Un hiver au soleil

Lit professor and adventurer Maryse Holder was an aspiring novelist who, instead of writing, fired salvos from the front lines of the sexual revolution. Like a latter-day Malcolm Lowry, Holder found self-knowledge through her own self-destruction in Mexico, where she was murdered while on a bender (drugs, booze, sex - you name it) in 1978.

While Holder's posthumously published collection of letters, Give Sorrow Words, is not quite the literary caliber of Under the Volcano, it shocks with the acutely observed, scandalous wisdom of a decadent who lived life most passionately when she embraced death.

These letters are the basis of the brooding and extraordinary A Winter Tan, which may very well be the first epistolary movie.

As Holder, actress Jackie Burroughs (who, with four fellow Canadians, co- directed this unforgettable film) pours out Holder's 180-proof letters straight, no chaser. A sinewy androgyne with leathery skin and a raspy whine, Burroughs is so intense that she's almost impossible to look at.

Paradoxically, it's her intensity - call it raw nerve or exposed nerve or anything you like - that makes it impossible to look away. As Holder, Burroughs spends the movie engaging the camera as though it were her best friend to whom she's writing, talking of her appetites - for Mexican men, resort scenery, alcohol. Frequently she indulges them. She seizes male prerogatives - and expects to be punished for them because she's a woman.

Rarely have an actress and her material been so dynamically matched.