[1] The film centres on the mystery of Victor Pellerin, a visual artist from Montreal who burned all of his art and disappeared in 1990, on the occasion of a 2005 gallery show exhibiting artwork by other figures who had been influenced by him.
[2] The cast consists principally of real figures in Montreal's arts scene playing fictionalized versions of themselves, including Eudore Belzile, Élisabeth Legrand, Anne Lebeau, Éric Devlin, Olga Korper, Julien Poulin, Alain Lacoursière, Mathieu Beauséjour, Sheila Ribeiro, Sylvain Bouthillette, Maria-Luisa Fernandes, Plastik Patrick and Jean-Frédéric Messier.
Ultimately, nothing is offered as what it seems, a suitably foggy philosophical state for a missing person mystery set in the over-inflated, scam-ridden art market of the 1980s.
You may find yourself on to Missing Victor Pellerin's own game long before it's over, but that shouldn't prevent you from enjoying the either the skill with which its played or appreciate the legitimacy of the con itself.
Brilliantly, then, Deraspe plugs into three traits in the viewing audience: (1) our gullibility, born of our uncertainty about who's who in this incestuous but reputedly important enclave; (2) our unwillingness to admit to that naiveté, to what we don't know; and (3) our instinctive responsiveness to cozy stereotypes (the tortured artist) and to easy conventions (the standard-issue doc about the tortured artist).