An Anglophone's Case Against Québécois Cinema

In the current issue of Cineaste, there's an article by Matthew Hays, titled "Bon Cop, Bad Cop [2006] and Canada's Two Solitudes," about the (relative) commercial success of Québécois cinema on its home turf, that while impressively researched and thoroughly readable, strikes one as myopic in its overall emphasis on box office returns (it's impossible not to think of Pauline Kael). Hays seems to dismiss Bon Cop, Bad Cop at the top of the article as "fromage," but nevertheless concludes by writing:

"Those behind Bon Cop, Bad Cop concede a sequel has been discussed. Perhaps next time around some of that elusive success can seep across the Québec border into the ROC [rest of Canada]. And all of Canada, not just one province, can enjoy the kind of robust, invigorating, popular cinema that Québec enjoys."

For the record, I found Bon Cop, Bad Cop unspeakably depressing--far from "invigorating"--but then I'm the guy looking for symbolism in Arrested Development re-runs, and thus have an innate resistance to the idea that any film, let alone one so nasty and unpleasant, "could be fun if you just make sure not to take any of it very seriously" (yes, this sentence was published in a magazine named Cineaste, which calls itself "America's leading magazine on the art and politics of the cinema"). And while I quite enjoyed Philippe Falardeau's Congorama (2006)--the best Canadain movie I saw last year overall (of nine) (1); Hays doesn't mention it--judging by the article, Québécois cinema is "robust" only insofar as people are going to see it, regardless of quality. As an example of the kind of good news the Québec film industry recieves on a near-weekly basis, Hays cites the box office success of Nitro (2007), a transparent knock-off of The Fast and the Furious (2000) (2), which in its opening weekend out-performed Hollywood blockbusters like Live Free or Die Hard and Ratatouille (both 2007).

While the article doesn't contain any information about Hays himself, including whether or not he's Québécois, his gloating over the moribund state of English-Canadian cinema (he makes the outrageous claim that Anglophone filmmakers are too wrapped up in self pity to appeal to broad national sentiments) seems indicative of an age-old rivalry between English and French Canada that does more to maintain the two solitudes than bring them together. What I find most dubious about the article is the underlying assumption that Canadian cinema should speak to a popular (provincial) Canadian audience rather than an international (cosmopolitan) auidence including Canadians. Peter Greenaway, the greatest of all British filmmakers (now based in Holland), likes to quote Gore Vidal's statement that only two hundred people in America read books: "You have to begin with that hard core of deeply engaged, deeply intrigued individuals." Not surprisingly, the best American directors, from Orson Welles to Nicholas Ray to Jim Jarmusch, tend to be more respected in Europe than at home; and while a friend of mine from China is just as crazy about the films of Jia Zhang-ke as I am, he's the exception rather than the rule (given Jia's long-take aesthetic, one imagines his work wouldn't fit comfortably in the mainstream anywhere on earth).

Among active Canadian directors, only five have international reputations, and while I wouldn't hesistate to say that David Cronenberg, Atom Egoyan and Guy Maddin are all world class filmmakers (that is, on par with the best of world cinema: Assayas, Haneke, Hou et al), and the one film I've seen by Michael Snow--Wavelength (1967), naturally (3)--is a masterpiece, Denys Arcand (whose work I don't know especially well) strikes me as a competent but unremarkable middlebrow entertainer. His Les Invasions barbares (2003) made me cry when I first encountered it at the Altantic film festival, in a packed theater that errupted into applause the second the film ended, but seeing it again the following summer while in Toronto, in a small second-run theater with only a handful of other people, I found it far less impressive. Compared with the other films that premiered at Cannes that year--including The Brown Bunny, Crimson Gold, Distant, Dogville, Elephant, Le Temps du loup and Young Adam, which only grow in resonance on second and third viewing--Arcand's clearly doesn't measure up.

If I had to pick my favorite Québécois film, it'd be an easy choice: Jean-Claude Lauzon's Léolo (1992) is one of those great films like The Night of the Hunter (1955) and Woman in the Dunes (1964) that seem to come completely out of left field and frighten away imitators. If one can spot the influence of other filmmakers on Lauzon's masterpiece, they're international rather than domestic (critics have cited Federico Fellini and François Truffaut) and so thoroughly assimilated that the film feels like the work of a director making his tenth feature rather than his second. (4) Less impressive though still worthy of mention are the first two features by the vastly underrated Denis Villenueve, Un 32 août sur terre (1998) and Maelström (2000), both loopy and unpredictable narratives about young women dealing with pregnancy. Ideally, Villeneuve should've found an international following and directed three more features by now; instead, what happened? Apparently nothing, apart from a two-minute short made with a cell phone. The Québec film industry, so good at marketing schlock to a domestic audience, seems incapable of either recognizing a major talent when they have one or selling them to an audience outside Québec. I rest my case again Québec's robust, invigorating, popular cinema.


Footnotes:
1. The other seven were Monkey Warfare (which I might recommend for the performances by Don McKellar and Tracy Wright, even though the film falls apart completely in the final stretch), three I walked out on--Black Eyed Dog, Delivrez-moi, Tales of the Rat Fink--and three more I should've walked out on: The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, Snow Cake and Un dimanche à Kigali. After an acquaintance, to whom I recommended Congorama, reported back to me that it was just "arlight," I had to reconsider my enthusiasm for the film; I realized that I was probably overrating it because it was Canadian, and therefore went in with lowered expectations. I suspect if the film were made in France or Belgium, I wouldn't have been nearly as impressed.
2. I haven't seen Nitro, so I'm basing this statement on the advertising campaign.
3. Some critics have argued that if Snow had used a loft in Toronto or Montréal rather than New York, the film wouldn't have had nearly so large an impact.
4. Lauzon's first feature, Night Zoo (1987), while unsuccessful and far less interesting, is not an experience I'll ever forget--particularly, the film's final scene in which the hero and his father break into a Montréal zoo in the middle of the night to hunt elephants. After Léolo, Lauzon retired from filmmaking; he died five years later in a plane crash.