Glenn Gould’s cult status makes it hard for the would-be objective critic, compelled to fight his way through a tangled thicket of hero-worship and self-conscious idiosyncrasy. Gould hardly wore his genius lightly and the title of this strange film comes from his belief that since the present is so repellent there must surely be a hereafter. Certainly Monsaingeon is happy to indulge many neurotic and obsessive admirers for whom Gould possessed a godlike pre-eminence. And whether you are watching Lia Barbara’s colloquy with Gould’s statue in Toronto, Nathasha Gugina’s propaganda as she attempts to “Gouldalise” those who do not share her neurosis, several other half-crazy young women from England, Sweden and Japan, and another who bares her bulging midriff to reveal a tattooed tribute, you are aware of an ever-blossoming status similar to that accorded the Beatles, James Dean and Princess Diana.

Gould’s early retirement from concert-giving and his decision to devote himself exclusively to recording is castigated by Menuhin, for whom the live concert is sacred. For Gould a mosaic of takes, often extending over many years, was a musical ideal, the result an “event” of permanent and defiant importance. Detesting audiences (“a source of poison”), he disdained human warmth and communication outside the studio, though later we see him singing and gesticulating before a startled herd of elephants.

True, there are valuable previously unavailable examples of Gould’s playing, with dazzling flights through Chopin (the second Etude), Weber and Hindemith, but the overall impression is of true genius diluted by perversity. As for Gould’s recorded legacy, it provides a no less bewildering mix of the eccentric and the transcendental. For one critic his reading of Beethoven’s Op 109 Sonata was “hysterical, sentimental, a shambles without real stature”, but for others such oddity was spirited away in a cloud of incense.