Canadian Film Review: Black Robe (1991)

* * * 1/2
Director: Bruce Beresford
Starring: Lothaire Bluteau, August Schellenberg, Sandrine Holt, Aden Young

The landscape in Bruce Bereford’s Black Robe always looks foreboding. It’s bleak and uninviting, as if the land itself is rejecting the French missionaries and their intention to bring Catholicism and “civilization” to what will eventually become Quebec. It’s a harsh and unblinking film and one that seems to hold the audience at arm’s length, but its images and themes resonate thanks to its finely rendered story and characterizations.

Canadian Film Review: Le Confessional (1995)

* * * *
Director: Robert Lepage
Starring: Lothaire Bluteau

"That's not a suspense story, it's a Greek tragedy!" proclaims Alfred Hitchcock towards the end of Le Confessional. While the character Hitchcock's declaration suggests that the two forms are mutually exclusive, Robert Lepage proves that they're not, managing to create a film that is both a successful suspense/mystery story and a saga of human suffering and torment. Narratively and visually, it's a totally engaging and engrossing film.

The story takes place in Quebec City during two time periods: one half takes place in 1952 when Alfred Hitchcock (Ron Burrage) comes to town to film I Confess and the Lamontagne family struggles to cope with the social stigma of Mrs. Lamontagne’s unwed and pregnant 16-year-old sister, Rachel (Suzanne Clement). The other half takes place some 40 years later, after the death of Mr. Lamontagne brings his son, Pierre (Lothaire Bluteau) back from China. Pierre’s primary concern is in tracking down his adopted brother, Marc (Patrick Goyette), Rachel’s son who was raised by her sister and brother-in-law following her death. Time has not been kind to Marc, a former swimmer now reduced to hustling to make ends meet, spiraling in self-loathing and drug addiction. In an effort to help him, Pierre begins looking into the circumstances of Marc’s birth, hoping to find out once and for all who Marc’s father was, a search which ends less in clarity than in tragedy.

Written and directed by Robert Lepage, the film weaves itself easily between the two time periods and in and out of the film within the film. Portions ofI Confess are filmed inside the church where Rachel worked until the discovery of her pregnancy, and Hitchcock’s plot mirrors Rachel’s story. In Hitchcock’s film, a priest is accused of a crime and unable to reveal the identity of the actual culprit because it was revealed to him inside the confessional. In Le Confessional, a young priest (Normand Daneau) is expelled from the church because everyone assumes that he’s the one who impregnated Rachel, having spent so much time with her when she worked at the church. She confesses to him the actual identity of the father, which of course he can’t reveal. He begs her to clear his name but she can’t because, to her, the truth is much worse than the assumption and leads to her eventual suicide.

Le Confessional, aside from being simply a very good film, is astonishingly good for being a directorial debut. Lepage guides the story with a firm hand, uncoiling the mystery of Marc’s paternity slowly while also giving the characters time and space to develop. He also does some very interesting things visually. There are, quite naturally, a number of shots which echo some of the more famous shots from Hitchcock and manage to be fitting homage rather than cheap theft, but these are only a small part of the technical grace demonstrated within the film. There is a great overhead tracking shot that follows Pierre as he searches for Marc in a bathhouse, making the interior of the building look like a maze. There is a room in the Lamontagne house that Pierre has to keep repainting because the outlines of photos which used to hang there keep bleeding through (the past always coming back to haunt). The symmetry of images and the color red are motifs which show up time and again to good effect. It’s a very thoughtfully crafted film on both the narrative and visual levels.

Lothaire Bluteau is the standout of the cast, an actor who manages to appear simultaneously fragile and strong. This is true not only of his performance here, but also of other performances of his that I’ve seen, particularly in Jesus of Montreal. He’s always very soft-spoken, but he manages to convey a lot with that barely-above-a-whisper voice of his. As the “bad” brother, Patrick Goyette is also very good and makes Marc the inverse of Pierre, a character who looks physically solid, but is mentally and emotionally as fragile as an egg shell. Marc’s fate is inevitable, foreshadowed in the opening scenes, but nevertheless tragic and while he isn’t necessarily a “good” man (as his interactions with his ex-girlfriend and their son demonstrate), you still feel for him.

Upon its release a decade or so ago, Le Confessional was pretty widely celebrated within the Canadian film community, receiving several Genie nominations and walking away with the prize for Art Direction, Director and Picture. It’s a film worth revisiting and has held up pretty well, though some of the music choices date it and, in fact, make it seem older than it is (I’m looking at you Depeche Mode). It should be noted, however, that if your curiosity about the film stems from the inclusion Kristin Scott Thomas in the cast, that her role as Hitchcock’s assistant is actually fairly small and quite disproportionate to her prominence on the DVD cover, which I assume is attributable to the film having been released for home viewing at about the same time that The English Patient was making its theatrical splash.

Canadian Film Review: Jesus of Montreal (1989)

* * * *
Director: Denys Arcand
Starring: Lothaire Bluteau

Denys Arcand’s Jesus of Montreal is a thoughtful and well-constructed film which attempts to examine the relationship between people and religion, between ideas and practice. In it a passion play is staged which adheres perhaps too closely to Jesus’ teachings, starring an actor whose life begins to parallel that of the character he’s playing. It’s a film that takes religious teachings very seriously but casts a critical eye at the politics of organized religion.

Daniel (Lothaire Bluteau) is an actor much admired by other actors but whose career has never taken off due to the years that he’s spent abroad. A Montreal church, recognizing that the passion play that they stage every year has become stale, hires Daniel to direct and star in a retooled version. To do this, he gathers four other struggling actors to help him: Martin (Remy Girard) and Rene (Robert Lepage), actors he finds doing voice-over work, one for a porn film and the other for an educational film; Mireill (Catherine Wilkening), an actress more appreciated for her looks than her abilities, and Constance (Johanne-Marie Tremblay), a veteran of the passion play whom Daniel learns has been carrying on an affair with the Father Leclerc (Gilles Pelletier).

The play that the troupe puts on is not the play that the church is expecting, leading Father Leclerc to attempt to shut it down. It’s too literal, it’s too radical, and the response it provokes from the audience is too impassioned. There are members of the audience who speak to Daniel as if he really is Jesus and he himself begins to exude a different aura as events in his life begin to echo biblical stories about Jesus. One of the things that I really enjoyed about the movie is that it doesn’t hit you over the head with the parallels that it’s making. Arcand obviously has a firm handle on the subject, but he never lets the material become overbearing. There is an ease with which the film puts Daniel through the paces so that it doesn’t seem contrived or forced.

Existing on the periphery of the story, orbiting around Daniel like distant satellites, are characters whose purpose is neither to follow nor to impede him, but to distort his legacy. One is a member of the media who records and shares whatever facts or rumours about Daniel will make for the best story. The other is an attorney who takes the role of Satan to Daniel’s Jesus and sees a way to use Daniel’s memory to pervert his message and make a profit. These two characters, along with the church leaders who want to shut down the play, are like shadows steadily crowding in on Daniel, obscuring the light he is trying to impart.

Anchoring the film is the quiet central performance by Blutheau. He plays Daniel with a great deal of subtlety and grace, the full scope of which didn’t even really hit me until days after I’d watched the movie. The direction by Arcand is equally assured and engaging, though I do have one qualm: the music in the film dates it ridiculously. I mean, nothing says 1980s like a soulful electric guitar solo segue from one scene to another. Other than that, though, it’s a great film from top to bottom.