Inspired by a short story by Jack London, The Steak paints a striking portrait of Gaétan Hart at the moment when the boxer, in his late thirties, is preparing to step back into the ring after a six-year hiatus. The Falardeau–Leriche duo films the man in his modest daily life—from a construction site to an adult education classroom, by way of a roadside hotel room—during his training and in a bout against Michel Galarneau. In a rare appearance before a camera, he speaks, with disarming authenticity, about his path as a self-taught man and about his vision of life with great lucidity and pragmatism.

Anyone who has read Falardeau—whom we hear off camera conducting the interview with Hart—knows how great his passion for the world of boxing was. An admirer of Fat City (John Huston, 1972), a fiction film with beat overtones about a down-and-out amateur boxer, the filmmaker also often spoke of his fascination with the seminal short film Golden Gloves (Gilles Groulx, 1961). Placed as an epigraph to The Steak, London’s quote about his interest in “primitives” could moreover sum up the essence of Falardeau’s relationship (and very likely that of his co-director) to social classes.

Driven by a jazz score by Robert Leriche, The Steak casts a humanistic and perceptive gaze on a demanding, precise, and sometimes fundamentally beautiful sport—a discipline that is in reality far removed from “what the already-dead moralists consider barbarism¹.” 

Jean-Philippe Desrochers
Critic

¹ Pierre Falardeau, “Le noble art,” in Les bœufs sont lents mais la terre est patiente, VLB Éditeur, Montreal, 1999, p. 198.