Queen Rebel

In Jean-Marc Vallée’s new picture, The Young Victoria, Emily Blunt plays the longest running monarch in British history (63 years and 7 months) as a young woman who insists that she won’t be manipulated like “a chess piece in a game played against my will.” Despite the machinations of Victoria’s mother (Miranda Richardson), and her cohort John Conroy (Mark Strong), the 18-year-old ascends the throne and learns how to “master the game” - in the words of her suitor, the cultivated Prince Albert (Rupert Friend). Radiating a blend of giggly girlishness, cultural sophistication, regal authority, and implacable will, Blunt’s Victoria suggests Ellen Page in Juno, Carey Mulligan in An Education, and the quick-tongued heroines of innumerable Jane Austen adaptations.

At its core The Young Victoria is a teen story in which most of the adults in view are as corrupt, stupid, and grotesque as the authority figures in innumerable high school movies. Hours before Vallée’s film closed TIFF’s 2009 edition, the Québécois pop culture lover told me that the Queen who once meant nothing to him was “a rock and roll girl in her own time.”

Despite the obvious culture gap between The Young Victoria and Vallée’s breakthrough hit C.R.A.Z.Y. (2005), the films share many characteristics. Like C.R.A.Z.Y., The Young Victoria celebrates an adolescent whose vulnerability doesn’t stop her from standing apart and transforming herself into the dynamic non-conformist she wants to be. Both Victoria and the earlier film’s Zac are heroic romantics with narcissistic streaks, often seen gazing into mirrors checking out their look. Victoria scrutinizes coiff and clothes in gilded palaces, Zac in his lower middle-class, 1970’s suburban bedroom.  Victoria is adorned with by precious jewels and lovely gowns; Zac, who could also be tagged a burgeoning queen, wears David Bowie-esque face paint and eye shadow. Both characters feed their passionate natures with art, Victoria consuming Italian opera and British poetry, Zac tripping on Ziggy Stardust and The Rolling Stones.

In C.R.A.Z.Y.’s major blowout, Zac levitates to the ceiling of a church, riding the strains of Sympathy for the Devil. Victoria loves to waltz, and when she “sees Albert in the ballroom,” says Vallée, “she’s pulled magically onto the dance floor. She’s sliding, we don’t know how, toward him. And she’s like a force. She needs to go to this guy.” At its emotional centre, The Young Victoria offers its heroine the requited love that eludes C.R.A.Z.Y’s hero. Victoria finds her man and takes great pleasure in bedroom activities that many would deem most un-Victorian.

Scripted by Oscar winner Julian Fellowes, Vallée’s picture is not in the same ballpark as visionary adaptations of literary classics like Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon. However, it is an engagingly detailed evocation of 19th century British court life. After all, Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, a long-time student of her family history, initiated the project, and takes a producer credit alongside Martin Scorsese, who loves cramming the screen with visual and behavioural detail in films like The Age of Innocence and Casino.

In the US$35 million U.S./U.K. co-venture, Vallée continually relays information about palace life. Before she becomes queen, Victoria is treated like a china doll who can’t manoeuvre a staircase without a lady-in-waiting guiding her by the hand. As the movie progresses, we witness the influence and power of the female courtiers, not to mention an advisor (Paul Bettany), who becomes Albert’s rival for the Queen’s affections. Intriguingly, court hierarchies are so complicated, the royals shiver all winter because there are disputes about which footman is designated to light the palace fires.

The Young Victoria’s staging of small historical details plays better than its dramatization of the major political intrigues swirling around its heroine. The first act in particular is marred by rushed, unelectrifying dramatizations of various players concocting schemes to win over the future queen. Whatever the picture’s flaws, its box office has been strong in limited release, and hopes are high for the film when it goes wider, especially in the light of Emily Blunt’s Golden Globe nomination for best actress.

As for Jean-Marc Vallée, the lean 47-year-old is moving fast with at least three projects. Café de Flore, named for the legendary haunt in Paris’ Saint-Germain-des-Prés, is a time-jumping, music-driven love story. On an entirely different planet, Du bon usage des étoiles (Proper Use of the Stars) will adapt a novel about the seriously doomed 19th century Franklin Expedition to discover the Northwest Passage, a story told recently in John Walker’s award-winning doc, Passage. Finally, Lost Girls and Love Hotels might star Kate Bosworth as a woman overloading on sex and drugs in Tokyo.


Last Train to Sundance

Another rebellious teenage girl, one far removed in time and place from a mythic British queen, is one of the principal characters in Lixin Fan’s documentary, Last Train Home. Produced by Montreal’s EyeSteelFilm, one of Canada’s brightest doc-making operations, Last Train picked up the award for best Canadian/Quebec film at this year’s Rencontres internationales du documentaire de Montréal (RIDM) then went on to take the Grand Prix for best feature at the world’s largest doc showcase, The International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA). During the film’s first weeks of release on two Montreal screens it played to impressed audiences, and this month Fan’s directorial debut screens in competition at Sundance 2010, a major coup that could lead to an Oscar nomination in 2010.

Like EyeSteel’s Up the Yangtze, which Fan associate produced, Last Train Home is both epic and intimate in scope. Eschewing interviews, often feeling like a fiction film, never getting maudlin, the film tracks the sad and desperate holiday-time migration of 130 million Chinese workers from the grim factories, where they sew jeans and assemble squash racquets, to their distant homes in rural villages. As one of the workers ruefully puts it, if you can’t be with your family during the spring festival, you’ve got nothing.

Unfortunately, when the film’s emblematic couple, the Zhangs, succeed in re-uniting with their family after fighting for scarce train tickets and travelling for days stuffed into miserably crowded conditions, there are no Kodak moments. The Zhangs have seen so little of their son and daughter, they barely have anything to say to them, other than earnest platitudes about staying in school so they can achieve a better life.

The Zhangs’ alert and pretty daughter Qi resents her parents. As the film develops, she drops out of school and escalates her rebellion against what she sees as a vacuous illusion of family life. After years toiling in Guangzhou, Qi’s mother looks burnt out, the girl’s brother is lost and depressed, and dad’s youthful looks collide with his dour expression - you get the sense that he’s repressing so much, he could erupt at any moment. When the explosion comes in the film’s climactic scene, it’s such a shocker, you wonder how the crew continued filming, and what kind of a release form the Zhangs signed.

During Last Train Home’s lengthy travel sequences, confident, forceful shots juxtapose spectacular natural landscapes you want to melt into with the hopelessly polluted cityscapes most of the working population lives in. It’s an ashen, fouled world compared to the brilliant greens and sparkling water of paradisial rural homes where no one can earn a buck. In the jaw-dropping train station sequences, massive crowds plunging into chaos seem to be on the verge of mob violence. Overall, Fan reveals the troubling realities behind all our affordable “Made in China” goodies, for instance the slick machine I’m writing on now.

Also screening at Sundance 2010, Podz’s Les 7 jours du talion (7 Days) premieres in the Midnight section. Podz, the first Quebec director to adapt a DJ-style moniker, one that unfortunately resembles a well-known Yiddish pejorative, is Daniel Grou, a TV series specialist. Podz makes his feature debut with the latest adaptation of a Patrick Senécal horror story, this one about a surgeon who seeks vengeance for the murder of his eight-year-old daughter by torturing the killer for a week.

As for short films, Sundance programmed Montreal filmmaker Pedro Pires’ brilliant Danse Macabre, which I described elsewhere as a “plunge into darkness and light,” and Paul Raphael and Félix Lajeunesse’s Tungijuq. Because the NFB’s HQ is in Montreal, I’ll mention the venerable public producer’s entries in the lineup: two-time Oscar nominee Cordell Barker’s frenetic satire, Runaway; Bruce Alcock’s elegaic Vive la Rose; and David Coquard-Dassault’s delicately rendered L'ondée (Rains).


The Top Ten

The last year of the Naughty Oughties was not a routine one for the Quebec film and TV scene. The emergence of a charismatic new talent, a record-breaking hit that dominated the box-office, the eruption of a new scandal and the partial resolution of an old one, not to mention two turning point deaths are some of the events on my Top Ten for 2009 list.

1 Nothing set off as much buzz as the release of 20-year-old Xavier Dolan’s J'ai tué ma mère (I Killed My Mother), a directorial debut that picked up awards and favourable press in Cannes and went on to make waves at festivals from Zagreb and Moscow to Vancouver and Toronto.

The film, which opens next month in English Canada and the U.S., is Canada’s submission for the Best Foreign Film Oscar competition. It recently picked up a Prix Lumière nomination (the French equivalent of a Golden Globe citation) for best Francophone film produced outside of France. On top of that, Dolan just finished shooting his follow-up picture, Nos amours imaginaires without any public funding agency money. Around TIFF-time, he described it to me as “a movie about the impossible love between a transsexual and a woman who follows her boyfriend into the whole metamorphosis of becoming a woman.”

2 Written and directed by Émile Gaudreault, De père en flic (Fathers and Guns) earned $11 million in Quebec, ranking it the most financially successful French-language film ever made here. The movie’s status peaked when producer Denise Robert announced that she and key team members will be involved in the creation of Sony’s re-make, to be produced by the venerable Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall.

At the December networking event, Cinéma du Québec à Paris, De père en flic played well to audiences, suggesting a potential for successful French distribution. Interestingly, viewers were pleased that the movie screened with French subtitles that helped them though the most joual of the picture’s Québécois dialogue.

3 Jean-Philippe Duval’s Dédé à travers les brumes (Dédé through the Fog) also won over filmgoers during Cinéma du Québec à Paris, but observers say that it would have benefited from subtitles. I’ve got the release of this biopic of the late musician André (Dédé) Fortin on my list because I think it is one of the best Quebec films of the year and one of the funkiest portraits of a singer and his band ever made. It should score at the Prix Jutra and the Genies.

4 Exactly a year ago, most viewers of Radio Canada’s annual New Year’s Eve Bye-Bye spectacle were appalled by sketches that among other offences made weirdly crude racial jokes about the newly elected Barack Obama. Eventually, the CRTC slapped restrictions on the Bye Bye show, and Radio-Canada pulled the plug on its 2009 edition, denying the decision had anything to do with jokes about black men making good targets in a white house. Usually, anything that smells like censorship gives me the heebie-jeebies, but in this case …

5 The Quebeckers attending Cannes 2009 were startled by auditor-general Renaud Lachance’s accusation that Jean Guy Chaput, head of the funding agency SODEC, was throwing away taxpayers’ hard-earned bucks on frivolities like a $1300 per night Cannes suite. Despite Chaput’s popularity, and a widespread perception that his expenses weren’t that far out of line, he was fired and replaced by François Macerola. This means that the affectionately regarded Macerola achieves a government appointment hat-trick, having served as the top man at the National Film Board and Telefilm Canada.

6 For thirteen years, graphic designer and writer Claude Robinson accused the hugely successful children’s TV production company Cinar Corp of stealing an animation series idea from him. In 2009, much to the delight of almost everyone except Cinar execs, Robinson triumphed in court after bringing down the company by uncovering a panoply of unkosher activities.

Before Robinson can pick up the millions owed to him, however, he will have to endure a lengthy appeal process.

7 After thirteen years, last summer’s FanTasia Film Festival consolidated its status as one of the world’s major showcases for genre filmmaking. It drew 90,000 viewers, sold out 40% of its 195 screenings, and closed with a Quentin Tarantino-approved screening of Inglourious Basterds.

8 When Gilles Carle died, an era of nose-thumbing, anything goes, erotically charged moviemaking went with him. Every movie industry player, including institutions like The Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television and the NFB, paid homage to him. And unimaginable in the rest of Canada, Carle’s admirers said goodbye at a government financed state funeral.

9 Following the premature death of iconoclastic writer-director Pierre Falardeau, it’s fair to ask whether another filmmaker, in fact the industry itself, will ever again shoot movies that unambiguously agitate for the cause of Quebec independence from Canada.

10 Everyone in the Quebec industry was delighted that six of the movies on the Toronto International Film Festival’s annual Top Ten Canadian movies list were made in Quebec. The titles are J'ai tué ma mère (June and September Inside Quebec), Jacob Tierney's The Trotsky (November 2008 and September 2009 Inside Quebec), Denis Villeneuve's Polytechnique (March Inside Quebec), Bernard Émond's La Donation (December Inside Quebec), Denis Coté's Carcasses (June and September Inside Quebec) and Alexandre Franchi's The Wild Hunt, which screens this month at Slamdance, the parallel event at the Sundance Film Festival.