Wild Child

Philippe Falardeau's C'est pas moi, je le jure! (It's Not Me, I Swear!) was one of the strongest movies at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. It had a clear shot at winning The City of Toronto-Citytv Award for best Canadian feature, but the prize, sweetened by $30,000 in cash, went to Rodrigue Jean's contemplation of post-partum depression, Lost Song. The City of Toronto-Citytv also granted a special citation to Atom Egoyan's relatively low budget Adoration, a picture that hearkens back to his late 1980s examinations of the interface between private emotion and public media.

A week after TIFF, C'est pas moi, je le jure! did pick up a top Canadian film honour at the Atlantic Film Festival, as well as a best actor prize for the movie’s 11-year-old lead, Antoine L'Ecuyer. At the end of September, Falardeau’s movie opened on 37 Quebec screens, grossing $118,963, and placing 3rd in that weekend’s top ten at the box office. (By comparison, Benoît Pilon's highly-regarded Ce qu’il faut pour vivre, Canada’s selection to compete for a Best Foreign Film Oscar nomination, earned $221,863 during its first month of release.)

In Falardeau’s third feature, Antoine L'Ecuyer’s startling performance recalls child actors like Jean-Pierre Léaud in François Truffaut’s Les quatre cents coups (1959), or Jean-Pierre Cargol in the same moviemaker’s L’Enfant Sauvage (1970). L'Ecuyer plays Leon, a boy who tailspins out of control when his mother (Suzanne Clément) abruptly decides to abandon her dysfunctional family and take off for Greece. But Leon, also bothered and bewildered by his own obsessive speculations about God and man, is no typically Québécois movie victim of destiny, society, and parental shortcomings. Like the protagonists of Truffaut’s films about kids, he acts out his tensions with an insouciant, freewheeling cockiness that charms you even when he’s breaking into neighbours’ houses and peeing on their fur coats.

At TIFF, Falardeau told me that he was attracted to his source material, two quasi-autobiographical Bruno Hébert novels, by their wilful anti-hero. Falardeau wanted to adapt C'est pas moi, je le jure! and Alice court avec René for ten years, but didn’t obtain the rights until after making his attention-grabbing debut feature, La Moitié gauche du frigo (2000). “Although I was not like that when I was young,” Falardeau explains, “I could relate to Leon’s metaphysical questions about life, the fact that he doesn’t seem to fit anywhere, his fear of being abandoned. I tapped into that to write the scenario.” Incidentally, the novels are driven by the same maternal departure that inspired Hébert’s sister Isabelle to write Maman est chez le coiffeur, the basis for Léa Pool’s new picture.

Set in the 1960’s, C'est pas moi, je le jure! is a visually graceful movie, sensitive to the fields and riverbanks of Leon’s bucolic environment. Falardeau knows how to counterpoint darkness and light; moreover, like Truffaut, an obvious influence, he blends misery and hilarity, often in the same scene. His follow-up to the award-winning Congorama (2006) can be unsettling, but it’s too darkly funny, and free-spirited, to be a downer.

Ghost Story

Since the critical, if not financial, successes of La Moitié gauche du frigo and Congorama, Philippe Falardeau has been one of Quebec’s highest-profile moviemakers. Another Philippe (pardon the cheap segué) is unknown outside of an indie-minded, mostly English-speaking Montreal scene of filmmakers, musicians, and visual artists. For years, Philippe Spurrell fought to produce and direct his first picture while running a film society, building a collection of movie prints, and orchestrating multi-projector installations in the “spirit of all things celluloid,” as he puts it. Spurrell also stages events like North America’s largest Rocky Horror Picture Show extravaganza, and does all kinds of stuff for the FanTasia Genre Film Festival.

Spurrell’s The Descendant, playing in Montreal’s venerable Cinéma du Parc as I write, originated with a short version of the film that he pitched to distributors as a project that was already half finished. Their lack of interest didn’t prevent him from working against the grain of fast, cheap video shoots. Spurrell has completed a painstakingly lit, framed, and sound-designed 35mm production, made with his own money and investments from people he encountered via networking opportunities, or by jokingly posting inquiries online. Ultimately, Spurrell told me during a phone interview, “The saviour was private industry,” which offers support to burgeoning filmmakers who might become loyal clients in a few years. For instance, the now defunct Moliflex-White billed Spurrell $10000 for the rental of a $100000 35mm package. And top postproduction house Vision Globale came up with an excellent deal.

In The Descendant, James Duke (Tadhg McMahon), heads for his grandparents’ farm to find out why his late mother avoided them like the plague. James’ investigation leads to an uncovering of secrets in his family’s history that reflect sinister events in Quebec’s actual past. Generically, The Descendant is a horror film, but one that deliberately avoids brutalizing viewers with mindless gore and shock sound treatment. As if he was directing for Val Lewton, the 1940’s producer who ran a horror unit at RKO Studios, Spurrell aims at understated jolts, deploying recurrent images like James’ spooky grandfather Maurice (Jim Reid) standing in a mysterious corn field, wielding an axe.

For Spurrell, whose father was a Newfoundlander and his mother a francophone Québécoise, local moviemakers trying to produce in the English language are “shooting against all odds.” A friend of his believes that ignored Anglos are mutating into “hobbyist filmmakers. It would be nice to go beyond that and get some decent funding,” Spurrell continues. “And I think it’s just a matter of time before at least Telefilm takes notice and says, ‘I guess we should take another look and allocate a bit more money to Québécois cinema in English.’ There’s no shortage of talent and will.”

Crème de la Crème

Every October, the oldest film festival in Canada, Montreal’s Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, projects youthful experimentation and nosethumbinng irreverence. Defined by its goofily nonchalant founder, Claude Chamberlan, the 37-year-old festival programmes major arthouse releases while advancing an avant-garde vibe with hip DJs, late night dance parties, and events like this year’s lab on the future of cinema, which press material describes as an opportunity to “explore the contemporary galaxies of multimedia and multi-screen cinema.”

Similarly, “Exploration: Screenosphere offers a series of installations and screenings with some highly unusual mises en scène,” while “Encounters,” dedicated to digital production, highlights participants like Amanda Goodfried, the ex-talent agency lawyer who produced the faux blog YouTube series lonelygirl 15. The FNC’s Pocket Films Festival is a sidebar hyped as “the best of cellphone, digital camera and webcam cinema.”

Over the past few years, as the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma got buffeted by financial turbulence, it pushed its slate of audience-grabbing features more into the foreground. This year, the FNC’s 250 films from 60 countries include many of the hottest titles screened at TIFF and other festivals. For instance, the fest closes with Cannes 2008’s Palme d’Or winner, Laurent Cantet’s Entre les murs (The Class), and its various sections play films like Steve McQueen’s Hunger, Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir, Atom Egoyan’s Adoration, Deepa Mehta’s Heaven on Earth, Terrence Davies’ Of Time and the City, Samira Makhmalbaf’s Two-Legged Horse, and Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York.

Of the Canadian pictures, Michael MacKenzie’s Adam’s Wall, a Jewish boy-Lebanese girl Romeo and Juliet story, and Ben Addelman and Samir Mallal’s Nollywood Babylon, the filmmakers’ vibrant doc about the riotous Nigerian film industry, are among the fest’s world premieres. The latter screens in the meant-to-be provocative Temps Ø section, which also hosts the best film I saw at TIFF, Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, her agonizingly tense depiction of an American explosives defusing squad in Iraq.

As for tributes and special guests, the FNC’s 2008 honouree is England’s John Boorman, whose 1972 film Deliverance did for wilderness trips what Jaws accomplished for New England beaches. While in Montreal, Boorman screens his most recent picture, The Tiger’s Tail, and discusses work like the pop visionary Zardoz (1974) in a Master Class.

What the Phoque?

When Stephen Harper uttered his remark about public indifference to the complaints of “a gala of a bunch of people, you know, at a rich gala all subsidized by taxpayers,” an intellectual short circuit comparable to Sarah Palin’s assertions, the Conservative leader was probably referencing the Prix Gémeaux gala in Montreal. The television awards presentation, like many recent Quebec events became a platform to deplore Harper’s arts funding cuts, not to mention his party’s apparent hostility toward cultural enterprises. A million and a half viewers, most in the category of Harper’s “ordinary working people,” tuned into the gala on TV and heard celebs blast the arts slashing. If it ever extended to the federal funding and tax credit programs that subsidize Quebecers’ beloved movies and TV shows, the outcry might expand Harper’s understanding of culture’s relationship to taxpaying citizens.

Quebec’s most dramatic reaction to the cuts is a slickly produced video entitled Culture en péril. In it, Michel Rivard, co-founder of the beloved 1970’s rock band Beau Dommage, appears before a committee of fed bureaucrats to request funding for a music festival. When he performs his renowned tune, La Complainte du Phoque en Alaska, the dim-witted Anglos are outraged because they think that “phoque,” French for seal, is another word. Naturally, Rivard’s application is rejected.

Some argue that the clip misrepresents the issue. Montreal entertainment writer Brendan Kelly and La Presse columnist Nathalie Petrowaki call its casting of the culture war as yet another English-French argument disingenuous. On the other hand, by the beginning of this month, over half a million people viewed Culture en péril on YouTube. And for some Québécois voters, the focus on language must have given the issue an urgency it didn’t have before.