknowledged in all people." On another level, it extends outwards towards allegory—towards a philosophical investigation of the world. Fragmented in style, swish-panning its way from close-up to close-up, Erich Bloch's camerawork creates a sense of hysterical excitement. Re-enforcing the improvisational nature of the action, the grab-shot technique suggests a world in which attention is uncertain and perception unclear. Lacking parsable narrative sequences, the style perfectly parallels the feelings of isolation that a clutch of gays might have felt at the time in a straight world or that Anglophones might have felt within a culture that was becoming insistently francophone.
