Tag Archives: Quebec

Arts & Entertainment, Film & TV

“Camion” and a Québecois Poetics of the Masculine

Keep track of all The SunBreak’s festival coverage on our SIFF 2013 page.

Canadian director Rafaël Ouellet has lived in Montréal for close to two decades, but for his fourth feature film, Camion (available on iTunes), he returned to his home village in the province of Québec: Dégelis, juste à côté de New Brunswick, a study in ochres and umbers at twilight. He was motivated by something like the kind of skin-pinching nostalgia you see in Edward Burns’ Brothers McMullen or Ted Demme’s Beautiful Girls — like trying to fit into that old band T-shirt you’ve outgrown. Now in his early 30s, he’s in a position to honor the manual-labor lifestyle there without sentimentalizing about it.

Ouellet studied film editing at school, and went on to direct for TV; though he’s broken into film, he continues to work in both worlds. He’ll direct a TV series this summer and a movie in the winter. He’s also working on a fictional documentary about just-graduated high school seniors to shoot in 2014 or 2015.

While parts of Camion (which means “truck” in French) fit the fictional-documentary mold — Ouellet’s father drove a truck, as does the father played by Julien Poulin — other sources of inspiration are local to the Northwest. A musical touchstone for Ouellet is the Portland band Richmond Fontaine, whose work first dropped into Ouellet’s lap out of an issue of Uncut Magazine, on one of those free compilation CDs. (He ended up buying the song for use in his earlier film Derrière Moi.) Through Willy Vlautin’s songs, he discovered the fiction of Raymond Carver, which he offers as an influence on Camion.

You see Carver everywhere then: in Poulin’s grizzled truckdriver’s slow disintegration following a fatal collision; in Samuel’s (Patrice Dubois) stultifying janitorial job, comparing paint shades as a tinny voice recites a to-do list through ear buds; in Samuel’s wastrel brother Alain (Stephane Breton) and his (serial, you suspect) womanizing, somehow accomplished by reciting poetry in bars. Just as you rarely summit the transcendent moment in Carver, Ouellet’s film contents itself with gentle curves and slight hills. Samuel picks up on a strange tone is a voicemail from his dad Germain, and collecting Alain from a new embrace, they head back home to head off anything serious.

I told Ouellet (over juice at Uptown Espresso, during a SIFF screening that day) that, with Germain in a depressed state, it was difficult to imagine the person he was before, but Ouellet responded that you could, in fact, pick something up from what you see. Germain is a member of that generation of men no one knows that much about: “Silent guys expressing themselves through their work,” as Ouellet put it. “He talks about his sons to other people, more than to them.” What’s alarming then is Germain’s sudden urge to retire, to junk his truck — the brothers can’t get their heads around it.

Produced for close to $1.5 million, Camion opens with Germain and his old rig, hauling logs through the hills. The camera inspects the truck, how it’s loaded, the way Germain ties the logs down. Then — with a stuntman driving the druck at a remote-control car, driven by a following car — there is a bone-jarring impact and the car spins away, the truck jolting forward and off the shoulder. When the EMTs arrive, the camera inspects them, too — their equipment, their masks, the shield they use to protect the body of a stretcher from view. There’s no way to truly put the audience into Germain’s place, but Ouellet captures the shock of it.

The rest of the film stitches together smaller moments: Alain’s gentle harassment of Germain into keeping busy with chores, Alain and Samuel playing video games while Germain listens from his bed, Samuel’s excruciating, compulsive reunion with an old flame that ends with an epic bloody nose requiring an ER visit; Alain’s recounting of the beating that crippled his arm. They argue briefly, but being family don’t push it too far. The two sons go hunting with Germain, though it’s clear they aren’t hunters themselves. Alain takes it into his head to at least fix Germain’s old truck for him. Gradually, all three become unstuck, though you couldn’t say precisely what did it. There’s no determinative scene, no star-making monologue, no lacerating repartée.

What there is is a feeling of slapped-around humanity reviving itself. On their way down, Alain puts on Richmond Fontaine’s “I Fell into Painting Houses in Phoenix, Arizona,” which he’s semi-translating for Samuel. It’s about how the house-painting crew boss would pick up Mexican day workers, promise them pay end of week, and then stiff them, picking up laborers from a new spot next week. The narrator says that while he’d never thought of himself as anything special — “I ain’t shit,” is specifically what he drawls — he knew better than that and quit. Alain is in raptures over this, replaying the line for his disinterested brother.

And it really is a line — one that marks the worth of a human being as a human being.

Arts & Entertainment, Theatre

Point-Counterpoint: What’s Julie Andrée T. Up To at On The Boards?

Julie Andrée T. in Rouge

Stefan: Rouge (through May 6 at On the Boards; tickets) starts out full of promise. The stage at is all but bare. A few wires hang from the ceiling and stretch across the space. Wide rolls of paper are set up on high stands, their contents neatly spooled out toward the audience. A large black trunk waits nearby. This is a space full of possibility. Before the houselights go down a hush falls on the audience as Julie Andrée T. walks out on stage. Her eyes feign innocence and her manner is casual. Clearly she is up to something. But what it is that she’s up to is not remotely clear.

Rouge may move some, but this is pretty varsity as performance art goes and may frustrate or bore all but the most honestly artier-than-thou. Julie Andrée T. does not work for her audience. She does not fear our boredom or disgust. She does not pander to our desire for play or beauty. Narrative building is unheard of in this world. There are moments of extraordinary elegance mixed in with the general louche vulgarity. Julie Andrée T. inspires determined chuckles scattered around the audience. The emotional associations with the color provide some provocation and viscera are never far from the mind. At times she seems like an ADD kid let loose on the set of a commercial for Target.

There are times when the repeated phrase–“What color is this?”–loses its syntax, thus changing its meaning, but mostly the phrase just loses its meaning. Intense sound kills the audience response. The performance keeps its distance. Its structure and scoring don’t crave sustained intimacy but the presence of the live performer begs for constant attention. The abortive moments, which are used to cram as much stuff as possible into the piece, determinedly fail to reciprocate the audience’s attention. It comes to feel like a logrolling contest between Julie Andrée T. and the audience: if we don’t retrace our steps at top speed we are sure to be left behind. Julie Andrée T. has compared Rouge to channel surfing. This seems apt.

MvB: I’m such a determinist that when I hear that an artist is from Québec, I anticipate rebellion, and look for coded rebel-talk. Julie Andrée T. isn’t all that coded, but her Rouge does require you to remember that it’s called Rouge, and to wonder why, then, she insists on using the word “red.” Imagine this work performed anywhere in Québec–with its secessionists and general prickliness about assumptive English address–and then her soliciting the audience to agree with her that “this” is “red” will regain its provocation. A Native American gone to a “white” school will know what she means. Other Americans? I think it may slide right past. Of course it’s red. What else could it be?

It’s not just a question of a word, it’s about colonization of the spirit, the inability to articulate in your own words what’s wrong. So Julie Andrée T. turns to her body, often, to express pre-verbally a panoply of responses, at varying levels of comprehension. At the outset, she might be a little girl obediently, naively, taking in language instruction. But then she–and the audience–are forced through a linear tube of conformity.

The question is repeated: “What color is this?” It’s pre-school, it’s a signifier of knowledge (Yes, you know what the right answer is!), it becomes a nagging question, it’s fully annoying, you become entangled with your preoccupation with its Orwellian preoccupation with you. You try to subvert it, you piss on it, you notice how you’ve internalized it, how you can’t avoid it, because just holding up a red object brings “red” to mind. Every aspect of your life is described in an alien term. You can’t have sex in your own language.

There’s a Franco-clownishness to Julie Andrée T.’s performance (at one point, she’s wearing a red nose) that combines pathos with a giggle at the absurd. She is letting loose on “Target”–applying graffiti, reframing it. It’s the prerogative of a minority to dislike being logrolled by the majority, and to say so (or moon you). But as the performance goes on, she’s more and more fatigued, more lacerating. Later, she recruits Native Americans through imagery, perhaps as a paradigm of unbending (but bent) resistance. You don’t have to be Québecois to appreciate this struggle to be authentic, not to be painted over.

It may seem a small point, “red.” But in Julie Andrée T.’s hands, it explodes and gets all over everything. It’s a credit to her that Rouge isn’t a polemic–it’s too artistically open for that. You can think of artistic resistance either way: cast as resistance, cast as art. It’s a shift in the lighting. Rouge is about the color red, about physicality, sexuality, carnality, the nexus of visceral association that marketing is so fond of hijacking. But it also tries to remind you that it’s not a word. It’s yours.

Arts & Entertainment, Film & TV

At the Northwest Film Forum, Xavier Dolan Showcases the Heartbeats of Cinema

I love Xavier Dolan. He’s a (nearly) twenty-two-year-old gay Quebecois auteur, and I’m…none of those things. But he’s always my go-to guy whenever some fellow film geek wants to discuss up-and-coming directors.  Dolan’s got the wunderkind cred, as his first two films showed at Cannes, his first in 2009.  Both Josh and I enjoyed his audacious semi-autobiographical debut I Killed My Mother at SIFF last year.  I think that’s the better of his two releases, but it only ended up doing the film festival circuit, as an American distribution deal was set, but nothing ever came of it.  It ain’t even on Netflix, yo!

But now you’ve got your chance to get a dose of Dolan. His second film Heartbeats–though the directly-translated title Imaginary Lovers is much more on the nose–is running at the Northwest Film Forum twice nightly (7 p.m., 9:15 p.m.) tonight through next Thursday. Here’s what I had to say, upon seeing the film at last fall’s Toronto International Film Festival: Continue reading At the Northwest Film Forum, Xavier Dolan Showcases the Heartbeats of Cinema →