Valérie

Fed up with the constraints of life in a convent, young Valérie (Danielle Ouimet) sneaks out at night to meet her boyfriends. When she is caught and reprimanded, she calls up the leader of a motorcycle gang who arrives on his modern day steed to carry her off to Montréal. But she soon tires of her knight in less-than-shining armor. Valérie takes a job as a topless dancer but that doesn’t work out when Andrée, another dancer from the club she shares an apartment with, makes lesbian advances on her. Her next big city encounter is with Kim, who pushes her towards prostitution. Then one day she meets Patrick, an artist and the single father of a small son, François. He falls madly in love with her and is prepared to forget her past, but Valérie has her doubts. Valérie was the first of a group of films that came to be known as “maple-syrup porn” and made an unprecedented gross of over a million, making it the top domestic box-office film of its time. Valérie launched the careers of producers John Dunning and André Link and its director Denis Héroux.

The image above and the poster for Valérie were scanned from originals in the Northernstars Collection.
Valérie was recently restored by the Québec-based organization Élephant in time to be presented at the 2019 Ville du Québec Film Festival.