«La maison où j’ai grandi» The changing landscape of nostalgia in Quebec’s contemporary coming-of-age films

Julia Morgan Charles Department of Art History and Communication Studies McGill University, Montreal June 2009

A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Arts

© Julia Morgan Charles, 2009

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract...... ii

Acknowledgements...... iv

Introduction...... 1

Plot Synopses: Maman est chez le coiffeur...... 12

C’est pas moi, je le jure!...... 25

CHAPTER 1: Getting the diagnosis: The nostalgia film as symptom...... 37

CHAPTER 2: The thaw: Nostalgia‘s shifting horizon...... 59

CHAPTER 3: Carrying the past: The filial dimensions of Quebec‘s nostalgia.....91

Conclusion...... 111

References...... 113

i ABSTRACT

This study examines the role of nostalgia in contemporary Quebec cinema through the analysis of two recent coming-of-age films set in the 1960s: Maman est chez le coiffeur

(Léa Pool, 2008) and C’est pas moi, je le jure! (Philippe Falardeau, 2008). While the

―nostalgia film‖ has been roundly criticized for promoting a superficial engagement with history, and a dangerous withdrawal from the present, I argue that in the context of

Quebec, it should be understood as performing important critical work. Given the long and influential ties between the coming-of-age film, the family romance, and filmic nostalgia in Quebec to the national imaginary, I argue that these films reflect broader shifts in the state of cultural memory. Far from foreclosing a consideration of the future, films that creatively re-imagine the past enable new and empowering engagements with it. With these issues in mind, I go on to argue for a more measured consideration of the potential of nostalgia itself.

Cette étude examine le rôle de la nostalgie dans le cinéma québécois contemporain à travers l'analyse de deux films de 2008 sur le passage à l'âge adulte, dont l'action se déroule dans les années soixante : Maman est chez le coiffeur (Léa Pool, 2008) et C’est pas moi, je le jure ! (Philippe Falardeau, 2008). Alors que les films nostalgiques et la nostalgie elle-même sont vivement critiqués pour prétendument favoriser un rapport superficiel à l'Histoire et un dangereux détachement vis-à-vis du présent, cette Thèse soutient que dans le contexte du Québec, les films traitant du passage à l'âge adulte et de la nostalgie entretiennent de longue date des liens influents avec l'imaginaire collectif et qu'ils doivent être considérés comme porteurs d'un important travail critique. En outre,

ii ces films reflètent les changements profonds advenus dans la mémoire culturelle du

Québec et, loin d'empêcher une prise en compte de son avenir, donnent plus de raisons encore de s'engager au regard de celui-ci. Sur la base de ces observations, cette Thèse développe une argumentation en faveur d‘une plus juste appréciation du potentiel de la nostalgie elle-même.

iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First and foremost, I would like to thank my thesis supervisor, Dr. Carrie

Rentschler, for her extremely useful feedback and unwavering support throughout this process. I consider myself very lucky to have worked with someone as generous of time, energy, and ideas as she has consistently been. Likewise, I would like to express my appreciation to the women of Dr. Rentschler‘s working group for their early commentary on the original mess of ideas that eventually became this thesis, as well as for the privilege of being part of such a dynamic and inspiring group. Thanks go as well to Dr. Will Straw for his early suggestions and effortless acquaintance with all things nostalgia and Quebec, as well as the encouragement that he offered on an earlier paper that subsequently convinced me of the viability of my topic.

This process would not have been possible without the patience and unconditional love of my family and friends, who have put up with me during what was occasionally a trying process. To that end, I would like first of all to thank my partner in all things, David

Lewkowich, who kept me sane, fed, and relatively balanced, and whose boundless curiousity and willingness to experiment have been an endless source of inspiration for my own intellectual pursuits. Thank you as well to my extremely wonderful parents for their unflagging enthusiasm and support in my various pursuits throughout the years. I want to thank my amazing friends for enduring my occasional bouts of reclusion and melancholy, and for their formidable knowledge of the restorative effects of wine and nights off; also, a big thanks to Timothée Memmi for his savvy translation help. Lastly, I would like to acknowledge my poor neglected dogs, Baba and Benito, for selflessly forcing me out of the house and into the sunshine when inspiration waned.

iv INTRODUCTION

Over the past year, Quebec cinema has been garnering media attention for what some are describing as its increasingly retrospective gaze; of the province‘s1 four films listed in Canada’s Top Ten for 2008, all were set in the past, from the 1950s onwards.2

This is especially telling when one considers that the list for 2007 contained only two

French language films from Quebec, both set in an extremely bleak present.3 Some have suggested that the recent nostalgic turn in Quebec cinema is endemic of a regressive and myopic tendency in the face of recent issues around reasonable accommodation and the waning of a strong nationalist agenda. In effect, they argue that these ―nostalgia films‖4 function as an escapist denial of the present in favour of evoking ―a white Quebec before the immigrants got here.‖5 This explanation is given some credence by the inflammatory nature of much of the coverage surrounding the infamous Bouchard-Taylor Commission from 2007, as well as the persistent specter of xenophobia that has long haunted the

1 Throughout this study, I refer to Quebec alternately as both ―province‖ and ―nation.‖ This is a deliberate attempt to articulate the interstice that Quebec occupies between the two radically different subjectivities, the negotiation of which has been a defining characteristic and tension of its political project. In referring to Quebec as province, I am indicating its (current) status in the dominion of Canada; by nation, I am referring to Benedict Anderson‘s definition of a nation as ―an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign‖ (Anderson, 2006, p. 6). 2 Established in 2001 by the Toronto International Film Festival Group, ―Canada‘s Top Ten is a unique annual event . . . to honour excellence in contemporary Canadian cinema‖ ("Canada's Top Ten," 2008). The four Quebec feature films in question from 2008‘s list are Ce qu’il faut pour vivre (set in the 1950s), La Mémoire des anges (a collage of NFB footage chronicling Montreal‘s evolution over the 20th century), C’est pas moi, je le jure!, and Maman est chez le coiffeur (both set in the 1960s). 3 These were Denys Arcand‘s L’Âge des ténèbres and Stéphane Lafleur‘s Continental, un film sans fusil, the former an incredibly cynical and almost dystopic take on present-day Quebec, and the latter a dark portrayal about contemporary isolation and loneliness told through the intersection of four lives after a middle-aged man suddenly goes missing. 4 By enclosing the term ―nostalgia film‖ in quotations here, I am referring specifically to Fredric Jameson‘s definition of the genre; a definition whose implications and subsequent criticism I will be looking at in greater detail in Chapter 1. 5 This quote is taken from an interview with the Acadian filmmaker Rodrigue Jean (who sets all his films ―in the present‖) on the national CBC radio program, C’est la vie, wherein he dismissed the recent glut of films set in the province‘s past within the common teleology of Quebec‘s hostility to difference and rapid change, in the current ―nostalgia mood [of returning to a period in Quebec history, specifically] . . . the seventies and the sixties where it was a white Quebec before the immigrants got here and where it was almost a tribal thing, people were just amongst themselves‖ ("Interview with Rodrigue Jean," 2009).

1 sovereigntist agenda.6 Ultimately though, this explanation is too facile to prove satisfactory. While I believe there is some truth to these suggestions, at least insofar as they help to potentially explain the political economy behind the films‘ simultaneous production, as well as their perennial popularity, it is my contention that many of the films themselves, as cultural texts, can more constructively (and less literally) be understood as performing the important memorial work of coming to terms with the legacies of these histories, as an important step in transcending them. As such, some of these nostalgia films might be more usefully categorized within the cinema of what

Jocelyn Létourneau (2005), among others, have speculated is the current ―postnational‖ moment in Quebec; their specific and strategic representations of the past more fruitfully read for what potential they extend for the future.

This study will examine two such films from the past year, Maman est chez le coiffeur (Dir. Léa Pool, 2008) and C’est pas moi, je le jure! (Dir. Philippe Falardeau,

2008), as a way to approach broader issues surrounding the state of cultural memory in

Quebec. Since its inception, Quebec‘s national cinema has been indexically linked to articulations around national identity politics. Insofar as it is ―national,‖ I understand

Quebec‘s cinema as an integral part of a broader political project to define and locate a

Quebecois identity and people, ―whose lives and experiences have been historically absent from movie screens‖ (MacKenzie, 2004, p. 20). Furthermore, this cinema creates a vital public sphere that ―[has] allowed new discursive spaces momentarily to emerge . . .

6 There is also evidence of a surge of interest in a brand of neo-conservative, populist nostalgia, especially in popular culture, as shown by the 2007 surprise hit ―Dégénérations‖ (a double-entendre meant to evoke a narrative of decline and generational history) by the neo-folk group ―Mes Aïeux‖ (My Forefathers), with its lyrics praising ―great-great-grandfathers for clearing the land . . . glorification of great-great-grandmothers with 14 kids, and its contempt for young women who today cover up their ‗stupidities‘ by getting an abortion‖ (Yakabuski, 2007, p. A.25).

2 [whose representations allowed] both audiences and filmmakers to imagine a new and egalitarian way of living and interacting, an imagined community [that] opened up debate and discourse‖ (ibid). Quebec‘s national cinema is ―francophone, since it is above all the

French language which represents the distinctness of Quebec‖ (Marshall, 2000, p. x). It is also important to acknowledge the persistent and problematic privileging of a specifically white, heterosexual, male subjectivity within Quebec‘s national cinema, without limiting its possibilities to such an understanding.

It is in this context of the national cinema that I will be criticizing the (a)political genre of the ―nostalgia film,‖ and the evolution of this term from its initial use by Fredric

Jameson in 1984, to its (provisional) understanding today, through the criticism of several scholars, whose various interpretations have been hugely influential in the formulation of my own understanding of the category‘s inherent possibilities and limitations. Further to this, I will be mapping out a broad and critical understanding of nostalgia itself as a way to approach the representational stakes of these films. These films allow me to reflect on and reconsider some of the recurring themes of Quebecois cinema (sexuality, gender, family relations, memory, etc) in order to pry open their significance in the broader context of contemporary debates around cultural memory and politics. They enable me to look at the creative and influential role of nostalgia in Quebec cinema‘s history, as both a strategy for modernization and conservatism. As such, these films should be understood as performing important cultural work; through their ambiguous combination of themes and tropes common in Quebec cinema with those that are decidedly unusual, these films help perform what Létourneau (2004) describes as the necessary ―unthinking‖ of Quebec history, and an attempt to come to terms with what he calls ―its constitutive ambivalence‖

3 (p. 105), as well as making explicit the continuing links between cultural memory, nostalgia, and nationalism.

Létourneau (2005) and others have described the postnationalist sentiment of contemporary Quebec as marked by a decreasing collective interest in the sovereigntist project, and the end of a conception of the province‘s future solely through ―le prisme cardinal de la question nationale‖ (p. 15), that has characterized intellectual and cultural debates in Quebec since the Quiet Revolution7 of the 1960s. As with the ‗post‘-ing of any movement,8 ambiguities and differences of opinion abound, with those like Létourneau more optimistically describing postnationalism as the liberation of thought from the overburdening and unfulfilled project of Quebec sovereignty, while others more anxiously characterize it as a crisis or failure of national memory, as well as a cynical attempt to legitimize complacency and cultural relativism (Courtois, 2007). I do not intend to resolve such complex issues here; suffice it to say that by describing the current films as embodying a particular cinematic postnationalism, I understand them to be part

7 The Quiet Revolution, known in French as la révolution tranquille, was a time of great political and societal change in Quebec, characterized by ―a political rupture from . . . the supremacy of the [Catholic] Church‖ (Nadeau, 1996, p. 243); corresponding roughly with the end, in 1959, of Premier Maurice Duplessis‘ nearly thirty year rule of the province until the first (failed) referendum on sovereignty in 1980, the Quiet Revolution stands today as what Létourneau (2004) describes as ―canon of collective identity‖ (pp. 23-24) that many Quebecois view as the ―collective refoundation‖ (p. 21) of the nation after over three centuries of oppression and colonialization by the French, the British, English Canada, and the Catholic Church. It was a period marked by ―a new nationalism [that was] essentially a secular ideology, anti- imperialist and oriented toward decolonization, national liberation, and self-determination‖ (Juteau, 1999, p. 154). Initially articulated in an exceptionalist discourse which stressed Quebec‘s rapid modernization after la Grande noirceur of Maurice Duplessis‘ autocratic reign in lockstep with the Church, historians have come today to regard it as an integral part of the broader civil-rights movements that were gaining purchase in North America during the 1960s. The Quiet Revolution was a time of increased bureaucratization of the state apparatuses, and ushered in political changes ―accompanied by strong labor and feminist movements, variously liberal, radical, and Marxist,‖ as well as signaling an important revaluation of Quebecois culture, such as literature, film, design, and language. 8 In her chapter ―Postfeminist Media Culture?,‖ Rosalind Gill (2007) describes the inherent difficulties of conceptualizing such ‗post‘-ed movements, as a result of the three overlapping and contradictory ways that the prefix is commonly understood: as signaling an epistemological break; indicating a historical shift, or delineating a position that is antithetical to that earlier movement (p. 249).

4 of a national cinema with a growing international public (MacKenzie, 2004, p. 185), whose content and style is not over-determined by the sovereigntist project of Quebec.

By this I do not mean to suggest that they are not concerned with memory, as it is surely one of, if not the, main preoccupation of both films; only that the nationalist question is not driving their narrative in the same way that has long characterized Quebecois film, and this marks a departure that mirrors changes in the province‘s historiography and likewise challenges long-held, dominant discourses around memory in Quebec.

Maman est chez le coiffeur and C’est pas moi, je le jure! belong to that universally nostalgic genre known as the coming-of-age story; and while this type of narrative has broad appeal in just about every national cinema,9 it has been a perennial favourite in Quebec film and literature, where its receptivity to allegorical explorations of the nation have endowed it with a weightier cultural resonance than its Hollywood counterpart. These films have had serious political implications since at least 1952, when

Jean-Yves Bigras directed La petite Aurore l'enfant martyre; nearly twenty years later,

Claude Jutra made what is arguably Canada‘s most famous film, coming-of-age or otherwise, Mon oncle Antoine (1971); the subsequent decades have seen films such as

Les Bon débarras (1980), Léolo (1992), and more recently, C.R.A.Z.Y. (2005), mined for what glimpses their child protagonists can provide into their respective contemporary zeitgeist. Despite their domestic settings in a seemingly apolitical and benign 1960s

Quebec, these films from 2008 similarly contain and articulate contemporary ambiguities around broader political issues through the complex metonymy of the family romance. In

9 Given its popularity, especially in French and Quebecois films, I was quite surprised to learn, in having the abstract of this thesis translated, that there is no official French translation for the ―coming-of-age‖ genre; suggestions included ―roman d'apprentissage‖ or ―initiatique,‖ as well as ―un film sur le passage à l'âge adulte,‖ which was eventually chosen; none of which seemed to quite capture the bland inclusiveness of the term in English.

5 so doing, Maman est chez le coiffeur and C’est pas moi, je le jure! clarify certain representational stakes around questions of (shifting) popular memory that hold important ramifications for our present vantage. As such, these texts help elucidate an ambivalence in the province between the past and the future, and should not be simply dismissed as a xenophobic response to Quebec‘s changing demographics; instead they are better understood as an active, though admittedly imperfect, attempt to come-to-terms with the end of a particular historical era.

Of course, it could be argued that since its beginnings in the 1940s, Quebec‘s national cinema has been preoccupied with looking back at its past and traditions in what has come to be understood as a quest for origins and identity; of the five coming-of-age films listed in the above paragraph, all but one are set decades before their production.10

What differentiates these contemporary films then, from their progenitors? It is not only their unconventional setting in the affluent South Shore banlieues of the 1960s, the Expo- obsessed aesthetic that is fashionable again, or the ubiquitous popularity of soundtrack material from that era; like their predecessors, these recent films share common themes of lack and longing, of intergenerational strife suggesting a vanishing past and the fear of a creeping amnesia. Their context, though, which is the present day of their writing and production, is at least as important as the era they seek to recreate. As such, these films can be read more productively as a memorial text designed to meet the needs of the

10 Though not technically set in the past, Les Bons débarras, which takes place in the time of its 1979 production, was already dated shortly after it came out, in that it was released only two months before the ground-changing referendum of 1980. La petite Aurore l'enfant martyre (1952) follows the true story of a girl in 1920; Mon oncle Antoine (1971) is set sometime during la grande noirceur of the 1940s; Léolo (1992) is set in a working-class Montreal neighbourhood in the 1960s; and C.R.A.Z.Y. (2005) ambitiously traces its hero, Zac, through the 1960s to the present day.

6 present; not consciously perhaps, but organically, through the auspicious but hardly coincidental coming together of talent, time, funding, and desire.

I have chosen Maman est chez le coiffeur and C’est pas moi, je le jure! in particular, as opposed to various other Quebec nostalgia films on offer from the past few years (C.R.A.Z.Y. [2005], Maurice Richard [2005], Je me souviens [2009], etc.) due to a culmination of factors. Perhaps most importantly, and strikingly given their almost simultaneous production, release, and funding from the federal and provincial institutions, these films share a very similar narrative and setting. The similarities between these two films are not coincidental: the screenwriters of the two films are siblings, and they both draw extensively on childhood memories of their parents‘ separation for their respective films. C’est pas moi, je le jure! is based on the popular, semi-autobiographical novels of Bruno Hébert. His sister, Isabelle Hébert, co-wrote the screenplay for Léa Pool‘s Maman est chez le coiffeur. As a result, the two films have similar plots and settings, and both centre on the trauma of the summer their parents separated, with their mother leaving the family. Their father was the late writer, activist,

Liberal senator, and great friend of Trudeau, Jacques Hébert, and as such, both films recount the (thinly-veiled and variously modified) history of a well-known political family from the province‘s past. Though neither film explicitly invokes this connection, the media discourse that surrounded the production and release of the films was such that a great percentage of their home audience would have that knowledge going into the films.

There are however, important differences between these films and their predecessors in Quebec cinema; namely, they depict a bourgeois family, which is still

7 relatively uncommon in a national cinema that has defined the people and the nation as

―working-class.‖ This is very significant and will be analyzed more closely in Chapter 2, along with their atypical seasonal location in summer, as opposed to the traditional depiction of Quebec stories in winter. Furthermore, the significance of the mother‘s departure is likewise unusual in a cinema that has long been distinguished by the abandonment of the father and the constancy of the long-suffering mother. Lastly, while their setting in the 1960s is not unusual in itself, as it was a time of great political and social change and upheaval in Quebec, their distinctly apolitical depiction of this much- mythologized era is. By only engaging tangentially and indirectly with the major societal changes of the day, the films‘ politics are obscured and made conspicuous in their absence: as such, the films represent an interesting and potentially rich source of information about a current mood or mode of popular memory in contemporary Quebec.

Beyond the family connection, what is truly remarkable about these two films is that, despite their extremely similar plots, settings, and release dates, both stories were picked up by renowned Quebecois filmmakers and judged worthy of funding from the major federal and provincial institutions (Telefilm and the Société de développement des enterprises culturelles [SODEC], respectively). Both films qualified for Telefilm‘s most valuable funding program, the Canada Feature Film Fund (CFFF), which is ―designed to support the development and production of Canadian feature films with strong domestic box office potential‖ (Telefilm, 2008), and funds ten productions annually in each official language.11 Compounding matters is the simultaneous inclusion and support given to a

11 Eligible films must show that they meet the exhaustive list of qualifications, including a strong track record and verification that the production will draw extensively on Canadian talent. Furthermore, under the ―Evaluation Criteria‖ of the Crown corporation‘s guidelines, among a list of other factors, the two primary criteria are ―Creative‖ and ―Audience.‖ The following relevant components are listed under

8 third film that year, Francis Leclerc‘s Un été sans point ni coup sûr, which is also a coming-of-age story set in a summer of the sixties.12 Though Leclerc‘s production is more in the Bad News Bears vein than the other two (it is essentially an elegy for the heyday of the now-defunct Montreal Expos), it also deals extensively with the tension between the young protagonist‘s parents and a persistent fear of the mother leaving the home and the family. Like Pool and Falardeau‘s films, it also received funding from

SODEC that year.

According to a Journal de Québec article from 2007, when the films were still in production, Pool‘s film received $ 4.3 million and Falardeau‘s received $ 4.7 million for their budgets. Telefilm received 38 feature-length proposals that winter (2007), and of them, both Isabelle and Bruno‘s Hébert‘s treatments made the final list of ten that were accepted for funding. Telefilm‘s spokeswoman, Janine Basile, who is quoted in the article, confirmed that a committee of at least ten different people had read both scripts, and it was not an oversight. Despite the similarities of their plots and the relationship between the writers involved, she explained that their perspectives and treatments were

―completely different.‖13 SODEC‘s spokeswoman, Ann Champoux, said much the same

―Creative:‖ Originality of the project; Director‘s vision for the film; Director‘s track record; Scriptwriter‘s track record; Producer‘s vision of the film and control over its creative elements; Reflection of Canadian society and cultural diversity. Under ―Audience,‖ the guidelines specify the following key factors: Potential for success in theatres (with consideration given to size and type of film); Marquee value of key project elements (director, performers, original work from which the film has been adapted, source material, etc.); Potential for success in international markets; Potential for success at festivals (Telefilm, 2008). 12 Telefilm‘s complete list of ten films financed by its Canada Feature Film Fund 2007-2008, announced February 22, 2007, also included the following films: La Cité des ombres (coproduction with France); Les Doigts croches (coproduction with France); Cruising Bar 2; Dédé, à travers les brumes; Le Grand depart; Il faut prendre le taureau par les contes (which became Babine); and Trifecta (Telefilm, 2007). Of these, the last five, plus the three set in the sixties (Maman, C’est pas moi, and Un été sans point ni coup sûr) were also funded by SODEC in the same year. The first two mentioned here, both coproductions with France, received funding from SODEC in the next year, 2008-2009. 13 This may also be attributable to the fact that in its original proposal, under the working title ―Pieds nus,‖ Maman est chez le coiffeur was set in the seventies, not the sixties (Telefilm, 2007).

9 thing, adding that the films ―don‘t end the same way‖ ("Financement de deux films similaires : Telefilm et la SODEC dans l'embarras," 2007).

Given the current political climate, in which Telefilm‘s relevance and funding is under more scrutiny and pressure than ever, 14 it seems, in retrospect, especially curious that three such similar films would be financed simultaneously. The nostalgia of contemporary Quebecois film is sometimes attributed to ―the C. R. A. Z. Y. effect‖

(Knight, 2008): that is, the success of Jean-Marc Vallée‘s 2005 film, which was a huge hit in both Quebec and English Canada, grossing over $8 million (Flageul, 2005), quite healthy by Canadian standards. With an expensive soundtrack, C.R.A.Z.Y. arguably relies upon nostalgia to a degree unparalleled in other contemporary Quebecois film, running through the highs and lows of Zac‘s life in the 1960s and 1970s to the well-known music of Patsy Cline, David Bowie, and the Rolling Stones. However, its tone is much more sweeping and epic than the more recent nostalgia films, spanning roughly thirty years of the protagonist‘s life in a manner somewhat reminiscent of Forrest Gump (though thankfully not to the same extremes), wherein the life of one individual serves as a vehicle to guide the audience through the cultural references of the era represented. The three movies from 2008, which take place during one decisive summer in the sixties, are much more focused this way, which has the somewhat contradictory effect of making them all the more nostalgic through their ability to halt time or at least slow it down, in order to then be able to reflect upon it. It is as though, in both Maman est chez le coiffeur

14 Since winning a minority government in January 2006, the Harper Conservatives have cut $45 million in arts funding, including, in August 2008, $14.5-million from a Telefilm initiative, Canadian New Media Fund, that fostered the creation and distribution of internet content (―Tories hack Telefilm's $14.5M new media fund,‖ 2008). This March (2009), CBC announced substantial cuts (on both the French and English networks) to its radio and television programming, as well as the lay-off of over 800 full-time staff to make up its $171-million shortfall in 2009-10, cuts which have largely been attributed to the Conservatives in their unwillingness to help the national broadcaster recover from the difficult economic times (―CBC cuts hit news, drama, sports, radio,‖ 2009).

10 and C’est pas moi, je le jure!, the protagonists are combing the memory of that summer in a search for clues, constantly asking themselves in the manner of Eliza Minot‘s The

Tiny One: ―How can something so big [the disappearance of the mother] fit into such a little thing like a day‖ (as quoted in Mavor, 2007, p. 54).

That these films all secured funding from Telefilm and SODEC is likely attributable in some measure to the success of C.R.A.Z.Y. and its broad popular and critical appeal, but the filmmakers bristle at the suggestion that they are following a trend.

Philippe Falardeau insists that he had been waiting to make C’est pas moi, je le jure! since he read Hébert‘s book by the same name in 1997, and Léa Pool‘s film had been in the works with Telefilm since around the time that C.R.A.Z.Y. was still in cinemas.

Leclerc‘s theory for the influx of Quebec movies set in the sixties is simple: ―funding.

‗All the persons [sic] who work for Telefilm Canada and SODEC are now 50 . . . [and so] they want to see their past, the time when they were maybe 12 or 13 years old‖ (quoted in

Knight, 2008). Pool has echoed this hypothesis as well, claiming in a recent interview that the wave of films set in the 1960s is not surprising: ―C'est normal qu'il y ait des phases comme ça. Ce sont des réalisateurs dans la quarantaine et dans la cinquantaine qui ont envie de parler de leur enfance‖ (Dumais, 2008). In effect, while allowing for the theory of a certain cultural zeitgeist for the sixties,15 it is perhaps a certain boomer sentimentality that is green-lighting all these projects. This is especially interesting when one considers the lack of any direct experiential nostalgia on the part of the filmmakers themselves: Leclerc, who is 36-years-old, was born two years after his film was set; 40- year-old Falardeau‘s film is set roughly in the year of his birth, and Léa Pool, born in

15 Falardeau maintains, in a similar vein, that ―[t]hese ideas in the air seem to pop up at the same time in many minds‖ (Knight, 2008).

11 1950, would be approximately the same age as her protagonist, but her cultural references, growing up as she did in Switzerland, would be vastly different than the

Quebecois setting of Maman est chez le coiffeur. This suggests that the nostalgia informing these films is a mixture of mediated knowledge and personal experience.

Finally, there is the overall critical and popular reception that Pool and Falardeau‘s films received, which was comparable in spite (or because of) their similarities: both made the aforementioned Canada’s Top Ten list for 2008, and both were nominated for seven Jutra awards and at least one Genie Award.16 The greater cache of Pool‘s film outside the province‘s borders, as evidenced by her film receiving a special Jutra for being ―The most prestigious film outside of Quebec,‖ and the higher amount of Genie nominations it garnered, despite many critics‘ declaring Falardeau‘s film to be the stronger of the two, speaks to the difference of these directors‘ reputations and status as auteurs, both within

Quebec and outside. Because of the importance of director‘s distinct oeuvres in Quebec, where ―auteur cinema . . . can be ‗popular‘‖(Marshall, 2000, p. 137), a closer look at the vastly dissimilar bodies of work of Pool and Falardeau is necessary, especially given the staggering coincidences between these most recent of their films. These will be parsed through a broader consideration of the interstices and divergences of the two films themselves.

Plot Synopses: Maman est chez le coiffeur

Maman is Swiss-Quebecois director Léa Pool‘s twelfth film. Since emigrating to

Quebec in 1978 from Switzerland (Marshall, 231), Pool has established herself as one of

Quebec‘s only female auteurs; Chantal Nadeau (1999) points out that she is one of the

16 The Genie Awards are the Canadian cinematic awards; the Jutras are for Quebec cinema. Maman est chez le coiffeur was nominated for six Genie awards, whereas C’est pas moi, je le jure! was only nominated for one.

12 few women directors in Quebec that can claim a ‗commercial visibility,‘ and that during the 1980s, she received the ―greatest amount of support from the organizations that subsidized Quebec‘s film industry‖ (p. 205).17 Making her name during the especially masculinist post-referendum cinema of the 1980s and 1990s, Pool was quickly labeled a

―feminist filmmaker.‖ This was partially due to her open homosexuality (as lesbianism is often conflated with feminism in the press), and because her films dealt almost exclusively with female protagonists and their relationships. Likely it is also a consequence of what critics called the ―emotional‖ and ―intimate‖ quality of her films, more often associated with the feminine. Pool is also distinguished by her internationalism, and while her films are often set at least partially in Montreal, she does not generally use local referents to the degree of many of her Quebec-born contemporaries, prompting some critics to remark upon her films‘ conspicuous lack of québécitude,18 (Melnyk, 2004, p. 175). Her decision to make a film in English with

2001‘s Lost and Delirious, and 2004‘s The Blue Butterfly, point to a perception of her as somewhat more internationally marketable than other Quebecois auteurs.19 This is echoed by the fact that she has been ―one of the pre-eminent beneficiaries of international co- production, with four of her features produced through international deals and intended for the commercial and art house markets of Europe‖ (Longfellow, 1999, p. 176).

17 Despite the emergence of Lyne Charlebois, who won the Jutra for Best Director for her 2008 film Borderline, this disturbing trend persists to the present day, with Pool listed as the only female director in both Telefilm and SODEC‘s lists of major feature funding for 2007-2008. No female directors are listed for the French language films announced for 2009-10 funding (SODEC, 2009; Telefilm, 2009a). 18 After the international success of Anne Trister, critics speculated that Pool‘s cinema was ―vacciné contre toute influence québécoise‖ (Pérusse, 1991, p. 53). 19 Denys Arcand‘s similar forays into Anglophone cinema, Love & Human Remains (1993), and Stardom (2000) were widely considered failures, especially in relation to his huge success in French-language films, both in Quebec and internationally (Melnyk, 2004, p. 177).

13 Despite her treatment of homosexuality and focus on women subjects, Nadeau

(1999) sees in Pool‘s cinema a paradox around questions of sexual difference, and proposes an important distinction: she suggests that Pool‘s is not ―women‘s cinema‖ so much as it is ―cinema about women,‖ 20 because of her depiction of ―women [as] both sexually and socially indifferent‖ (p. 206). Further to this, Nadeau does not discern in

Pool‘s oeuvre any challenge to the status quo of masculine nationalism in Quebec cinema; her portrayal of the alterity of feminine subjectivity is too disengaged from the actual materiality and complications of sexual difference, so that her films ―are somehow reassuring . . . safely anchored in the intimate universe, voluntarily non-engaged and non- confrontational‖ (ibid). Pool is equivocal about her own ideas on the subject of her films‘

‗feminist politics:‘ When asked in a recent interview for the Gazette des femmes (Faradji,

2008) whether she considered herself a feminist filmmaker, Pool responded:

Si on entend le féminisme comme une démarche revendicatrice, je dirai que non.

Je ne fais pas un cinéma politique, je n’ai pas de contenu féministe. Parcontre, si

c’est dans le sens d’une parole donnée à une femme dans son expression la plus

totale, oui. Le fait qu’on soit représentées de façon équitable dans le cinéma

national et international a pour moi une importance capitale. Je suis féministe

dans le sens où j’affirme une identité créatrice feminine (p. 51).

However, Pool has also been praised for films such as La Femme de l’hôtel

(1984), and Anne Trister (1986), for their ability to ―sidestep the traps that gaze theory claims mainstream cinema creates for female spectatorship‖ (Marshall, 2000, p. 233) in her portrayal of women as ―objects of fascination for [one] another‖ (ibid). This,

20 Pool herself is uncomfortable with the characterization of her films as ―women‘s films‖ and is quoted as saying ―We absolutely must smash this whole idea of women‘s films‖ (M.-C. Loiselle, & Claude Racine, 1991, p. 49, Translation mine).

14 Marshall notes, is an important departure in Quebec film, which tends to place ―woman as the Other in an existential (or Oedipal, or national) quest for authenticity‖ (p. 232). Her works‘ ambiguous politics have sometimes been redeemed as pro-feminist in their expression of ―a European sense of feminism that is removed from the American- influenced Canadian feminism of English Canada and its social pre-occupations‖

(Melnyk, 2004, p. 177), and more in line with ―[s]o-called ‗new French feminist‘ theory

[which] has included an interest in the feminine investment of liminal spaces, a cult of marginality‖ (Marshall, 2000, p. 233). In a manner reminiscent of the critique of the mode retro French films of the 1970s that will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 1,

Nadeau‘s criticism is thus diminished by its similarity to a certain overly literal Marxist orthodoxy that conflates the characters‘ politics with those of the director or the films themselves (ibid, 133).

Nadeau is correct in discerning a certain paradox in Pool‘s films, but it is perhaps better understood in the context of her other recurring thematic preoccupation: childhood and the quest for the mother. Pool, who worked as a schoolteacher in Switzerland before coming to Quebec, has long been fascinated with childhood and the liminal subjectivity of adolescence, made most strikingly apparent in her hugely successful coming-of-age film Emporte-moi (1999), also set in the 1960s: “Ma source vive depuis le début, c’est l’enfance. Les questionnements, le préocupations, les douleurs sont ceux d’une période assez restreinte somme toute” (Grugeau, 2001, p. 20). Some have described Maman as a companion piece for this earlier film, dealing as it does with a young girl coming of age in the 1960s, and her dysfunctional family. Emporte-moi was arguably a more personal film for Pool though, in that she wrote it herself, and much of the material was drawn

15 from her own experience of growing up with an immigrant Jewish father and mentally ill, emotionally unavailable mother, while grappling with the dawning consciousness of her own homosexuality. It is perhaps in this last detail, more than the setting in the 1960s or their portrayal of adolescence that the two films are most alike. Pool, whose own mother abandoned her and her family for three years during her youth, has said that the quest for the mother has long been her driving force; describing her own mother in an interview with 24 Images (Grugeau, 2001), as ―un être dépressif, exile en lui-même, complètement coupé de la réalité et des autres‖ (p. 18). Her films, she goes on to describe,

porte sur des mères manquantes, des mères inadéquates . . . L’absence de la

mère, qui est à combler, fait partie intégrante de tous mes films. L’exil correspond

pour moi en quelque sorte au fait d’avoir été éjectée d’un lien vital. Le lien à la

mère est à la base même de l’identité. Sans ce lien ou si ce lien a été brouillé,

l’identité sera toujours fagile (p. 20).

It is in this idea of a quest for origins and a feeling of a fragile identity that the inclusion of Pool‘s oeuvre within Quebec‘s national cinema can best be understood; her ambiguous relationship with the maternal completely in line with a cultural cinema that has largely been defined by its troubled intergenerational relationships. Now that she is a mother herself, she has said she is even more interested in the world of childhood, and was especially drawn to Isabelle Hébert‘s screenplay for Maman because she was interested in attempting to understand how a mother could make what for her would be an impossible decision: to leave her children (Perron, 2008).

Maman recounts a summer in the life of Élise Gauvin (played by Marianne

Fortier), an adolescent who witnesses the gradual unraveling of her once (seemingly)

16 happy family, and tries to cope with the trauma of her mother leaving after the revelation of her father‘s homosexuality. Set in the summer of 1966, the film is firmly rooted in the era of Quebec‘s much-mythologized Quiet Revolution, exactly one year before the cultural landmark of Expo 67, and two years prior to the groundbreaking creation of the

Parti Québécois (PQ). In light of the father‘s sexuality and consequential separation of the parents in the film, it is also worth noting that the story takes place two years before

Quebec‘s sodomy laws were repealed by Pierre Trudeau‘s federal government in 1968, effectively decriminalizing homosexuality (Marshall, 2000, pp. 120-121); that same year also saw long-awaited changes to the Canada‘s divorce laws, with the federal Divorce

Act of 1968, and the subsequent decriminalization of divorce in Quebec in 1969.21 As the oldest child and the only daughter, Élise is particularly affected by her mother‘s sudden absence, and struggles in her unwitting role as surrogate mother to her troubled youngest brother, all the while grappling with the regular rites of passage and changes that come with adolescence. In what amounts to a significant departure for Quebec film, which has long associated a certain working-class subjectivity with an authentic Quebecois identity,

22 the Gauvins (as well as the Dorés of Falardeau‘s film) are depicted as a bourgeois family, with both of the parents portrayed as working professionals.

In reviews of the film, whether in French or English, critics make frequent recourse to words like ―evocative‖ and ―beautiful:‖ its setting in the picturesque region of the Richelieu Valley, deliberate recreation of film processes from the era, saturated

21 Prior to these changes to the federal divorce laws, divorce was governed by pre-Confederation provincial statutes and inherited English legislation. In Newfoundland and Québec, where no divorce legislation existed, divorces could only be obtained through a private Act of Parliament (Dickinson, 2003, p. 367). 22 André Loiselle (2006) writes that ―the proletariat might be one of the more common objects of Quebec filmmakers‘ gaze‖ (p. 211), especially before the 1980 referendum ―shattered the illusion that the class struggle and the nationalist agenda were united in their march towards victory‖ (p. 225).

17 colour palette,23 impeccable costume and set design, and a score of songs from the era,24 have the effect of making the audience‘s aesthetic experience of the film integral to its reception. The affective quality of the film‘s stylistic elements have caused some, like

Philippe Falardeau, to suggest that Pool ―plays the nostalgia card‖ (Falardeau, 2009a) to a greater extent than other directors (such as himself, presumably).25 Some, like The

Gazette‘s film critic Brendan Kelly, suggest that beauty of the film serves to compensate for certain plot inconsistencies and flawed character development (Kelly, 2008). This is reminiscent of the general criticism of nostalgia films in that they are often dismissed as preferring style over content, an understanding which privileges an idea of the two as mutually exclusive. Generally though, and as we have already seen by its inclusion on the aforementioned ―Canada‘s Top Ten‖ list and several award wins and nominations,

Maman est chez le coiffeur was well received, critically and with audiences both home and abroad.

The summer begins promisingly, with Élise and her two younger brothers returning to their well-appointed home on the last day of school before summer vacation, where their mother (played by hard-working Quebec actress Céline Bonnier) greets them

23 In an interview from Ciné-Bulles (Perron, 2008), Pool described how she and her photography director, Daniel Jobin, worked during postproduction to give the film a feeling of 1960s‘ Kodachrome; and how she was inspired by artist David Hockney‘s colour palette, with its very saturated turquoises, reds, and greens. Filmed on a super 16, the film was then blown up to 35 mm to give it a grainy quality to distinguish it from the more defined and sharper image of contemporary films (p. 15). 24 Songs from the era include yé-yé versions of Sonny Bono‘s ―Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down),‖ Françoise Hardy‘s version of ―La maison où j‘ai grandi‖ (borrowed for the title of this thesis), as well as popular songs by Quebecois chansonniers from the 1960s such as Claude Léveillé‘s ―Frédéric.‖ These quasi-diegetic songs (meant to imply what the characters themselves are listening to as well as setting a particular tone), are combined with a haunting original piano score by Laurent Eyquem, as well as a cover of the Patrick Watson song, ―The Great Escape,‖ sung by Élie Dupuis in the role of Coco. 25 From a Q&A session with Falardeau that followed the January 19th, 2009 screening of C’est pas moi, je le jure!, at Salle Pauline Julien in Montreal. According to Falardeau, he was relieved when he first saw Pool‘s film because it was ―so different than mine,‖ partly because she ―played the nostalgia card to a greater degree‖ (Falardeau, 2009a, Translation mine).

18 with their favourite snack: a homemade cake with white frosting. But June Cleaver she is not; instead, the audience soon learns that she is a journalist for the national broadcaster,

Radio Canada, and busily manages to work on a story about an undeclared American war in Vietnam, while simultaneously playing with her youngest child, Benoît (Hugo St-

Onge-Paquin). The fragile baby of the family is shown from the start of the film (when he wets his pants on the school bus) to be a sensitive and somewhat absent-minded child, and his father worries he is developmentally delayed when he has trouble learning how to read. Élise and the middle child, Coco (Élie Dupuis) are portrayed as more independent and ―normal:‖ Coco spends the entire summer working obsessively on turning a lawnmower into a go-kart, and Élise does well at school; both of the older children, like their mother, play the piano, a recurrent theme in both films that has simultaneous implications for the score, and also for connoting the relative affluence and ―culture‖ of these bourgeois families in that they can afford such things. Their father (played by

French actor Laurent Lucas) is a globetrotting microbiologist who spends his time working at the hospital when he is not playing golf. He is a caring father but somewhat remote; while he is shown to be obsessively preoccupied with his children‘s diction

(often correcting their French, a tendency that the father in Falardeau‘s film shares and, like the piano, points to their upper-middle-class status), he does not notice their glazed expressions when he lapses into lengthy descriptions about the anatomy of a jellyfish or tries to impart wisdom to them in the form of a proverb. The father‘s Frenchness, which was an addition to the screenplay made by Pool, has caused some curiousity among

Quebecois critics,26 but Pool maintains that the theme of a dual nationality is something

26 Éric Perron (2008) speculates that the fact that their father is French accentuates the children‘s distance from him, a question that speaks to a particularly Quebecois perspective (and homogeneity) that Pool does

19 that has long preoccupied her since her own relocation to Quebec (Dumais, 2008), and the fact that she herself grew up with parents of different nationalities and religions

(Perron, 2008, p. 11). Regardless of her personal motivations, the fact that the father is both French and gay underlines a long-standing tension in Quebecois film‘s portrayal of male homosexuality: ―the whole relationship with Canada had for long been expressed in highly gendered and sexualized terms which precluded the juxtaposition of ‗Quebec authenticity‘ and ‗homosexuality‘ . . . the representation of gay men in Quebec cinema was as predators and freaks‖ (Marshall, 2000, pp. 119-120). In this way, the father‘s queerness is somewhat offset (and contained) by his Frenchness, while still contributing to what Chantal Nadeau (2008) describes as the ‗queering‘ of the family romance; effectively a way to modernize and thereby redeem the Quebec (sovereign) family melodrama (p. 1), which has for so long been associated with the nation.27

The idyllic setting of the family‘s large suburban home borders a lake with mountains in the distance. Free from the constraints of school, the children play happily on the water, catching frogs and throwing stones. The local kids harass the neighbourhood weirdo, M. Mouche (mouche because he makes and sells intricate lures for the local fly-fishermen). Mute and marked by a large port-wine stain on his face, M.

Mouche, who lives in a trailer by the water, is established early on as the Other of the

Gauvins‘ homogenous community, as well as a character that holds great fascination for

Élise. He will eventually come to befriend her and act as a type of surrogate parent after

not subscribe to: ―Pas pour moi. Probablement plus pour vous. Moi, j’ai une famille comme ça, un père polonais, une mère suisse, donc des accents très différents, et je ne sentais pas mon père plus ou moins loin‖ (Perron, 2008, p. 11). 27 To this end, Nadeau points to recent examples from Quebecois film and television, such as C.R.A.Z.Y., and the popular Télé-Québec miniseries, Histoire de famille; the even more recent success of Xavier Dolan‘s J’ai tué ma mère (2009), about the fractious relationship between a young homosexual man and his mother, seems to bear this out.

20 her mother leaves, teaching her to fish, coming to her defense against the local busybody, and offering temporary respite from the turmoil at home.

The family‘s peace that summer is soon disrupted: Élise begins to suspect her father‘s ―golf dates‖ and emergency calls to the hospital, and it is soon revealed that he is having an affair with another man. The audience is made aware of this before anyone else in the story through the thwarted embrace Élise and the audience witness between her father and his ―friend‖ when he drops him off at home in an early scene.28 Though Élise can tell something strange is going on, she is not quite sure what, and later she eavesdrops on her father‘s phone conversation. Unable really to make sense of what she is hearing, or else in an effort to tell her mother what she suspects, Élise hands her mother the telephone. Horrified by what she overhears, Simone slaps her daughter and asks her why she did that, implicating Élise in the eventual dissolution of her parents‘ marriage.

Simone leaves, hastily demanding a post as a newscaster in London, after telling her boss she will die if she stays. In a fight between the parents that the children overhear from the hallway (a scene that establishes the recurring theme of voyeurism into the adult world that is echoed throughout both films), Élise‘s father feigns incomprehension at his wife‘s

28 Pool‘s treatment of the father‘s homosexuality is surprisingly superficial and owes much to the Dennis Quaid character in Todd Haynes‘ 2002 Far from Heaven, a film that she refers to explicitely in an interview (Perron, 2008, p. 10) in order to explain how the character of Madame Gauvin (Céline Bonnier), an investigative reporter, has no inkling of her husband‘s homosexuality: ―Dans ces années-là, personne ne songeait à tout ce qui concerne l’homosexualité. Pensons, entre autres, à Far from Heaven avec Julianne Moore, il y a du déni. Même si elle soupçonnait quelque chose, elle ne voudrait pas le savoir, il faut vraiment qu’elle l’ait en pleine face pour qu’elle le réalise” (p. 10). In Pool‘s film, Laurent Lucas‘ character‘s sexual orientation is used mainly as catalyst for the pivotal separation of the parents and to render the mother‘s ‗violent‘ departure more understandable to the audience; after the mother‘s departure, it is never alluded to again. Also similar to Haynes‘ film is the contrasting way in which the (contemporary) audience is quick to suspect the real motivation of his extended absences and strange phone calls, while the other characters (his family) are not, through winking references to ―golf dates,‖ that solicit contemporary audiences‘ wider knowledge of such things directly in a bid to address them as ―modern‖ and ―cosmopolitan,‖ that is a great part of the pleasure of the nostalgia film.

21 veiled accusations and euphemisms, and accuses her of abandoning her children, though she assures them all that she will be sending for the children when she is settled.

The rest of the summer takes place in a sort of limbo; without their mother, the children are adrift. Benoît especially, troubled from the outset, retreats further and further into his own world, manifested in the film as the furnace room, where he hides from the rest of his family and mourns his mother‘s absence, inventing new and more disturbing ways to kill his GI Joe doll. Élise tries to protect and take care of him, all the while resenting her father and ignoring her mother‘s phone calls; she tells Coco, who remains convinced that their mother will return, that she has abandoned them. Her mother‘s contentious plans for her to attend private school in the fall now effectively canceled,

Élise tries to revel in her newfound freedom; playing kissing games in the barn, riding bikes with her friends, and fishing at the lake, which her mother had expressly forbid.

Tacitly forced into the maternal role towards her youngest brother, and trying to dissuade her father from institutionalizing him at a ―special school,‖ Élise bears the weight of her mother‘s absence more heavily than the boys. In one scene, she puts a blanket on her father, who is passed out among some empty bottles on a lawn chair and then enters her mother‘s empty bedroom and tries on her gloves, burying her face into a silk scarf in an attempt to get a whiff of her mother‘s perfume. Though she is angry, Élise writes letters to her mother and hides them in her plastic thermos. She is also initially the keeper of the family‘s secret of the mother‘s absence, which they explain with line borrowed for the title, that ―mom(my) is at the hairdresser‘s.‖29 Such deception is shown to be necessary in an era that was still largely and homogenously Catholic, and words like ―separation‖ and

29 In one review for the film, Anna Phelan (2008) describes the title as ―very misleading and regrettable‖ as it ―suggest[s] a farcical comedy of errors, [and] instead [it's] an alternately heart-warming and heart- wrenching family drama whose only mistake is that title.‖

22 ―divorce‖ were considered dirty. An unvoiced conformity is enforced by local gossips, who create petitions for things like a general ban on clotheslines.

Élise‘s dawning consciousness of the hypocrisy of the adult world is something obliquely gestured to throughout the film‘s diegesis; she watches a neighbour‘s father tell his children that he is giving up their puppies to a pet store, only to see him later pay M.

Mouche to drown them. The recurring character of a neighbourhood boy dressed like a runaway member of the Von Trapp family provides comic relief by telling Élise about his royal parentage: his mother has told him he is the illegitimate son of an Austrian prince

(hence the lederhosen), and that is why his stepfather is so cruel to him. Yet another boy is struggling to keep his fragile mother together after his father has been taken to hospital indefinitely. Perhaps the most explicit scene highlighting the duplicity of the adult world is the one in which Élise and some friends pay another boy to watch his aunt, a prostitute, with a client. Hiding in the bedroom closet, they are horrified when the customer turns out to be one of the boys‘ fathers. This theme of the innocence of childhood contrasted with the sordid adult world is a key feature in both Pool and Falardeau‘s films (as well as countless other films about children), and is at least equally nostalgic of childhood innocence as the temporal location of these films in the 1960s.

Similarly, both Pool and Falardeau depict the children‘s own proper nostalgia, which takes different forms in each film, but in both cases is directly linked to the mother. In Maman, Élise watches the famed Quebecois chansonnier, Claude Léveillée, on the family‘s black and white television, perform his hit ―Frédéric,‖ itself an incredibly nostalgic song whose lyrics evoke happy family Sunday meals spent sitting around the table while mother busily served everyone, before everyone grew up, scattered, and ―la

23 vie [les] a bouffé.‖30 In Falardeau‘s film, the ten-year-old protagonist Léon is seemingly nostalgic for a time before his birth, when he was literally inside his mother, resting quietly. This sort of longing is not a common feature in filmic depictions of childhood, which tend to privilege a depiction of youth as eternally present and living in the moment. It shares more in common with the audience‘s adult subjectivity, which prefers to think of childhood in Léveillée‘s terms: as a time of unspoiled happiness and innocence.

Élise‘s hapless father is shown to be struggling in his role as single parent; he takes up smoking and feeds the children pizza every night. Concerned about his youngest son and clearly overwhelmed, he decides Benoît would be better off at an institution after he sets the garage on fire ―by accident.‖ Élise, despondent about his plans and the future in general, stows away on M. Mouche‘s pickup truck for a day. This voyage away from the scene of her problems, the domestic setting, into town for the day, is echoed in

Falardeau‘s film where it takes the form of a quest across the river in order for the main character, Léon, to buy a plane ticket to see his mother: in both cases, it serves as the climax of the film, wherein the larger town or community is cast as both a respite from the trouble at home, and as a challenge to be overcome, wherein the relief it offers can only ever be temporary because domestic issues continue to haunt the characters in a way that affirms their inescapable primacy. Happy and distracted with M. Mouche at a store in town, Élise sees her mother on television reading the news, and surprised by her image, is reduced to tears. Benoît, watching the same broadcast at home, reaches out and touches

30 It is not the first time this song has been used to evoke this sort of longing; André Loiselle (2007) describes its use in the 1994 film, Mon amie Max: ―From the soft amber cinematography to the . . . Claude Léveillée song ‗Frédéric,‘ everything in the film encourages nostalgia‖ (p. 160).

24 his mother‘s image on the screen, which in the next scene we see he has smashed, his tortured GI Joe doll laying like a signature beside the hammer.

When the summer ends, M. Mouche packs up his trailer and drives away. Élise faces her father, who is about to drive her brother away to boarding school. In a scene reminiscent of an earlier one in which their mother drove away and Benoît chased her car, Élise takes off after her father as he pulls out of the driveway. Catching up with him, she opens the car door and grabs her brother‘s hand; they run into the cornfields, their father shouting after them; meanwhile, Coco pulls up triumphantly in his finished go-cart to the other kids waiting for the school bus. Élise and Benoît run through the endless fields as fast as they can; when they finally sit down to rest, and Benoît asks his sister where they will go next, to which she simply responds, ―London.‖

C’est pas moi, je le jure!

Philippe Falardeau follows in the long tradition of Quebecois filmmakers who have come to directing through the documentary tradition. C’est pas moi, je le jure! is his third―most accessible‖ feature film ("Canada's Top Ten," 2008), based on an amalgam of

Bruno Hébert‘s two popular, semi-autobiographical novels, C’est pas moi, je le jure!

(1997) and Alice court avec René (2000). Falardeau‘s body of work up until this point, while widely acclaimed critically, was seen as more obscure and ―political.‖ His first film, La moitié gauche du frigo (2000), took the form of a fictional documentary wherein a politically active, somewhat radical but affluent filmmaker, Stéphane, decides to make a film about his roommate Christophe‘s struggle to find a job after he leaves his engineering position as a consequence of globalization. The director‘s constant presence

25 and camera begin to make life impossible for Christophe, who starts to feel more and more exploited by his financially-comfortable roommate, and he finally leaves Montreal for Vancouver. Falardeau‘s second film, 2006‘s Congorama, recounts the story of a

Belgian inventor who travels to Quebec on a quest to find his biological parents, who gave him up to a Belgian couple soon after Expo 67. It is a compellingly international story in which the traditional Quebecois ―search for origins‖ narrative meets a fairly oblique commentary on the effects of globalization and Quebec‘s role in the international sphere. Prior to these two films, both of which were written by Falardeau, he also wrote and directed a short for the NFB called Pâté chinois (1997) (literally, ―Chinese pasta), the title referencing the uniquely Quebecois term for a meat dish similar to shepherd‘s pie.

Midway between documentary and fiction, this film chronicles Falardeau‘s cross-country trek at the behest of a rich businessman from Hong Kong, on the eve of that territory being handed back to the People‘s Republic of China, to find and research the Chinese restaurants in every town. For Falardeau, these ubiquitous businesses represent both the origins of a common stereotype and a symbol for the difficult integration of Chinese immigrants to North-America, one which allows him to explore another theme common to Quebecois film that is similar to Pool‘s oeuvre, that of exile.

Just prior to this film for the NFB, and after returning from a job as a cameraman in Southern Sudan for Marie-Claude Harvey‘s 1994 NFB documentary Attendre,

Falardeau worked with famed Quebecois writer, essayist, and filmmaker Jacques

Godbout on his film Le sort de l’Amérique (1996), which was also a cross between documentary and fiction about the struggle to make a film about the still highly

26 contentious31 and hugely consequential 1759 Battle on the Plaines of Abraham.

Falardeau, who also co-wrote the film, plays himself and serves as Godbout‘s assistant and cameraman. Jocelyn Létourneau (2004) describes him as playing a kind of ―‗straight man,‘ the embodiment of honesty and earnestness . . . he repeats to anyone who will listen, especially his boss and mentor, Godbout, that the past cannot be manipulated with impunity that the narration of the past must obey certain established rules‖ (p. 94), as opposed to the model proposed by Godbout‘s other associate, the playwright René Daniel

Dubois, who is working on a film dealing with the same subject for a group of

Hollywood producers. Dubois represents the ―trickster in relation to Godbout‖ (p. 95), who believes that history should be at the mercy of drama and narrative. In the end, after

Godbout‘s project fails, a disillusioned Falardeau tells him that he is going to work as a chauffeur for a rich Montreal Anglophone, and accuses Godbout of being the ―traitor‖ in the whole affair. While Létourneau suggests many hypotheses to explain the meaning of this insult, and the laughter with which Godbout responds, the most obvious seems to lie in an understanding of the generational conflict inherent in their relationship: Godbout, the intellectual of the Quiet Revolution and its utopic promises, has let down Falardeau, who represents the subsequent generation, by failing to make a ―thinkable‖ and

31 Recent plans of a reenactment in the summer of 2009, of the epic battle on the Plaines, known in Quebec as ―la Conquête,‖ which for many in Quebec has long symbolized the beginning of colonial rule by the British, stirred up considerable controversy with sovereigntists, who saw the National Battlefields Commission (a federal institution)‘s, plans to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the battle as insulting and insensitive. Fears that such protests would stoke sovereigntist sentiment, as well as recent Parti Quebecois anger over the federal ownership of such historical lands, saw the reenactment cancelled in February 2009, as well as the accompanying masked ball (Laurin, 2009). Another well-publicized example of the controversy over popular memory that this national park still stirs up 400 years after Quebec city‘s founding is that which erupted after the announcement in the summer of 2008 that Paul McCartney would play a free concert on the plains for the anniversary, which very staunch sovereigntists found distasteful given his status as a British knight. The controversy, which was exacerbated by a press eager for headlines like ―British Knight to invade the Plains of Abraham‖ (2008), and ―Paul McCartney a conquis Québec‖ (2008), ended relatively quickly and the concert proceeded as planned on July 20th, 2008.

27 completely objective (true) narrative out of Quebec‘s messy history. The laughter and lack of any real animosity in this scene points to the impossibility of just such a project.

From this résumé, it should be fairly obvious that Falardeau, a Political Science and International Relations graduate and award recipient from the University of Ottawa, who worked as a political analyst32 for two years upon graduating, comes to filmmaking with a strong political agenda and interest, especially in terms of a particular tension between Quebec‘s national ambitions and a globalizing society and economy. C’est pas moi is the first of Falardeau‘s features that he himself did not write, and it is, by his own account, the ―least political‖ of his films. It is perhaps this lack of overt politics or its setting in the universal realm of childhood that has seen it also hailed as his most accessible. He has said, in recent interviews, that he intends to return to making political films.33

For C’est pas moi, Falardeau was emphatic about not falling into ―le piège de la nostalgie‖ (Demers, 2008), and even considered setting Hébert‘s novel in the present day.

He was interested in this shift both for economical reasons (renting period cars is expensive) as well as in order to achieve a greater immediacy with the audience, as he felt that the story was one that could still be related to today. In the end though, he was dissuaded because, as he explains, the separation and trauma of the mother‘s absence would not be as significant today, in an era of digital communications, where divorce is

32 He worked as a political analyst for the for the Fédération des francophones hors Québec, where he wrote Hier, La francophonie, a historical survey of the French diaspora in Canada. He has since published several articles on the francophonie in publications such as L’Action Nationale, as well as a weekly column for the Montreal newspaper, Le Devoir (ONF, 2009). 33 By the time that C’est pas moi was released in theatres, Falardeau was already working on a screenplay adaptation of the play Bashir Lazhar, about an Algerian immigrant substitute teacher in a contemporary Quebec public school, as well as adapting the memoirs of Jacques Cossette-Trudel, who was a member of the FLQ Liberation cell that kidnapped James Cross in 1970 and was subsequently exiled to Cuba (Castiel, 2008). The latter of these, Falardeau says he knows will ―make people talk‖ and might even raise some protest, but that is why he absolutely wants to go ahead with it (Boudreau, 2009, Translation mine).

28 much more common. Falardeau used contemporary filmic techniques and avoided ―the nostalgia trap‖ by utilizing a less evocative colour palette than Pool‘s film.34 Instead of using music from the era, Falardeau commissioned an original score from a contemporary Montreal-based musician, Patrick Watson (whose song ―The Great

Escape‖ is used in Pool‘s film).35 Other music is provided by the Montreal band Karkwa, as well as the recurring diegetic motif of the piano, which is also like Maman. In both films, the mothers play piano, and the father in C’est pas moi, also plays. Léon often practices a particular Schubert piece, usually to drown out the sound of his parents fighting; in one scene about halfway through the film, he plays an impromptu duet with his father at home, in a rare scene of family harmony.

Like Maman, C’est pas moi is set in an affluent rural suburb in Montreal‘s South

Shore, the scenic Montérégie region of Quebec, but two years later, during the summer of

1968. Very similar to that other film in terms of the background story of the breakup of the parents, Falardeau‘s protagonist, 10-year-old Léon (played by Antoine L‘Écuyer), is decidedly more of a troublemaker than Élise. In fact, the film was marketed to Quebecois audiences as a type of Dennis the Menace for adults, because Léon‘s antics are so over- the-top (the opening scene has him almost hanging himself ―by accident‖) that they are often (darkly) comical. Falardeau has said that he wanted to create, with Léon, a type of

34 In a press release for the film, Falardeau said that his inspiration in terms of colours came from an overarching interest in conveying Léon‘s desire: thus, the colours in his house, where he is unhappy and bored, are monochromatic; the neighbours‘ house across the street though, which he imagines as warm and full of toys, is rendered in very saturated and lively colours (Ruer, 2008b, p. 5). 35 The coincidence of both directors drawing so extensively on this Anglophone Quebecer‘s work is likely just that; since winning the coveted Polaris Music Prize in 2007, Watson‘s band has been in fairly high demand, and their piano-based music is especially suitable for both films given the way in which they both foreground the instrument as a marker of class, as well as the inherently nostalgic quality of the band‘s music. Watson has also been known to actively woo directors to use his music in their films, as he recently attempted with when he found out that Spike Jonze would be adapting Maurice Sendak‘s children‘s book, Where The Wild Things Are, to film (Leijon, 2009).

29 ―anti-Aurore‖ (Ruer, 2008b, p. 3), referring to the child protagonist of the hugely important early Quebecois film, La Petite Aurore l'enfant martyre, which dramatically recounted the true story of a young girl who is essentially tortured to death by her evil- stepmother. By this, Falardeau was alluding to the popular tendency (especially prevalent in Quebec film) of portraying children as the victims of circumstances. Instead, he wanted Léon to have agency and control over his own life, even if it meant he chose to be self-destructive.36 Though older and precociously clever (often speaking in voice-over monologues to the camera in a manner that belies a disillusioned adult subjectivity, despite the ten-year-old timbre of its deliverance), in many ways Léon bears a striking resemblance to the character of the youngest brother in Pool‘s film, Benoît, both in terms of his self-destruction, wild imagination, and closeness to his mother. Given the relationship of the screenwriters, it is not too difficult to imagine that they are both based on Bruno Hébert himself.

Unlike the Gauvins of Pool‘s film, Léon Doré‘s family never really seems happy, even before the mother leaves. Léon‘s mother, Madeleine Doré (played by Suzanne

Clément) is a passionate artist-type, often clad in a dashiki; once an aspiring painter, she now feels stifled and unfulfilled in her role as a ―glorified waitress‖ to her human-rights activist/lawyer husband Philippe Doré (played by Daniel Brière), whom Léon describes

(sardonically) as a ―national hero,‖ who ―never lies [and is] practically perfect.‖ Léon‘s

36 To this end, Falardeau also removed the scene from Hébert‘s original novel, where it turns out that Léon actually does have a mental problem. Falardeau (2009b) describes an audience member commenting to him at the end of an early screening that Léon‘s actual problem was attention deficit disorder and that he needed counseling and likely, medication. The woman implied that there was nothing funny about watching a sick 10-year-old trying to kill himself. Falardeau seems to have found this comment indicative of a certain victim culture wherein nothing can happen for itself instead of as a result of some sort of disease or trauma. What is strange about this is that Léon is of course the victim of a trauma, and that trauma seems explicitly to be his parents‘ terrible relationship and his lack of attention, but Falardeau does not address this.

30 father is established early on as a workaholic more concerned with ―saving the world‖37 than saving his family. He cares about his children, but dismisses his wife‘s obvious unhappiness and does not take her seriously enough to change his ways. Léon is obviously very close with his mother; their complicity is established at the beginning of the film, when the local busybody (a common feature of both films that works similarly as a foil for the more likable and ―liberated‖ personality of the mothers), Madame

Brisebois, accuses Léon of throwing an egg at her house. His mother rescues him by backing up his alibi, admonishing him in private that ―It‘s better not to lie, but it‘s worse to lie badly‖ (Mentir c'est mal. Mais mal mentir, c'est encore pire). Their closeness bears a trace of the Oedipal about it; Léon is preternaturally calm when his mother is around, and they share the sort of symbiotic communication that precedes speech. 38

After a massive fight between the parents that Léon and his long-suffering older brother Jerome (who only wants ―a normal family‖) witness from their hiding place in the closet, Léon breaks into his vacationing neighbours‘ home, where he vents his frustrations by urinating in the cedar closet, taking a screwdriver to their harpsichord, and generally ruining everything he touches. Soon after, their mother announces that she is suffocating at home, and is leaving the next morning for Greece to restart her life. In another memorable argument between Léon‘s parents, his father screams ―As a mother,

37 This characterization of M. Doré resonates particularly with Jacques Hébert‘s own biography, and the character of Philippe Doré is based much more closely on the actual character of Jacques Hébert than Élise‘s father in Pool‘s film; in an interview for the film‘s opening, Daniel Brière describes how he spoke to many of Hébert‘s actual colleagues and friends to get a better understanding of him (Beauchamp, 2008). 38 The film actually begins with a faraway shot of an island in the ocean and Léon‘s voiceover declaring that at the beginning, before The Word, there was nothing: ―I was sleeping 20,000 leagues under the sea.‖ This has a special resonance in the original French, as the word for sea is mer, phonetically identical to the word for mother, mère. Then one day, ―God ruined everything. The seawater (l’eau de la mer, ―water of the mother‖) drained out and life appeared at the end of the tunnel.‖ Later, after his near-asphyxiation, he describes the other time he accidentally almost killed himself, when he tried to ―take a nap in the pool,‖ in an attempt to get back to the peaceful quiet of the waters before he was born.

31 you set a precedent. People will talk about this in forty years in the best homes in

Montreal!‖ She fires back, ―I don‘t give a shit what your pals at the Beaver Club think!

… I want to live, not rot away in the suburbs.‖39 When she actually gets into her car and leaves, Léon struggles to hold on to her physically, then resorts to eating dirt when his father restrains him, all in a desperate bid to keep her at home. This scene is remarkably similar to the one in Maman, which is less frenetic but equally sad in its portrayal of

Benoît chasing his mother‘s car until it‘s out of sight.

Both films make frequent recourses to the theme of ―nature‖ as haven; epitomized in both as the cornfields that the children are able to hide in. In his frequent invocations of returning to the still waters of the time before his birth, Léon links the ocean, and water and nature more generally, to an idea of maternal plentitude.40 Similarly, Élise spends much of her free time playing and fishing in the lake, despite her mother‘s warnings, and when she makes her big escape with Benoît at the end of the film, it is to

39 The allusion here to the Beaver Club is worth a second look: Despite its seedier connotations, the Beaver Club is actually an exclusive private club located in the Queen Elizabeth II hotel in downtown Montreal, historically known as a gathering place for bourgeois French and English Canadians. The reference is also intertextual, as the Beaver Club was made especially famous in the 1985 ―subterfuge video‖ by controversial director Pierre Falardeau, Le temps des bouffons. Falardeau (no relation to Philippe Falardeau) secretly filmed the 200th anniversary celebration of the club, where French and English ruling elite celebrate Quebec‘s colonial legacy, some dressed in ‗traditional‘ garb from the Conquest of 1759. Notorious for his incendiary rhetoric, Pierre Falardeau described those in attendance in his inimitable way: ―Negro kings with white skin who speak bilingual . . . English bourgeois [and] bilingual collaborators‖ (MacKenzie, 2004, pp. 168-169). When it was finally released on video in 1993, Falardeau encouraged piracy and illegal copying of it, so that 2,000-4,000 bootleg copies, plus the original 2,000, were eventually in circulation (MacKenzie, 2004, p. 168). With this seemingly banal comment (and even in the original French, she says ―Beaver Club,‖ not ―Club des castors,‖ a testament to its untranslatable-ness), Madeleine Doré is effectively accusing her successful (bourgeois) husband of being ―a bilingual collaborator‖ (read: federalist sycophant), as well as implicating him in the questionable sexual politics of the boy‘s club, what Chantal Nadeau (2001) describes as the Beaver Club‘s ―display of the economic power of testosterone in the regulation of the nation‖ (pp. 62-63). 40 ―The ‗oceanic feeling,‘ Freud argues, is a form of infantile regression, in which the individual seeks to return to early childhood experiences of breast feeding‖ (Mavor, 2007, p. 173). Psychoanalyst and Object Relations theorist Michael Balint describes how ―oceanic feeling[s] are to be regarded as repetition either of the very early mother-child relationship or of the still earlier intra-uterine existence, during which we were really one with our universe and were really floating in the amniotic fluid which practically no weight to carry‘‖ (as quoted in Mavor, 2007, p. 173).

32 the cornfields that they run and hide. Riding their bikes through the forests and fields, as well as through their rural suburbs, the protagonists of both movies evoke visceral memories of the freedom of childhood summers. Animals are woven portentously into the storylines as well: in Maman, the bird that flew into the family‘s clean window at the start of the film seems like a harbinger of the end of the Gauvins‘ harmony;41 in C’est pas moi, Léon often sees a red fox running across his path, usually before something pivotal happens. Léon flies his brother‘s homemade kites, while Élise learns to fish at the lake, both of them connected to the landscape tenuously, by a string.

The summer continues, as does Léon‘s antics at the neighbours‘ house.

Eventually he becomes friends with the troubled neighbourhood girl Léa, a character who echoes Maman‘s theme of parental disappointment: she is beaten by her uncle, and her father‘s absence creates a quiet scandal in their homogenous community, where, as

Jerome tells his brother in an early scene, ―divorce is a dirty word, like vagina.‖ Given this, it follows that Léa‘s mother is either complicit or negligent, and when Léa goes to look for her father in a ―quest for origins‖ not unlike Léon‘s own coterminous quest to buy a plane ticket to Greece, she finds another family that he has skipped out on. This odyssey that forms the climax of the film takes Léa and Léon on a harrowing journey across the river into town. Alone and unsupervised, the ten-year-olds must accomplish several feats of bravery, such as crossing Portage St. (the place that Léon fearfully

41 The dead bird reappears in a deleted scene of the film, made available on the DVD: Simone Gauvin opens her suitcase in a London hotel room and is startled to find the bird‘s body lovingly packed among her clothes. Here the ominous connection to the children‘s welfare is made more explicit, as it is clear that Benoît, who is shown finding the dead bird in an early scene, has stowed it away for his mother‘s trip; in a way, the bird is a type of surrogate for him. Mavor (2007) traces the bird-child connection back to the J.M. Barrie work, Little White Bird, wherein birds represent winged souls before they become boys or girls; ―that is the reason there are bars on nurseries windows . . . . because very little people sometimes forget that they have no longer wings, and try to fly away‖ (as quoted in Mavor, 2007, pp. 183-184). In a manner akin to the oceanic feeling, ―bird and boy are tied together in a pre-Oedipal innocence before flight‖ (p. 184).

33 describes as ―where all the weirdoes live‖ and where they come across the bizarre spectacle of a crucified moose); Léon tames a huge wild dog with a strategic tic-tac-toe game, earning him a kiss from Léa; and finally, they take a ferry manned by a reputed

Cyclops. Importantly, during this quest and at the precise moment of coming upon the inexplicable sight of the moose, Léon‘s voiceover describes how they will accomplish their mission ―without Jesus‘ help.‖ This is perhaps one of the most explicit examples from the film of Léon‘s complicated relationship with religion. This ambiguous relationship with Catholicism is present in both films, though to a more significant degree in Falardeau‘s.42

After their failed mission, wherein Léa does not find her father and Léon does not get his plane ticket, they cross the river to find their families waiting for them. Léon runs away, and when his father finally corners him on a staircase, he decides to jump, preferring the void to his father‘s wrath, in a manner not out of character with his already-established masochism (which he continuously describes as a cathartic need to destroy in order to rebuild). Back at school, in the fall, Léa ignores Léon, who attempts to win her back by getting his unlikely friend, M. Pouchonnaud, an older Frenchman who works at the local bowling lanes, to buy him some Barbies for her. In his role as both unlikely surrogate and outsider, M. Pouchonnaud serves a similar function to Élise‘s M.

Mouche.

When his bid to regain her affection doesn‘t work, and it turns out that Léon‘s father has been deliberately keeping their mother‘s phone number and address from him

42 In an interview for the film‘s press release, Falardeau was asked why his film was so anticlerical in comparison to the novel: ―En effet, c’est plus anticlérical que les romans. J’ai sauté là-dessus. Pourquoi ? Parce que la religion parle de nous ! Tout le temps ! Tout le monde au Québec a ces références-là . . . Ce qui est dramatique en un sens, c’est que le petit Léon qui croyait ne croit plus, cependant il ne veut pas perdre sa spiritualité‖ (Ruer, 2008b, p. 4).

34 and his brother, Léon, feeling doubly abandoned and alone, packs his bag and leaves; in words that echo his mother‘s, he says he is ready to ―start a new life too,‖ something, he explains, that first requires the leveling of the rubble of his old life, ―like making a new

Lego house.‖ This statement creates a tense dissonance with hegemonic ideas in Quebec about the importance of memory and ―foundations;‖ in the end though, the failure and obvious masochism of Léon‘s attempt to start from zero underscores the undesirability and futility of such a self-destructive act. At the back of the bowling alley where he spends time sneaking alcohol from the unsuspecting M. Pouchonnaud, Léon explains that

Léa has ―emptied my reserves of love for a thousand years,‖ love that he had transferred from his absent mother in the first place. Despondent and slightly drunk, he places his head on the lane behind the one remaining queue, waiting for deliverance from a speeding bowling ball. The final scene shows a bruised Léon lying on the ground outside in the fallen leaves. He explains to the camera that despite his attempts, it would seem that he is made to live, and that he has reconciled himself with the fact that his mother isn‘t coming home anytime soon, but that he‘s happy to wait for her. In the meantime he says, he will take care of Madame Brisebois, and his mittened hand opens to reveal an egg.

35 36 CHAPTER 1: Getting the diagnosis: The nostalgia film as symptom

In their dual settings in the 1960s and childhood, both Maman est chez le coiffeur and C’est pas moi, je le jure! certainly qualify as ―nostalgia films,‖ a term first introduced by Fredric Jameson in his influential treatise ―Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of

Late Capitalism,‖ which appeared in a 1984 issue of the New Left Review. The subsequent trajectory and evolution of this expression deserves further attention here, as well as its French counterpart from the 1970s, la mode retro, which Jameson relates it to, as they have greatly informed my understanding of current cinematic nostalgia in the context of Quebec. Given its particularity as the largest French-speaking population in

America, and the legacy and influence of both the United States and France on its history, it is tempting to locate an understanding of Quebec‘s nostalgia film as existing somewhere between Hollywood‘s version (as articulated by Jameson), and France‘s mode retro; however, to do so would ignore the important role played by national history, culture, and popular memory in Quebec and its particular film culture. Quebec‘s history and its contingencies, as well as its very particular political aspirations, must therefore inform any articulation of its specific nostalgia mode. The discursive realm created by these two different, yet related, phenomena (nostalgia film and mode retro) will be used instead as a type of scaffolding to help further flesh ideas about Quebec‘s nostalgia mode, a category which itself contains a vast and heterogeneous assortment. I will also elaborate the definition of nostalgia that I am working with, as it has obviously informed the way in which I understand the problems and potential of the nostalgia film in the context of

Quebec.

37 In a society such as Quebec, where the duty to remember is understood as a strategy for survival,43 an analysis of the possible benefits of the nostalgia film is especially timely and important. Contrary to popular criticism of the genre, nostalgia films do not lead to an unquestioning and static understanding of history through the shorthand of fashion and narrative contrivances; instead, films set in a particular past connote nothing so much as its absolute remoteness, which is mediated in an attempt to better comprehend it, in a gesture that can never be completed. This lack of finitude does not mean that the process is inherently flawed or somehow inauthentic, but only underlines the imperfection and mediation of all historical knowledge. At the same time that it can entertain and fulfill certain audience expectations, the best of this genre also keeps open the possibility of a sustained and dynamic interaction with an unknowable but nonetheless active past. This lack of resolution leaves room for the mistakes that come from an improvised and creative approach to the past, instead of burying them behind a veneer of purported historical objectivity, which would see them entombed and untouched.

In discussing the nostalgia film‘s potential in this manner, I do not mean to negate what I feel to be much of the genre‘s accurate criticism; namely, that (certain) nostalgia or mode retro films problematically contain and neutralize historical, political, and social struggles. However, I do not subscribe to the belief that the ‗glossiness‘ of their images, or the ―fetishization‖ of a period as a particular style is necessarily anathema to ―real‖ historical consciousness; these condemnations, reliant as they inevitably are on a forced binary between a representation‘s appeal to an unquestioned and implicit ―reality,‖ strike

43 Though he disagrees with the way he arrives at his conclusion, and the pessimism it employs, Létourneau nonetheless agrees with Serge Cantin that ―[t]he new Quiet Revolution of Quebec will be a revolution of Memory, or it will not be‖ (quoted in Létourneau, 2004, p. 100).

38 me as even more suspicious than the admittedly dubious political agenda of some of the nostalgia films themselves. Nostalgia films need not be viewed simply from a teleology of good/bad, or true/false depictions of history, nor as a scapegoat for fears about a contemporary ―culture of amnesia‖ and the commodification of history. Instead, they should be interpreted for their ability to interrogate and challenge historical and cultural memory, and the potential they have to create pockets of critical space; what Svetlana

Boym (2001) describes as ―a detour from the deterministic narrative of twentieth-century history‖ (p. xvii). I understand the nostalgia film to be an experience that is negotiated by the audience‘s reception, varying drastically with the particularities of place, time, experience, recollections, tastes, and history; and not, as Fredric Jameson suggests, a necessarily homogenous (and homogenizing) force in the service of postmodernism and late capitalism. The category of the nostalgia film should instead be perceived as a qualitatively distinct genre that responds in varying degrees to the contingencies of the present.

Nostalgia

Nostalgia gets a bad rap, likely a hangover of its original 17th century understanding as a disease.44 Nowadays, nostalgia is more commonly associated with a type of wistful ―longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed. Nostalgia is

. . . a romance with one‘s own fantasy‖ (Boym, 2001, p. xiii). The futility of the endeavour does not dampen the enthusiasm of the nostalgic; as Lowenthal (1985)

44 First diagnosed by the Swiss doctor Johannes Hofer in 1688 (Boym, 2001, p. 2), the term comes (nostalgically) from the Greek roots (nostos—return home, and algia—longing), and was pathologized as a potentially fatal but nonetheless curable disease, with symptoms ranging from ―nausea [to] a propensity for suicide.‖ (p. 4).

39 describes, ―many seem less concerned to find a past than to yearn for it, eager not so much to relive a fancied long-ago as to collect its relics and celebrate its virtues.‖ (p. 7).

Not so much fatal as futile, nostalgia is routinely dismissed as a somewhat bourgeois homesickness, a luxury that proponents of progress or likewise ―busy‖ individuals couldn‘t possibly have time for. Moreover, nostalgia is considered a selfish and self- indulgent pursuit; whatever possibilities it opens up for collectivity are generally perceived as regressive and conservative, heralding a return to an idyllic past that never actually existed. Nostalgia is also condemned as a kind of escapism, which entails a dangerous denial and withdrawal from the present, and a malevolent hostility towards the future. Viewed in such a manner, nostalgia is seen as the antithesis of progress, as it proposes a decline narrative in which the past was superior to the present, which continues to erode into the future. Akin to this derogative understanding of nostalgia, but tempering it slightly, is the more sympathetic articulation of it as symptomatic of an artistic temperament that swells in the loss and longing of irreversible time (the most famous and often-cited example of which is that made famous by Proust and his soggy madeleines).

Alongside this understanding of nostalgia as psychical or emotional affect is the understanding of it as an adjective cynically employed to sell everything from television and film to furniture and clothing. In this incarnation, nostalgia is often linked with a postmodern millennial malaise and memorial obsession in the face of an uncertain future, and cited as evidence of the commodification of history under capitalism, in which the individual can no longer project their utopic ideals onto the future, and so locate novelty increasingly in the past. Instead of actual history though, this postmodern, capitalist

40 nostalgia attempts to reify selective memory; more concerned with style than substance, it inevitably diminishes social change into private affect. It is within this superficial definition of nostalgia that the ―nostalgia film‖ is commonly located. This is an unfortunately flat understanding of nostalgia, whose ―reductive collapsing of the commodity form and psychic structure . . . fails to give us the tools to explain the mnemonic desires and practices that pervade our culture.‖ (Huyssen, 1995, p. 7).

Without denying its real potential for the problematic tendencies and abuses outlined above, and with the understanding that ―[t]he left no less than the right espouses nostalgia‖ (Lowenthal, 1989, p. 27), I will be working within an understanding, following

Ray Cashman (2006), of nostalgia as a critical and cultural practice, ―[that] has no inherent relationship to power . . . [and is] without a given content‖ (p. 153). In attempting to understand the current cinematic nostalgia in Quebec, I want to expand its interpretation ―as more than a ‗cloying sentimentality‘ and instead as ‗a [useful] strategy for coping with change, loss, or anomie‘‖ (Mavor, 2007, p. 34). Far from foreclosing the future, I believe that nostalgia has the potential to open up a space from which to contemplate the horizon of time and its contingencies, one ―that enables people to generate meaning in the present through selective visions of the past‖ (Cashman, 2006, p.

137). In turn, it offers ―the temporal perspective necessary to become critics of change, and more or less willing participants . . . [and] can lead to informed social criticism‖ (pp.

146-147).

Instead of viewing it as a brake on progress, or dismissing it as (only) a romantic artistic proclivity, nostalgia could be better understood as a creative coping mechanism with which to come to terms with massive societal and technological change. The

41 inevitable waning of generational memory and the decreased role of the past in everyday life has turned history into what Lowenthal (1985) describes as a ―luxury‖ (p. 364). Far from solely narcissistic or myopic, nostalgia, ―unlike melancholia, which confines itself to the planes of individual consciousness . . . is about the relationship between individual biography and the biography of groups or nations, between personal and collective memory‖ (Boym, 2001, p. xvi). As such, nostalgia can create empathy that straddles differences in time and space, and despite the easy commodification of the sentiment and its capacity to turn inwards, at its best, nostalgia can create strong and affective links between individuals. Susan Stewart (1993) writes, ―[n]ostalgia is a sadness without an object . . . the desire for desire‖ (p. 23), and sees within this characterization a certain inauthenticity in its failure to partake in what she calls the ―lived experience;‖ such a description could equally be viewed as recuperative of the dynamic potential and creative force inherent in nostalgia‘s imagination of the past and present that should not be condemned wholesale because of its abuse by some.

Film has been more than a passing interest for scholars interested in nostalgia; by its verisimilitude, film, more than any other medium, brings us simultaneously closer to the impossible object of our desire (the projected image) while effectively removing us from its original even further (through its reproduction, and thus the inherent depletion of its ‗aura,‘ as articulated by Benjamin). It is through this ―play of presence and absence, this relay of perpetual and unattainable desire, that . . . the film image [is able] to hold such fascination for us‖ (Dika, 2003, p. 5), and links it by its very nature to nostalgic longing. As Sprengler (2009) argues, the ―visual aspects deemed responsible for [a] film‘s identification as a ‗nostalgia film‘ can fuel, rather than impede, engagements with

42 history, initiate critical or oppositional readings, generate multiple layers of meaning that enrich the filmic text and the cinematic experience and produce analytical pleasure for the invested spectator‖ (p. 2). To this last item I wish to add the very real potential that the nostalgia film opens up for aesthetic pleasure, which is too often overlooked in these analyses, or blamed for its problematic ‗glossiness,‘ which supposedly precludes a suitably deep and meaningful engagement with history. This idea is based on an understanding of the terms as mutually exclusive that is simply not borne out in the history of film criticism.45

“Nostalgia film”

In Jameson‘s seminal article from 1984, which he subsequently developed into a book by the same title, he defines the ‗nostalgia film‘ as a distinct feature of postmodernism. For Jameson, a leading Marxist critic and scholar, this type of film represented a cynical attempt to commodify history through the metonymic use of artefacts, techniques, styles, and genres from the past; these ―fashion-plate, historicist films . . . [are] in no way to be grasped as passionate expressions of that older [properly modernist] longing once called nostalgia but rather quite the opposite‖ (Jameson, 1984, p. xxvii). For Jameson, this is the Hollywood equivalent to the earlier French mode retro from the 1970s, a trend characterized by a renewed interest and re-examination of the années noires (dark years) of the 1940s, French occupation (also known as Vichy

45 Take, for example, the extremely influential American film Bonnie and Clyde, from 1967, which Mark Harris (2008), among others, argues helped redefine the New Hollywood with its then-controversial depictions of the thrills of transgression and the fatal blows the film dealt to the faltering and censorious Production Code. Faye Dunaway and her character‘s ―thirties‘ style,‖ became an overnight sensation, a fact that does not negate the film‘s other accomplishments, but is instead intrinsically linked to their success and cultural resonance. Likewise, that the film took liberties with the actual history of the gangster couple does not alter its relevance as an important film.

43 France). Critics condemned the cultural output of mode retro, especially its filmic incarnation, as a conservative reaction to the post-Gaullist politics of 1970s France marked by a ―snobbish fetishising of old costumes and décors combined with a contempt for history‖ (Austin, 2008, p. 30).

Under Charles de Gaulle‘s presidency, the war years had effectively and conscientiously been ―refashioned . . . into a narrative of vigorous resistance,‖ (ibid) and it was this ―Gaullist gloss … the myth of La France résistante‖ (Guffey, 2006, pp. 117-

118) that certain filmmakers sought to peel back after his resignation from the French presidency in 1969. Despite the fact that many of these directors professed a commitment to leftist politics, critics on the left felt that the films of mode retro attempted to whitewash fascism and eroticize power in a way that simultaneously denied the real struggles of those years, thereby neutralizing the ideological potency of the actual resistance. Likewise, criticism from the right denounced the characters, such as Louis

Malle‘s eponymous ‗hero‘ from Lacombe, Lucien (1974) as not being suitably idealistic.

Foucault criticized films such as these as a way for contemporary (1970s Giscard-era)

France to ―rid itself and the nation of a heroic image of resistance‖ (as cited in Golsan,

1996, p. 60) and transform the Occupation from a ―period of grand ideological confrontations, popular struggles, and heroic endeavours . . . into a time when a few troublemakers caused ripples on the surface of the nation‘s well-being but failed to affect its depths‖ (ibid). He and other critics of the genre accused the films of functioning as a scapegoat for the unresolved, negative connotations of the past while simultaneously lulling audiences into a false sense of historical consciousness.

44 While criticisms like these seem somewhat hyperbolic (and more than a little paranoid) when viewing films such as Lacombe, Lucien today, after countless films recounting the resistance and collaboration made during the intervening years and the general recognition of the importance of Malle and his contemporaries‘ work, one must take into account the highly-charged political context of the 1970s in France. Opinions surrounding mode retro tended to be very polarized, with ―no middle ground possible‖

(Golsan, 1996, p. 60) for assessments of the film, and ―political and ideological ambiguity and ‗irrationality‘ were clearly unacceptable‖ (p. 70) in what amounted to a battle for popular memory. Only more recently have studies such as Golson‘s begun to attempt to articulate the importance of films such as Malle‘s in the project of coming to terms with a traumatic history and giving voice to stories that were previously suppressed or elided. As I write this, the importance of approaching history and its representation critically has been driven home by the discovery by the BBC of papers confirming de

Gaulle‘s role, along with British and American commanders, of ensuring that the liberation of Paris on the 25th of August 1944 was ―seen as a ‗whites only‘ victory. ‖46

Revelations such as this one, about an event which had substantial consequences on subsequent public memory, clarify the value of a certain skepticism around any grand and totalizing historical narrative, even one that is associated with a victorious popular struggle.

46 De Gaulle insisted that his Frenchmen lead the liberation of Paris, so that it could be perceived and remembered as ―Paris liberating herself.‖ Allied High Command agreed but only on the condition that the unit be 100% white, to which de Gaulle complied. As there was no completely white formation in France at the time (black colonial soldiers made up around two-thirds of Free French forces), soldiers who did not fit the profile were removed from the liberating unit and replaced by lighter-skinned soldiers from parts of North Africa, Spain, and the Middle East (Thomson, 2009).

45 In his article, Jameson (1984) analyzed American films such as George Lucas‘

American Graffiti (1973), as similarly attempting to colonize the present (p. 67) through their superficial representation and understanding of history which ―prefers form to content,‖ and ―approach[es] the ‗past‘ through stylistic connotation, conveying ‗pastness‘ by the glossy qualities of the image, and ‗1930s-ness‘ or ‗1950s-ness‘ by the attributes of fashion‖ (p. 67). Because of its reliance on the ―blank‖ and narcissistic techniques of pastiche and irony, which foreclose any meaningful engagement with the past, this filmic nostalgia, according to its critics, can never actually be historical, but only intertextual, superficially referencing an original but itself only simulacrum, a bad copy.

In the twenty odd years since Jameson coined the term, scholars have leveled several criticisms at his articulation and condemnation of both postmodernism and the nostalgia film. Three such arguments are especially relevant to us here: that Jameson‘s argument is itself nostalgic (Hutcheon, 1989; Radstone, 2007); that he fails to consider the interpretive and negotiated meaning-making processes of audiences (Dika, 2003;

Grainge, 2002); and that his analysis suffers as a result of his indifference to questions of sexual difference and feminist theory (Creed, 1987; Radstone, 2007).

In The Politic of Postmodernism, Linda Hutcheon (1989) suggests that Jameson‘s analysis is itself nostalgic in his overdetermined opposition between postmodernism and modernism; he ―repeatedly expresse[s] . . . a desire for a return to what he has always called ‗genuine historicity‘‖ (p. 176), which is for him synonymous with modernism. She goes on to suggest, convincingly, that Jameson‘s actual problem with historical films

―may simply be that they do not deal with Marxist History: In these films there is little of the positive utopian notion of History and no unproblematic faith in the accessibility of

46 the ‗real referent‘ of historical discourse‖ (ibid). Further, Hutcheon (2000) contends, quoting Anne Friedberg, that ―what Jameson is really protesting in these films when he laments the ‗enfeeblement of historicity‘ is not postmodernism at all but the distanced relation of every film from its historical referent. In other words, it is the medium itself and not postmodernism that gives the illusion of a ‗perpetual present interminably recycled‘‖ (p. 176). Therefore, it is not the ―improper‖ historicity of these nostalgia films that Jameson finds so objectionable, but the imperfection of representation itself, as

―there is no directly and naturally accessible past ‗real‘ for us today: we can only know – and construct – the past through its traces, its representations‖ (ibid). Lowenthal (1989), makes the related argument that ―it is wrong to imagine that there exists some non- nostalgic reading of the past that is by contrast ‗honest‘ or authentically ‗true‘‘‖ (p. 30).

Nostalgia films (and mode retro), viewed from this angle, differ only in degree than in kind to every other film‘s representation of time.

As Radstone (2007) points out, these alignments of nostalgia as ‗good‘ and ‗bad‘ with ‗properly modernist‘ and ‗depthless postmodernism‘ are in themselves a type of nostalgic revisionism, and that these

denigratory approaches to nostalgia . . . run the risk of overlooking the real or felt

losses to which nostalgia may respond – an overlooking that may collapse into the

narcissistic denial of loss. The wholesale hostility to [contemporary] nostalgia

may also overlook those historical sufferings to which nostalgia may respond, as

well as avoiding any analysis of the pleasures of nostalgia (p. 115).

She further criticizes Jameson‘s nostalgic and unquestioning appeal to ―a paradigm of truth and falsehood‖ (p. 133), and his explicit longing for the ―properly

47 modernist nostalgia‖ of his hero, Walter Benjamin. Using Benjamin, Jameson attempts to recuperate a self-conscious (―properly modernist‖) nostalgia, which, dissatisfied with the present ―on the grounds of some remembered plenitude, [can] furnish . . . a revolutionary stimulus‖ (as cited in Radstone, 2007, p. 142), and thus ―projects his own nostalgia onto

Benjamin‖ (Radstone, 2007, p. 142). Radstone also rightly takes issue with the way that

Jameson‘s argument is built on an implicit privileging of the masculine (modernism) over the feminine (postmodernism) in his descriptions of ―nostalgic historicism as

‗overstimulating‘ and ‗omnipresent, omnivorous and well-nigh libidinal‘ a series of derogations most commonly and routinely associated with Woman‖ (Radstone, 2007, p.

136). Jameson‘s suspicion and vilification of the sensual, visual, and affective aspects of a representation rely and capitalize on stereotypes and questions of sexual difference that he then broadly ignores. For Jameson, film aesthetics can only ever occupy a superficial position, or at most, a hermeneutical one, as in the case (for him) of Van Gogh‘s painting of peasant shoes.47 Aesthetic pleasure in and of itself does not register for Jameson, unless it is the servant of a greater (political) good.

Jameson‘s influential critique of the nostalgia film has also been criticized for its failure to distinguish between the ―meaning‖ a film may intend, and the disparate and negotiated readings which any audience would inevitably bring to that film. As Helen

47 In his 1984 article and subsequent book from 1991, Jameson uses the example of Van Gogh‘s (modernist) painting of peasant shoes in stark contrast with Andy Warhol‘s (postmodernist) print ―Diamond Dust Shoes.‖ For Jameson, the former embody a sort of rugged, honest materiality and historical engagement that for him is lacking in the latter. He describes Warhol‘s fetishized footwear as a sort of incomplete hermeneutical gesture, an affectless ―random collection of dead objects hanging together on the canvas like so many turnips, as shorn of their earlier life world as the pile of shoes left over from Auschwitz or the remainders and tokens of some incomprehensible and tragic fire in a packed dance hall‖ (Jameson, 1984, p. 60); an image that for me at least, does not seem devoid of affect in the least! Here too Jameson shows his blind-spot for questions of sexual difference in that he completely overlooks the implication of identifying male peasant shoes with (honest, rugged) modernism, and women‘s high heels with (superficial, vapid) postmodernism.

48 Irving (1991), in her article dealing with the Left‘s often didactic opposition to advertising, asks, ―Can we never escape from the legacy of the Frankfurt School which saw the individual in mass capitalist culture as having lost all powers of critical perspective, as moronically equating movies ‗directly with reality?‘‖ (p. 99). This question‘s bluntness articulates the creeping suspicion I began to feel in my research on the nostalgia film (and nostalgia more generally); though it was left implicit for the most part, critics of the nostalgia film and mode retro tend to either completely disregard audience interpretation, or worse, discuss viewers as though they were not intelligent enough to come away with anything but the most conservative or simplistic reading. In their call for a type of ―united front‖ against such apolitical, sentimental films, mode retro and nostalgia film critics began to read as though they were advocating for some kind of filmic propaganda for the Left, wherein ―proper‖ interpretations of history would be meted out to the masses for their own good. In this too there is a shockingly tacit assumption in the infallible power of film media to essentially ―brainwash‖ the audience, the terrain of disagreement simply the content of the program, as opposed to the different and heterogeneous meaning-making processes going on at the level of reception.

Vera Dika (2003) reads a similar lack into Jameson‘s failure to distinguish between the films‘ representation of the past and the audience‘s own memories. The friction produced as a result of this ―historical disjunction‖ (p. 89) creates a tension ―that encourages a new set of meanings to arise‖ (p. 91). Dika‘s reading of Jameson is particularly useful in its emphasis on how nostalgia confronts the present, and how, in films such as American Graffiti, ―the audience‘s own knowledge of the impending destruction of this innocent world . . . resonate with historical specificity . . . [and]

49 uncomfortable contradictions begin to destabilize the pure nostalgia of the events‖ (pp.

92-93). Dika refers to the mobilization of these allusions to personal or historical memory in the nostalgia films as a ―wink,‖ which, more than just a patronizing gesture on the part of the director, underscores ―a culturally specific awareness that this era never quite existed as presented nor would we want to return to it‖ (p. 94). While Jameson argues that the nostalgia film represents a threat to history and an inability to live in the present,

Dika convincingly proposes an alternate view of it as a potentially productive way to address present trauma through a critical engagement with the past. Paul Grainge (2002) similarly criticizes Jameson for his failure to ―consider the profound uncertainty of capitalist postmodernity. Specifically, he does not consider how audiences negotiate meaning in a media-saturated world, or, indeed, how meaning and memory may be refigured in a changing cultural and semiotic terrain‖ (p. 32).

Barbara Creed (1987), in thinking about the intersection between feminism and postmodernism and the way in which both present a challenge to the Great Narratives of the West, locates in Jameson‘s discussion of the nostalgia film a striking lacuna in his indifference to issues of sexual difference and feminism (p. 53) and the lack of any analysis about this ―longing for the past‖ that he sees in the nostalgia film (p. 54). In a move that is especially compelling, Creed suggests that Jameson‘s problem is that he actually situates the ―older period,‖ or past that these films refer to, in the historical past, and conflates them: ―he does not consider the possibility that all generations may have similar longings, and that the cinema . . . addresses these longings in different ways and through different filmic modes across the decades‖ (ibid). Creed posits the possibility

―that the ‗missing‘ past which lies at the heart of these films is that which once validated

50 the paternal signifier‖ (p. 55), and that these films are doing the symbolic work of coming-to-terms with the collapse of the great narratives of the West, a possibility left completely unconsidered by Jameson.

However, critics such as Hutcheon and Radstone nonetheless tend to agree with

Jameson‘s characterization of the nostalgia mode in film as attempting to recuperate an inherently conservative ideology or force; Hutcheon (1989) seeks to redeem postmodern irony and self-reflexivity as ―a critical edge to ward off . . . debilitating nostalgia‖ (p.

176), and Radstone (2007) proposes that the contemporary ―nostalgia for boyhood film‖ functions as a way to shore up a threatened patriarchy against a feminizing postmodernism, confusedly contrasting this melancholic ‗false‘ nostalgia with the productive work of ―mourning.‖ As Amelia DeFalco (2004) points out, most critical understandings of nostalgia in film posit an ―opposition [that assumes] another either/or relationship between nostalgia, which is implicitly ‗sanitizing,‘ conservative, and ahistorical, and postmodern irony, which is critical, undermining, and (implicitly) progressive‖ (p. 30). In this way, even apologist accounts for postmodernism seek to redeem it as a progressive tool (contra-nostalgia) within Jameson‘s metanarrative of progress and ―truth.‖

Reading the nostalgia that suffused a body of ―films made during the late 1980s and early 1990s in which men remember or return to earlier times,‖ Radstone (2007) describes this trend as ―more closely aligned with masculine melancholic or ‗false‘ nostalgia than it is with postmodernism‖ (p. 159). In this description, the ‗false‘ or melancholic nostalgia that Radstone refers to is ―a form of melancholy . . . a narcissistic response to loss‖ (p. 177), the unhealthy and blocked reaction that occurs ―when the

51 narcissistic ego receives a wound. Mourning, on the other hand, depends upon prior acknowledgement that what has been lost was never a part of the self‖ (p. 163). These nostalgia films then symbolize a type of unfulfilled grieving process wherein nostalgia stands in for the authentic work of mourning. This is directly related to Modleski‘s

(1991) analysis of films such as Big and The Incredible Shrinking Man in the context of another ‗post,‘ that is, postfeminism, wherein she concludes that these films which depict men returning to boyhood or literally shrinking, represent a reaction to the perceived threat of feminism (and castration) and a desire to return to a ―sentimentalized version of childhood . . . [and escape] the corruption and hypocrisy of repressive adult society [the repressive forces of which women have typically been associated with]‖ (p. 97) is premised on a sexist ideal of domesticity. In America, Modleski argues, this desire to return to the home, ―the kind of space . . . identical to ‗woman‘ . . . is closely linked to

America‘s obsession with its own imagined innocent past, the 1950s . . . participating in a nostalgia for a time in which human relationships are felt to have been relatively uncomplicated, although the cost of this simplicity is [women‘s] repression‖ (pp. 98-99).

There is a complex and paradoxical relationship with femininity here: one the one hand, the ―shrinking‖ man/boy seeks to escape the feminizing (castrating and feminist) forces of the civilized, adult world, but the escape he seeks is back to the locus of the original childhood home (nostalgia), associated with the woman/pre-feminist mother.

It is less clear how Modleski would interpret such nostalgia films not set in a

―time before feminism‖ but in a time of feminism, that is, the era most commonly associated with the second-wave feminism of the 1960s and 1970s, such as the two films examined here. Maman and C’est pas moi both depict the dissolution of the nuclear

52 family, the Church‘s waning influence, the fallibility and hypocrisy of adults, a more materialistic, ―Americanized‖ and less exceptionalist culture; hardly the stuff of Happy

Days and The Wonder Years that one normally associates with the term ―nostalgia.‖

However, the scholarly criticism surrounding another Tom Hanks film, Forrest Gump

(1994), might shed some light on this type of nostalgia film, as it is largely set in the sixties and seventies.

The periodization and subsequent characterization of decades is extremely important to representations of particular eras; a film‘s ability to conform to or challenge these popular perceptions, especially of the relatively recent past, is a key feature and large part of the appeal of nostalgia or historical films. This is what Jameson (1984) dismisses as its ―fashion-plate‖ approach to history (p. xxvii). While fashion is an undeniable factor in these representations, this simplistic and dismissive description belies the importance that such periodizations have on popular memory. As Daniel

Marcus (2004) argues, the 1950s and 1960s (in America specifically), occupy a privileged role in terms of filmic representation: he suggests that the reason that these decades have such a strong and lasting hold on the public imagination is because of how easily they are viewed in dichotomous ways:

The 1950s are depicted as an era of American global dominance, personal

security, and economic prosperity, but also as a time of stultifying social

convention, racism, and widespread denial of national problems. The 1960s,

conversely, are seen by their critics as a time marked by social unrest and chaos,

the trauma of the Vietnam War, and the failure of Great Society programs, and by

their defenders as a time of energetic idealism, personal liberation, and vibrant

53 popular culture. The decades‘ continued iconic power is strengthened by their

concurrence with the childhood and youth of the Baby Boom generation, and with

the twin emergences and ascendancies of television and rock and roll (p. 2).48

Forrest Gump, perhaps more than any other film before it, owes its success at least in part to its mastery of this concept of periodization and popular interest in representations of particular decades conforming and appealing to a certain cultural memory and mythology. Though a huge commercial success (and endless source of idioms, boxes of chocolate, and soundtracks), Gump was critiqued by film scholars for the way in which, similar to the films of mode retro twenty years earlier, it contained and effectively neutralized the significance of popular struggle (civil rights and opposition to the Vietnam War, especially) in its narrative of a hapless, mentally-retarded veteran whose good-natured loyalty and complete lack of guile somehow see him compete in the

Olympics, survive the Vietnam War, become a millionaire entrepreneur, meet several US presidents, marry his childhood sweetheart Jenny, and then raise their son all by himself after her death from an unnamed virus that is almost certainly AIDS (given the cultural- landmark-driven logic of the film). Furthermore, while the film makes reference to the assassination of several prominent white (male) figures, such as John F. Kennedy and

John Lennon, it completely neglects (and consequently tries to ―forget,‖ in terms of the popular memory it is appealing to), the importance of leaders from the Black community, such as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., whose lives and assassinations are inexplicably overlooked. Also problematically, it fails to acknowledge the importance

48 In Quebec, these decades are seen in a similar and complimentary ways: the 1950s as simultaneously the era of Duplessis‘ autocratic rule, and a time of tradition and family, and the 1960s as both the beginning of ―the refounding of Quebec‖ that was the Quiet Revolution, and a time of increasing turmoil and individualism.

54 and influence of the feminist movement, and depicts its (few) female characters, especially Jenny, as helpless victims who have no agency or autonomy. Critics accused the film of ―Gumping America‖ (Byers, 1996; Scott, 2001; Wang, 2000) and attempting to rewrite popular memory of that era (the 1960s especially) as ineffectual, childish, devoid of any real meaning and bloated with its own self-important excess, criticism that often spills over onto nostalgia itself. While these criticisms of Gump‘s deliberate blind- spots and strategic historical revisions are certainly accurate, the tone of the complaints is quite similar to Jameson‘s, and Radstone (2000) discerns in them a similar troubling echo:

Reviews suggested that audiences have been ‗taken over‘ or even brainwashed by

the film‘s deceit and ‗dishonesty‘. . . [They] accuse Forrest Gump of playing a

part in the reprogramming of ‗popular memory‘ and . . . audiences emerge as

either innocent victims or hopeless suckers (p. 92).

Instead of locating the appeal of Forrest‘s innocence with nostalgia itself,

Radstone (2000) describes it as a facet of melodrama that ―can be linked also with fantasy structures familiar to psychoanalysis‖ (p. 100). As such, popular films like

Forrest Gump, despite their glaring aporias, are nonetheless useful as a way to initiate debate and engagement with uncomfortable and unresolved (national) trauma in the public sphere.

Perhaps more than anything, this literature on the nostalgia film and its French counterpart make clear the ambiguities and instability involved in any attempt to affix a static understanding of the nostalgia genre. Further to the complications that the term nostalgia itself offers, there is a general lack of consensus regarding the genre‘s actual

55 technical parameters, with various critics including all manner of historical or ―period‖ films (Burgoyne, 2008); adaptations from literature (Powrie, 1997); anything set in a real or imagined past, especially the 1950s and 1960s (Marcus, 2004); films about children

(Muller, 2007); films about shrinking or returning to childhood (Modleski, 1991;

Radstone, 2007); films that, while set in the present, might use historical genre conventions, techniques, or referents (Jameson, 1984), and the list goes on. Though the term appears ―indispensable‖ (Jameson, 1991, p. xvii) and quite straightforward to

Jameson, the twenty-five years that it has been in circulation have only seen its definition expand to a point where it is impossible not to question its actual usefulness today.

Nonetheless, the criticism and research it has elicited is quite valuable to the current analysis of the two Quebecois films in question; whether or not the term has outlived its usefulness, many of its defining characteristics still raise critical questions as to the stakes and state of contemporary popular memory. Any attempt to understand this recent phenomenon in Quebec must also bear in mind the crucial role that filmic nostalgia has played in the definition of a national cinema, as well as its paradoxical relationship with both tradition and modernity. The peculiar location of Quebec cinema as simultaneously an international art cinema as well as a national popular cinema, financed and made possible through television and state apparatuses must also not be overlooked.

Maman and C’est pas moi, by their location in the years of the Quiet Revolution

(an event that Létourneau [2004] argues has become problematically mythologized as a type of refounding of Quebec), destabilize the hegemonic and polarizing narratives of those years, if only through their disengagement with a more exceptionalist narrative. The

56 concept of the Quiet Revolution as a solitary event, one without precedent that can never be recreated, and overly-determined by now-cliché images of the sudden advance of modernity, does arguably more to obfuscate an engagement with history than either of these films could realistically achieve. It is this mythology that Létourneau (2004) is suspicious of, and which the nostalgia film can complicate. While they simultaneously partake in the domestication of popular struggles through ―the family romance,‖ and as such, invoke a certain inevitable reduction of popular struggles into individual grief and conflict, they also mobilize the cultural (as well as individual) memory of those struggles in unpredictable and unstable ways, creating a dissonance and critical engagement with history in the present.

57 58 CHAPTER 2: The thaw: Nostalgia’s shifting horizon

Of equal importance to their status as nostalgia films, Maman est chez le coiffeur and C’est pas moi, je le jure! also belong to the long and influential history of what has been described as Quebec‘s ―cinéma orphelin‖ (Tremblay-Daviault, 1981), a moniker meant to connote both its complicated lineage of American and European influences, as well as its preoccupation with orphans themselves. Orphan cinema takes place within the even broader tradition of the ―roman familial‖ (Weinmann, 1990), or family romance, which Quebec cinema has been engaged with since its inception. Characterized by the high frequency of both adult and child protagonists who are either actual or near- orphans;49 the central drama of orphan cinema is usually intergenerational conflict and absence. While not exclusively, these orphans usually represent what Marshall (2001) describes as ―‗perverse‘ children‖ (p. 116) whose fascination with issues such as morbidity and sexuality sets them apart from the ‗normal,‘ happy children who are more commonly associated with the coming-of-age stories in other national cinemas. This context is crucial when considering the important way in which Falardeau and Pool‘s films cannot be solely accounted for by the literature on nostalgia films, and also for the ways in which they both partake in this defining structure of Quebec film, while breaking with many of its defining characteristics in new and important ways.

Falardeau and Pool revise the genre in ways that reveal the current state of talk about contemporary memory in Quebec; namely, they reflect the changing perceptions around Quebec‘s self-perception as an isolated, remote community cut off and exploited

49 By ‗near-orphan,‘ I am referring to a broader understanding of the term within the literature on Quebec cinema that defines an orphan as anyone who is cut off physically, mentally, or emotionally from either parent, or whose fraught relationship with them is foregrounded in the narrative of the film, such as Jean- Claude Lauzon‘s Un zoo la nuit (1987). The orphans are not exclusively children, as in the aforementioned film; the prime example of the adult orphan in Qubecois cinema is Gratien Gélinas from Tit-Coq (1953).

59 by forces exterior to itself, its foundational relationship to North America and its own inherent Americaness, as well as a certain ambiguity in the province around its exceptional past and (tragic) destiny. This is accomplished through the films‘ introduction of some key thematic changes. Upon first glance, these changes might seem almost banal, but when interpreted in the context of Quebecois film and history, they are surprisingly significant. By comparing and analyzing them alongside seminal examples of Quebec‘s orphan cinema, the possibilities that these shifts extend can be more properly understood.

Maman est chez le coiffeur and C’est pas moi, je le jure! foreground the intergenerational strife and the traumas of absence so typical of orphan cinema, while they also privilege—and identify with—the child characters‘ subjectivities. Within the common domestic setting of this genre, many Quebecois cinema scholars see an unresolved tension and ambiguity in Quebec‘s own colonial history (Lever, 1988;

Weinmann, 1990). The parent/child relationship becomes the stage on which questions of memory, tradition, and futurity are posed in national form (Poirier, 1998, 2004a, 2004b).

From within the psychoanalytic tradition, Weinmann (1990) argues that the ubiquity of these troubled parent/child relations in Quebec film signals the legacy of Quebec‘s unfinished business with its own colonizing ‗parents‘: France, England, the Catholic

Church, and the Federation of Canada, successively (p. 19). As a result of these ties, which have never been properly severed due to the deferment of sovereignty, Quebec instead transfers its psycho-affective links from one ‗parent‘ to the next, in a type of unfulfilled Oedipal relationship, the collective imagination of which is then actualized by

60 its national cinema in the form of the ―roman familial,‖ also referred to as the ―family romance‖ or ―family melodrama.‖

[The] Freudian model of the family romance [explains] the way in which the child

develops from an exaltation of his or her parents to discovery of their

imperfections, thus impelling the fantasy of in fact having a different, nobler

birth. In this way, dreaming of the royal family points to the memory of the days

when the child‘s parents were considered to be god-like, and indeed to some

extent all national identifications can be thus explained. However, that fantasy of

nobler birth takes first the asexual form of being a foundling, and then the sexual

form of being a bastard, in which the ‗real‘ father is a usurper. So the family

romance partakes of the child‘s entry in the Oedipal scenario (Marshall, 2001, p.

104).

The foundational movie in this understanding of Quebec‘s fixation with the family melodrama, orphans, and an Oedipal fixation, is the aforementioned La Petite

Aurore l’enfant martyre (1952), which despite its disturbing and unlikely subject matter, is one of the most commercially successful films in the nation‘s cinematic history. Set thirty years before its production, Aurore tells the true story of a tragic episode in the province‘s history. Perhaps best understood as Quebec‘s answer to the universal

Cinderella story (without the happy ending), the narrative of the story is quite straightforward: young girl loses biological, beautiful mother to nefarious circumstances, her hapless father remarries, and her wicked stepmother, jealous of the young girl‘s resemblance to her husband‘s first wife, spends her time coming up with new and horrible tortures to inflict on the poor child, until Aurore finally succumbs and dies.

61 André Loiselle (1991) recounts how, in the intervening years, ―Aurore has often been interpreted as a most striking metaphor of French-Canadians during la Grande noirceur .

. . Abandoned by the mère patrie (France) and controlled by an evil tyrant (Britain) and a complicit patriarch (Duplessis)‖ (p. 22).50 The child protagonists of later examples of

Quebec‘s orphan cinema, such as Mon oncle Antoine (1971), Les Bons débarras (1980),

Léolo (1992), and more recently, C.R.A.Z.Y. (2005), have all variously been subjected to similar allegorical readings; all together, the rotating cast of the parents in these films have been variously described as representing France and English Canada (Aurore);

Duplessis-era French Canada (Mon oncle Antoine) (Leach, 1999; Marshall, 2001; Patry,

1996); a colonized Quebecois mentality that voted NON to the referendum and to Quebec sovereignty (Les Bons débarras) (Cuierrier, 2005; Marshall, 2001); a self-interested, gluttonous Quebec bloated on the excesses of 1980s post-referendum materialism (Léolo)

(Marshall, 2001); and the traditional (sovereigntist) family coming to terms with modernity (C.R.A.Z.Y.) (Nadeau, 2008). In short, all of these films, or at least the criticism surrounding them, have attempted to give shape to the ephemeral and shifting perceptions around the national project through the dynamic of the intergenerational relationship, which represents an attempt to articulate desires for the future through a complex negotiation between the present (children) and the past (parents).

Furthermore, Chantal Nadeau (2008), in describing the way in which C.R.A.Z.Y. attempts to ―queer‖ the traditional family romance, outlines the direct relationship between representations of the ―sovereign family‖ with aspirations around national sovereignty, referring to the genre more broadly as ―une romance nationale‖ (p. 3). In her

50 This interpretation of the film is tantalizingly compelling, especially in the scene where the evil stepmother, representing Britain or English Canada, threatens that she will burn Aurore‘s tongue to keep her silent (the French word for which is langue, which equally means language).

62 analysis, the sovereign family, and its cast of characters, heroes and fouls, evolves over time but persists as the dominant mode of representation; the family romance is essential to the national imaginary of Quebec, where the family itself has become ―un objet de culte ou de honte, un corps collectif que a besoin d’un barrage légal impressionnant pour assurer sa proper identité, sinon sa souveraineté de saing‖ (p. 4). The reenactment of power imbalances through the domestic model of the family provides a therapeutic narrative through which these inequities can be worked through, at least on screen.

Representations of permeability, and of greater acceptance into the sovereign family, represent the broadening horizons of the nation, as in C.R.A.Z.Y., when Zac is eventually accepted by his homophobic father. The family romance, in the Quebec context, works through similitude; acceptance comes when the family finally realizes that the Other (in this case Zac, a gay man) is not so different from them, and is therefore able to be co- opted seamlessly into the ―la famille humaine, donc, citoyenne, donc nationale‖ (p. 10).

These allegorical readings of the family romance, or melodrama, necessarily privilege the larger society, in that the family must always stand for it instead of representing itself. Gittings (2002) proposes a more useful way in which to understand this complex dynamic: ―[f]amily melodramas . . . negotiate the space between the home and the community, and the family‘s classed, raced and gendered positions within these two spheres‖ (p. 114). Instead of always understanding the family in question as metonymic of the society at large, it is more productively understood as a place that is in dynamic and sometimes tense relation with that society. In melodrama specifically, ―the family becomes the site of patriarchy and capitalism and therefore reproduces them‖

(Gittings, 2002, p. 114).

63 The intergenerational relationships of C’est pas moi and Maman represent a particular structure of feeling about the generation that succeeds that most commonly associated with the Quiet Revolution. As Lauren Berlant (1997) observes with regard to films dealing with traumatic events in American history,

[in] this mode of national narrative, stories of mass trauma like war or slavery are

encoded in plots of familial inheritance, wherein citizens of the posttraumatic

present are figured in a daughter‘s or a son‘s coming to public terms with a

generational past that defines her/him and yet does not feel fully personal (p. 32).

Though not to the same extent as the Vietnam War in the US context, the Quiet

Revolution in Quebec today, because it did not fully accomplish its national ambition of sovereignty, can similarly ―pulsat[e] like an exposed wound long after [it] [has] officially ended. A traumatic story is always interminable–that is what makes it traumatic‖ (ibid).

In the context of Quebec specifically, and through the two films examined here, a discernible generational hostility or tension persists between the younger baby-boomers

(those of Bruno Hébert‘s generation specifically, as well the generations which succeed it), towards their parents‘ generation, those older intellectuals born in the 1920s and

1930s, who are most commonly associated with the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s and its ideals.

The parents of Maman est chez le coiffeur and C’est pas moi, je le jure! are products of that older generation; they are professionally successful and personally ambitious; they want to travel and ‗find themselves,‘ have respect and sympathy for the global struggles of women‘s rights, national liberation, decolonization, and civil rights,

64 but stand accused of fundamentally abandoning their children. Bruno Hébert (Ruer,

2008a), in an interview as part of C’est pas moi‘s press release echoes this condemnation:

Mes parents viennent d’une génération où, quand ils sont sortis de l’université, its

étaient quarte finissants . . . La liberation de la femme, le moi-d’abord, le gros

ego, les choix de carrièrer, les bonnes à la maison : dans mon milieu, on ne

s’occupait pas de l’enfant, on l’abandonnait . . . Alors, pour toutes ces raisons, je

pense que l’on doit faire encore plus de films sur l’enfance, sur ces années-là,

pour faire débloquer une génération. (p. 9)

The mothers‘ quest for self-fulfillment (at the cost of self-imposed exile and the effective abandonment their children), and the fathers‘ blind self-interest (whether through their commitment to ‗saving the world‘ as in Falardeau‘s film, or in a quest for sexual fulfillment through the father‘s homosexuality in Maman) make them vulnerable to the resentment of this generation, who, if we are to take Hébert as a spokesperson, feel let down and abandoned; entitled, as it were, to a sort of reparation through repetition and representation on screen. As we have already seen, this is also the case, personally, in the dynamic of Pool‘s relationship to her own absent mother.51 In turn, given the Quebec context of these films, this is also a certain condemnation of Cité libre intellectuals52 and armchair revolutionaries of the 1950s and 1960s; in effect, not a nostalgia for those days at all, but a distinctly bitter regret. It is not inconceivable that this regret is deepened and

51 As alluded to in the Introduction, Pool‘s work has been marked by the personal trauma of having a mother who left the family for some time when she was a child, as well as her mother‘s long-standing depression and emotional isolation. 52 Cité libre was a magazine co-founded in 1950 by editor Pierre Elliot Trudeau and Gérard Pelletier with the goal of uniting intellectuals who were opposed to Maurice Duplessis‘ autocratic rule. During the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, the editorial board found itself split by polarized opinions regarding sovereignty, and the journal became associated with the federalist position of Trudeau and Pelletier, especially after the founding in 1963 of Parti pris, the journal of ―the left-wing nationalist intelligentsia‖ (Marshall, 2001). This later review published influential essays by Quebecois filmmakers calling for a ‗national cinema,‘ such as Jacques Godbout, Gilles Carle, Clémont Perron, Denys Arcand, and Gills Groulx (ibid).

65 legitimated by the ostensible failure (hence futility) of the Quiet Revolution‘s prime objective of political independence. In this way, the sentiment behind these films is reminiscent of Philippe Falardeau‘s cutting ―traitor‖ remark to Godbout in Le Sort de l'Amérique; the elder Goudbout failed to live up to his promise, and leveraged the future as a result.

Hébert‘s comment about film‘s possibilities as both analyst and analysand, and the return to the past and childhood especially, is echoed again and again throughout the literature on Quebec cinema; in a quote that foreshadows and gives Hébert‘s personal confession greater cultural resonance, Claude Jutra proposed, in an interview from 1971, that knowledge of reality is only possible when the artist undertakes “une psychanalyse collective des Canadiens-français en retournant à son enfance. Un peuple, tout comme un individu, découvre les chocs et les bouleversements qui ont façonné son caractère; il arrive à se comprendre lui-même et à résoudre ses contradiction” (as quoted in Patry,

1996, p. 21). Films are repeatedly seen as a way to ‗unblock‘ past trauma as a way to get on with the unfinished mourning process.

According to Falardeau, unlike Pool‘s film, which he sees as a meditation on how the children cope and attempt to make do in a world suddenly devoid of parents, C’est pas moi tells the vastly different story of the metaphysical quest of a hyper-lucid ten- year-old (Defoy, 2008 p. 21). Falardeau‘s characterization of the differences between his and Pool‘s film invokes and relies upon implicitly gendered distinctions that evoke

Jameson‘s comparison between modernism and postmodernism; he describes Pool‘s film as ―playing the nostalgia card,‖ something he (as a more serious ‗political‘ filmmaker) is loathe to do. In describing his film as a humourous dark comedy, he describes how the

66 discrepancy or tension between the film‘s humour and darkness let him tackle serious emotional questions without ―tomber dans le mélodrame ce qui serait pour moi une véritable catastrophe‖ (Castiel, 2008, p. 39); by suggesting that Léon‘s quest is somehow existential, whereas Élise (of Pool‘s film), is just struggling to make do on a day-to-day basis, he similarly relies on a problematic privileging of the more thoughtful (male) subjectivity, concerned with the ―big questions.‖ Bonnie Friedman (1996) sums up this conventional understanding succinctly: ―The boy‘s coming-of-age story is about leaving home to save the world. The girl‘s coming of age story is about relinquishing the world beyond home‖ (p. 9).

Despite these distinctions, both films break with earlier examples of orphan cinema in two very important and telling ways: a decisive shift away from a more exceptionalist portrayal of the particularities of Quebec and its history, and a reversal of the theme of the absent father. This last characteristic, which has for so long been synonymous with Quebec‘s national cinema, is replaced in Maman est chez le coiffeur and C’est pas moi, je le jure! with a focus on the departure and painful absence of the mother, whose long-suffering presence has been perhaps the true constant of this genre and its galvanizing force. Paradoxically, through her determining absence in these films, the mothers‘ presence is rendered more fully than in many earlier examples of orphan cinema, where she is as ubiquitous as wallpaper and often just as dynamic. By this I mean that the ease of the mother-child relationship is often taken for granted in many earlier

Quebecois films, as opposed to the relationship with the father, which is often portrayed as either impossible, or as requiring serious work; the object of a long and metaphysical quest.

67 The move towards a more universalizing and contextual understanding of this remarkable time in Quebec‘s history, the mid-1960s, is emblematic of a larger shift in historiography in the province which has sought to correct earlier, more totalizing understandings of Quebec as an isolated nation with a tragic destiny, towards one that attempts to reconcile the Quebec experience with its Americanness (Létourneau, 2004, p.

33), and membership in a wider colonial experience. In Falardeau and Pool‘s films, this is accomplished in two primary ways that appear, on the surface, to be relatively minor: the depiction of the families as middle or even upper-middle-class, and the decisive and singular setting of the stories in the summer.

Representations of Quebec‘s minority status, isolation, and relative dearth of economic and political capital have been shown, by Fernand Dumont and Jean Hamelin

(1981), to have furnished nationalists with ammunition for years (as cited in Dickinson,

2003, p. 284). Unlike the earlier examples of orphan cinema mentioned above, which all located French-Canadian and Quebecois subjectivity within a particular working-class, proletarian sensibility (thus linking the liberation of the nation to class struggle), the

Gauvins and the Dorés of the respective films are both shown to be fairly affluent, professional families. This deceptively simple detail has the effect of contributing to what

Létourneau describes as ‗unthinking the country‘ and a shift away from an overarching narrative of lack. As touched upon briefly in the introduction, Quebec cinema has long been preoccupied with depictions of French-Canadian subjectivity as working class; partly this is a reflection of the very real material discrepancies that has for so long characterized Anglophone and Francophone relations in the province and the country more widely, as well as the wide, systemic oppression that kept French-Canadians from

68 reaching the same economic and political heights as their Anglophone contemporaries. In

Quebec cinema though, this association between the working-class and Quebecois perspective has grown from a general concern with verisimilitude to a type of shorthand wherein ―[w]orking-class disempowerment and alienation [often] stand[s] in for a general national oppression‖ (Marshall, 2001, p. 108).

In ―Look like a Worker and Act like a Worker,‖ André Loiselle (2006) proposes that ―working-class characters in a number of Quebec feature films function . . . as stereotypes‖ (p. 207), in that they work to reduce a reality that is otherwise too complex to be fully understood. Loiselle perceives an ambiguity in Quebec filmmakers' approach to the working class in that, while,

[o]n the one hand, workers are seen as being more genuine and honest than

members of the upper classes . . . they are [simultaneously] shown as lacking

social awareness, as displaying bad taste, and as being often politically ineffectual

and at times profoundly conservative (p. 210).

He proposes that this is partly explained by the fact that most of these Quebec directors have come from ―the dominant classes‖ (ibid), and they are often fascinated by the working class in a manner bordering on the fetish.53 Loiselle credits Falardeau's La

Moitié gauche du frigo (2000),54 with bringing these ―exploitative good intentions‖ (p.

53 Key examples of this are two of the founding 'fathers' of Quebec cinema, Claude Jutra and Pierre Perrault, both of whom came from urban, bourgeois French-Canadian families, and were trained as a doctor and a lawyer, respectively. They both rose to prominence after their nearly anthropological interest in the daily life of working-class (and rural) French-Canadians. 54 In Falardeau‘s first feature film, as briefly outlined in the Introduction, the relationship between the working-class ‗subject‘ and the middle-class or bourgeois ‗observer‘ is made explicit in its self-conscious portrayal of the leftist filmmaker, Stéphane, making a documentary about his unemployed roomate, Christophe. Througout the film's diegesis, Christophe comes to resemble the stereotype of the working- class subjectivity he suddenly finds himself it: ―increasingly unkempt, behaving with less genuine self- confidence and more aggressiveness, and increasingly swearing and using ‗proletarian‘ language‖ (211); by the end of the film, this one-time engineer moves to British Columbia and joins a punk rock band.

69 212) to light; intentions similar to those that characterized Jutra's interest in Clément

Perron's childhood memories of growing up in a poor mining-town, which eventually became Mon oncle Antoine. Stereotypes of Anglophone characters in the Quebecois films are often used in a similar way. The English are represented as exploitative bosses

(Antoine), power-crazy cops (Un zoo la nuit), or sadistic bullies (Léolo). Depictions of a francophone middle-class or bourgeoisie as morally bankrupt, narcissistic and lacking in authenticity, which reached their apotheosis during the post-referendum cinema most often associated with Denys Arcand's oeuvre, reinforced these stereotypes, and further associated material comfort with national indifference (to borrow from the title of

Arcand's 1982 documentary, Le Confort et l'indifférence).

In important ways then, C’est pas moi, je le jure! and Maman est chez le coiffeur conform to this post-referendum vision of a middle-class, professional francophone family being insufficient in the ways that ‗count,‖ in that they cannot make their marriages work, put their careers ahead of their families, and do not always selflessly put their children first. However, both sets of parents, the Gauvins and the Dorés, are rendered more humanely and sympathetically than these earlier characters. Their woes neither stem from, nor are they negated by, their material comfort, but from a variety of other, more complex dynamics, such as a repressed sexual orientation (in the case of

Pool's film), or the stifling constraints of gendered roles in families (as in the case of the mother in Falardeau's film). Simply by focusing on the children of such families, instead of using them as foils for a more stereotypical depiction of working-class children, such as the protagonists of Mon oncle Antoine, Les Bons débarras, Léolo, and C.R.A.Z.Y, one can see a slight but decisive shift away from ‗thinking the nation‘ in such polemic terms.

70 Secondly, and in a move with comparable consequences, these films are both set in the summertime. This small seasonal detail is actually incredibly telling as Quebec films have long privileged the ―backdrop of the characteristically ‗national‘ landscape of winter and its attendant rituals and practices‖ (Marshall, 2001, p. 68). This had several effects: firstly, winter is something that evokes Quebec‘s exceptionalism (if not in

Canada, than at least in relation to France and other French-speaking colonies55). Snow has played a crucial role in films from the birth of Quebec‘s national cinema onwards.

Without it, Brault‘s raquetteurs56 would not have stumbled their way into the national imaginary; Mon oncle Antoine‘s Benoît would have nothing to hurl at the town‘s wealthy

Anglophone mine-owner; and the snow-plow-operating, eponymous hero of La Vie heureuse de Léopold Z. would not be able to afford a new fur coat for his wife57 (and this is only a partial list, not to mention the incredible importance of ice and images of people skating and playing hockey). Snow instantly connotes the resilience and toughness needed to survive and thrive in such an inhospitable climate for centuries; as such, it serves as an embodiment of the survivant culture that for so long characterized the

French-Canadian collectivity, as well as its isolation. Blankets of snow also serve a democratizing function; as Bill Marshall (2001) observes, ―[t]he snow is not only iconic

55 Voltaire famously derided the economic and strategic value of Canada, and New France particularly, during the 18th century, as ―quelques arpents de neige‖ (―a few acres of snow‖). This quote still has traction in Canada and Quebec today as a way of conjuring up the way that the Quebecois especially are, and have been, misunderstood and maligned by its mother country for centuries. It also speaks to the perceived isolation and lack of support settlers of New France were faced with. 56 Michel Brault‘s fifteen-minute documentary Les Raquetteurs (1958) has been described as the unlikely marker of ―the birth of modern Quebec cinema‖ (A. Loiselle, 2007, p. 38). ―Unlikely‖ because it is difficult to imagine today how a film about such a rustic pastime as snowshoeing could give rise to what amounted to an overhaul of the social and political imaginary through its contribution to the development of Quebec‘s formative cinéma direct. 57 Incidentally, Antoine L‘Écuyer, the child who plays Léon in C’est pas moi, je le jure!, is the grandson of Guy L‘Écuyer, the star of La vie heureuse de Léopold Z). In a small national cinema like Quebec‘s, especially given its long-standing fixation with the family romance and themes of inheritance, it is perhaps not that surprising to find that there are many family ties between current stars and earlier generations of actors.

71 of the national climate, it manages to elide many differences between urban and rural‖

(pp. 22-23). By obscuring important material differences between classes, as well as blurring the distinction between the city and the country, snow, and by extension winter, is the great leveler. In Mon oncle Antoine (which was originally going to be called Silent

Night58), winter, and the long Christmas eve within which the narrative unfolds, is also meant to evoke the deep freeze and dark days of Duplessis, the season then synonymous with la Grande noirceur. By this seasonal logic, it would follow that the Quiet

Revolution of 1960s would be depicted as the ―springtime‖ of Quebec, as one of

Létourneau‘s (2004) survey participants describes that period (p. 23), instead, in Maman est chez le coiffeur and C’est pas moi, je le jure! it is the listless, oppressive ―canicule‖ of summertime.

That these two films are both set so firmly in the dog days of summer is indicative of an important shift in the popular imagination, a move away from thinking of Quebec in an exceptionalist narrative. Winter is nowhere to be found in these films. There are no shovels, sleds, snowshoes, sugar shacks, and most spectacularly, no reference at all to hockey. In fact, aside from a few local references to art and politics,59 there is little in these films (other than the obvious linguistic dimension) to even suggest to the uninitiated that these stories take place in Quebec. The landscapes they depict, though recognizably local for home audiences who can perhaps distinguish the subtleties of the

58 This was the working title of the film, and even appears as the subtitle in some of the English language prints. The reason that this title, which Jutra and Perron preferred for its simultaneous connotations of Christmas eve, the ubiquity of English words in Quebecois culture, and its suggestion of a long darkness, was eventually changed to Mon oncle Antoine, was, according to the director, to encourage the ―phenomenon of spectator identification‖ (as quoted in Leach, 1999, p. 122), and because it had ―become something of a mannerism to give English titles to French films‖ (ibid). 59 In Maman est chez le coiffeur, Élise watches Quebec chansonnier Claude Léveillée on television, while in C’est pas moi, the mother destroys her husband‘s prized Marc-Aurèle Fortin painting, a well-known Quebecois landscape artist. In another scene from this film, M. Doré absently remarks over breakfast with his disinterested sons, that René Lévesque has created the Parti Québécois.

72 Richelieu Valley as opposed to the Laurentians, could ostensibly be anywhere in North

America. The Americanization of the setting and landscape indicates the waning necessity of depicting Quebec‘s national aspirations against the Other of rest of the continent. This is reinforced by the muted québécitude of the films; unlike their progenitors, they never explicitly locate their stories, and specifically cultural or Quebec references are buffered by references to American and European material and pop culture.

Instead of interpreting this shift as indicative of a creeping amnesia and deplorable lack of national pride, it can more persuasively be understood as the exact opposite: a nation that is confident enough in itself (despite its elusive political independence) to no longer feel it necessary to project itself only in terms of its particularity and difference. As such, it can enjoy a greater freedom of expression that does not limit its address to a particular home audience through a set of accepted conventions. This is also a direct result of Quebec cinema‘s move over the past twenty years from a national popular cinema to an international ―art-house‖ cinema that can contend within a global media culture.

Perhaps most importantly though, these films depict, and are primarily motivated by, the traumatic departure of the mother. The importance of this cannot be overstated in a cinema that has for so long been distinguished as much by their constant presence as by its absent or inept fathers. Here again, the case of La petite Aurore is telling. Not only is her biological father condemned as ineffectual and complacent in the film, but Aurore‘s priest is held up as equally useless; as such, the film was also considered a damning portrayal of Catholicism and the insular community it reproduces through its reigning

73 ―pères en jupe / fathers in skirts‖ (Marshall, 2001, p. 105). These ―false fathers‖ (ibid), along with the (biological) absent or complicit father,60 are always considered in relation to the long-suffering, constant mother; Christian Poirier (2004a) describes how the absence of the father is linked to the very strong presence of the mother and how, in this manner, she does not leave sufficient room for the father-child relationship to grow (p.

272). He suggests that in order for this to happen, she must leave them (ibid). In this way, the lack of the father is blamed on the mother‘s stoic presence.

This context is what makes the conspicuous absence of the mothers in Maman est chez le coiffeur and C’est pas moi, je le jure! so important, and breaks with an understanding of their departure as only a narcissistic response to trauma, characteristic of Radstone‘s (2007) ‗false‘ nostalgia, meant to signify masculinist loss in the face of feminism and broader societal changes. Though they evoke the structures of the common family melodrama, their reversal of the myth of the absent father, these films break radically with a more nostalgic tradition of understanding the mother as infallible and omnipotent, and a longer pastoral association between the woman and the actual territory of Quebec. More complexly, it is not simply a role reversal that sees the father as the site of comfort and security and the mother as cruelly withholding, but a more porous and diffused understanding of their particular roles.

Furthermore, by sending the mother away, these films call into question the myth that a closer relationship with the father (now made possible by the absent mother) was ever the source of any existential national angst; in effect, their departure obliquely

60 Denis Arcand (La Rochelle, 2004) describes as the prototypical father-figure of Quebecois cinema: ―Naturally, in Aurore as in almost our entire culture, the father does not exist . . . the male in question here is the eternal French-Canadian father: stupid, coarse, a good Catholic, honest, quarrelsome, sentimental . . . neither sympathetic nor detestable, he simply does not exist compared to the all-powerful mothers‖ (p 309).

74 addresses and makes obvious just how laughable the idea of pre-Quiet Revolution

Quebec as a matriarchy always was.61 The ―all-powerful mother‖ was always an illusion; even now, her departure is precipitated by the father‘s behaviour in both films. Nor is the relationship with the father significantly improved by their absence; if anything, it worsens, at least in the case of Maman est chez le coiffeur, as the children in both films blame the father for the mother‘s sudden departure, and the fathers are shown to struggle significantly in their role as single parent. In Pool‘s film, the father resorts to wanting to institutionalize his youngest child, while in C’est pas moi, je le jure!, M. Doré is easily duped by Léon, whose lies are then rewarded with a brand-new bicycle. The wound of the mother‘s absence does not heal within the films‘ diegesis; at the end of both, the children are still shown resolutely waiting to be reunited with her, though the audience is unsure whether this will happen anytime soon.

A certain ambiguity in both directors‘ characterizations of the respective mothers imbues both films with a quality verging on Freud‘s Unheimlich.62 The fixation and ambivalent resentment towards mothers, as represented in Maman est chez le coiffeur and

C’est pas moi, je le jure!, have become an increasingly common feature of Quebec films

61 This persistent fear, which Nadeau (1991) describes as the ―Plouffe Family syndrome,‖ is based on a nostalgic and macho exaggeration of the role and control that women had during the Grande noirceur, in their (undervalued and unpaid) vocation as nuns (who worked as nurses and teachers), and the mothers of large families; it is a convenient myth that elides the sexism and masculinism which persisted throughout the Quiet Revolution to the sovereigntist movement today. 62 Unheimlich, translated most often as ‗uncanny,‘ and literally ‗unhomey,‘ is essentially a feeling of uneasiness, of something not being in its rightful place; a familiarity unsettled by a foreignness. Freud traced the uncanny to the source of the original home and place of familiarity, the womb: ―Whenever a man dreams of a place or a country and says to himself, still in the dream, ‗this place is familiar to me, I have been there before,‘ we may interpret the place as being his mother‘s genitals or her body.‘ The uncanny is thus a double of nostalgia‖ (as quoted in Linville, 2004, p. 27). ―At first glance, it appears that the uncanny is a fear of the familiar, whereas nostalgia is a longing for it; yet for a nostalgic, the lost home and the home abroad often appear haunted‖ (Boym, 2001, p. 251).

75 of late.63 The connection between the maternal, the uncanny, and nostalgia is well- established: ―Freud says of the maternal body that ‗there is no other place of which one can say with so much certainty that one has already been there‘‖ (as cited in Mavor,

2007, p. 114). The mother‘s abrupt departure, or a feeling of unease in the mother-child relationship, would then signal the uncanny element of such depictions, as well as another degree of nostalgia. The ambivalence with which the mothers are depicted in these films intensifies this uncanny quality in unpredictable and subtle ways.

In the case of C’est pas moi, je le jure!, Falardeau made drastic changes in adapting the novel, wherein the mother‘s departure is a significant event in the background of Léon‘s summer, to making it the principal driving force of the film‘s narrative. In the film, Léon‘s quest across the river is motivated by a desire to buy a plane ticket to Greece, and his angst throughout the summer is attributable to (or at the very least, gravely exacerbated by) his mother‘s sudden absence. In the novel however, Léon and his friend Clarence (whose name Falardeau inexplicably changed to Léa) go on a similar adventure with the much less lofty goal of securing massive amounts of candy for the club they want to start. Falardeau makes the transference of Léon‘s affection from his absent mother to Léa much more explicit than it is in Hébert‘s novel, where Léon and

Clarence seem to come together out of a listless boredom and burgeoning sexual curiousity borne of a summer heat wave and lack of parental supervision.

The father of Hébert‘s novel threatens his wife that there will be no divorce trial and she will never get custody of the children; her departure is explained in a telephone conversation that Léon overhears in which she explains that her husband ―has won‖ (the

63 Montreal wunderkind Xavier Dolan‘s new hit, J’ai tué ma mère (2009), which was earlier offered as proof for the queering of the family romance in Quebec, similarly partakes in this uncanny relationship between mother and child.

76 kids, the car, the house), and she cannot possibly stay in the same town with her children and not be able to see them. In the novels, Léon is the youngest of five children (the same as the real-life Hébert family), whereas in Falardeau‘s adaptation, there is only he and his older brother Jérome, Falardeau instead opting to get rid of the characters of his sisters so that the Dorés would become ―une famille de gars; ce qui fait que c’est encore plus triste quand la mère s’en va‖ (Ruer, 2008b, p. 4). In Hébert‘s second novel, which is also partially adapted to the screen in Falardeau‘s film, the mother has returned after a stay of eighteen months in Greece (during which she pined endlessly for her children), to live in a renovated studio apartment off of the family home, the memory of her absence like a thorn in Léon‘s side, but never the determining force of his problems.64

Curiously, in the novel, Léon‘s mother has more in common with the mother of

Pool‘s film than her incarnation in Falardeau‘s film: she is described as having a career, and her trip to Greece disguised as a business trip, though the children are fully aware that it has more to do with their parents‘ constant fighting. The possibility that the father is having an affair is likewise alluded to, though it is never confirmed. As one of five children, Léon does not share the same intense and almost undivided maternal bond that he enjoys in the film; rather, his relationship is characterized as special as a result of his position as baby of the family and his propensity to get in trouble; no more, no less.

In the film of C’est pas moi je le jure! then, Falardeau grounded Madeleine

64 In a similar vein, Falardeau has stated that he did not want to adapt the ending of Hébert‘s original novel where Léon wakes up in a mental hospital towards the end of the story; the director stating that the decision was an artistic choice to avoid the repetitive depiction of children as victims (as in Aurore), though in all likelihood it was also motivated by a desire to avoid comparisons between his film and Léolo (1992), a film that Hébert‘s original novel bears many striking similarities too, including a scene wherein Léon almost drowns in a kiddie pool, which Falardeau changed to the opening scene of Léon almost asphyxiating himself on the acrobatic ropes on the tree outside his house in a deliberate attempt to avoid making C’est pas moi, je le jure! too similar to that earlier film (Ruer, 2008a, p. 8). Léolo ends with its title character institutionalized with the rest of his family (except his stoic mother) in a mental hospital.

77 Doré‘s unhappiness within the timely framework of Second-wave feminism‘s ―problem with no name,‖ thus obliquely referencing Betty Friedan‘s feminist classic from 1963,

The Feminine Mystique. 65 The ambiguity in this choice comes as a result of the film‘s limited attention to Madeleine Doré‘s struggle and eventual decision to leave her family, which has the consequence of making it seem either hasty or selfish. In his analysis of

Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), which was one of the first films to ostensibly tackle the cultural shift caused by Second-wave feminism and the fallout of divorce, McMullen

(1996) describes the similar way in which Joanna, the mother in that film is characterized. While the audience sympathizes with her desire to escape her domineering husband and pursue her own dreams, her decision to leave her family ―is difficult to reconcile in this short frame because, as her choice is made prior to the film‘s opening scene, the viewer does not share her lengthy struggle . . . viewer identification with her is blocked by the film‘s limited attention to her experiences‖ (p. 40). Much like that film,

Madeleine Doré is motivated to leave her family, who she is established early on as very devoted to, because she feels stifled in her unhappy marriage and suburban lifestyle, but the audience‘s understanding of her is similarly limited as it only learns of her unhappiness through second-hand snatches gleamed from Léon‘s eavesdropping. This choice means she must leave her children, which McMullen (1996) further argues shows the untenability of the American Dream for women: They cannot ―have it all.‖ Unlike that earlier film‘s paternal recuperation though, Léon does not stop missing his mother because of a newfound closeness with this father. One the one hand, the superficial rendering of Madeleine Doré‘s decision to leave might lead critics and audiences to feel

65 In this hugely influential work, which Davis (1999) credits with ―la[ying] the groundwork for the new mass movement‖ of the Second-wave, Friedan surmised ―that something important was missing from the lives of housewives‖ (p. 50).

78 that she is being characterized as narcissistic and frivolous; however, modern ―liberated‖ audiences are solicited, ―across the caesura of the Quiet Revolution and its aftermath‖

(Marshall, 2001, p. 142), to feel sympathy for her feelings of isolation and repression in her homogenous community and terrible marriage, during a time when the choices with which a woman was confronted were relatively limited. Léon‘s unwavering devotion to her affirms her qualifications as a ―good mother,‖ even though her absence throughout the film makes this a difficult position for the audience to maintain. This is perhaps why

Falardeau makes frequent cuts to the landscape of Greece throughout the film, where

Léon pictures his mother and imagines conversations they might have. This serves to keep her memory alive throughout the film, in spite of her absence. Because Léon and his father never become nearly as close as he was with his mother (in the final scene we see with the father, Léon is betrayed by him when he learns how his father has been keeping their mother‘s contact information from him and his brother, essentially out of spite),

C’est pas moi, je le jure! does not follow in the footsteps of films associated with the backlash against feminism of the 1980s and 1990s especially, such as Mr. Mom, Three

Men and a Baby, and Mrs. Doubtfire, wherein ―men prove that they make better women than do women‖ (McMullen, 1996, p. 30). Neither Falardeau‘s nor Pool‘s films offer the fathers redemption in a newfound affinity with their progeny, à la Kramer vs. Kramer.

The ambiguity towards the mother in Maman est chez le coiffeur comes from a similar desire to make her character sympathetic, despite, what for Pool is the unthinkable and ―brutal‖ choice she makes to leave her family. This is a very personal theme for Pool, as described above; in an interview for the film, she describes how she would never be able to abandon her children:― Je n’y survivrais pas. Dans le cas du film,

79 il faut bien sûr se remettre dans le contexte des années 1960 pour comprendre pourquoi la mère part. J’ai essayé de ne pas la juger, même si c’est un geste très brutal‖ (Faradji,

2008, p. 51). In describing why she chose to make the mother‘s actual departure so sudden and almost violent in the film, Pool similarly tells Éric Perron (2008),

―Autrement, elle ne pourrait pas partir. En fait, elle est une sans-cœur d’une certaine façon. C’est tout de même extrêmement violent de partir. Moi, je serais incapable d’abandonner un enfant‖ (p.10). Despite her strong feelings about the mother‘s choice to leave, Pool describes the desire and necessity to make her a strong and sympathetic character.66 This is exactly the choice that some critics67 have found to be the script‘s main inconsistency: Why would this wonderful, caring mother (and an independent woman of means, unlike Madeleine Doré) not just pack up the kids and take them with her to London? Or kick her cheating husband out of the house, even if it was the 1960s?

The lack of preamble or any allusion to previous unhappiness on the part of Simone

Gauvin makes her sudden departure even more implausible than Léon‘s mother (despite the former having a ―better reason,‖ that is, the father‘s infidelity), because unlike the

Gauvins, the Doré family is never initially portrayed as ―happy.‖

Furthermore, Pool edited out the governess character of Isabelle‘s original script,68 a female character who might have served as a ballast against the absolute trauma of the Gauvin mother‘s departure and the devastating effect it has on Benoît, as

66 In the same interview, she says, ―Parce qu’on voulait que la mère soit sympathique, on ne voulait pas que ce soit un monstre qui abandonne ses enfants, on voulait que le spectateur puisse s’attacher à elle comme les enfants y sont attachés‖ (Perron, 2008, p. 10). 67 In a review of the film for the local Montreal weekly, Hour, Anna Phelan (2008) describes the mother‘s departure as the ―one truly implausible - yet fundamental - conceit of this otherwise flawless film: that a caring and attentive mother could abandon her children.‖ 68 In her interview with Éric Perron (2008), Pool describes how the governess character, who Isabelle Hébert was very attached to keeping for reasons of verisimilitude, claiming that ―une famille bourgeoise sans gouvernante, ça ne se pouvait pas‖ (p. 9), had to be cut in the interest of the film‘s running time.

80 well as potentially mitigating Élise‘s growing feeling of responsibility for him and the rest of her family. In effect, this role of surrogate then falls squarely on the shoulders of

M. Mouche, similar to the character of M. Pouchonnaud in C’est pas moi, je le jure!, another striking similarity given the fact that in Bruno Hébert‘s novel, no such character existed; instead, Léon was vaguely intrigued and chummy with the neighbourhood vegetable salesman, an elderly Pole named M. Hilcu who we meet only briefly in the first novel.

The importance of these extra-familial relationships is not without precedent in

Quebec films, and coming-of-age films more specifically. The pairing of a child and an adult who doesn‘t belong to the same social class, race, ethnicity or religion as that child, forms what Adam Muller (2007) , in his analysis of the nostalgia of two European

―Heritage‖ films depicting children and the colonial experience, terms a ―multilayered friendship . . . [meant to] throw into relief the moral and political failings of the white adults around them‖ (p. 742). By depicting these children as untainted by the biases and norms of adult cultures, they come to depict a version of ―our ‗best‘ selves‖ (p. 750), whose manifestation of a desire for moral and social equality (what Muller describes as a particular ―moral cosmopolitanism‖) is ―much more consistent with the ideals of the present-day Europe . . . than with the system of values de rigueur in the colonial Africa of their parents‖ (p. 745). With this in mind, these relationships in the Quebec films could equally speak to an anachronistic desire and (admittedly guarded) call for openness and greater diversity.

Given the specificity of Quebec‘s orphan cinema, it might be more accurately read as an attempt to locate a more positive intergenerational relationship; in the Oedipal

81 readings of Weinmann and others, Monsieurs Mouche and Pouchonnaud could be understood as the ‗noble‘ or ideal fathers that these children are seeking. Instead of searching for origins in a quest for biological parents then, this locates those origins (and a sense of futurity through traces of what one might become) outside of the immediate family. Finally, and most problematically, these tertiary parents are almost always male.

These older men come in many ways to fill (or at least ameliorate) the void left by the absent mother in a way that is problematically reminiscent of a certain postfeminist tendency to create a kinder, gentler, patriarchy, what Modleski (1991) termed ―Feminism without women.‖ Simultaneously, they work to redeem the fathers‘ inadequacy and often come to serve as liaisons between them and their children. However, these men (M.

Mouche and M. Pouchonnaud, as well as their earlier incarnations)69 are unequivocally single and, in important ways, rendered androgynous through their renouncement and disengagement from the Oedipal narrative (and its reproduction of gender within the family). They might be better understood as a type of modern eunuch, the adult incarnation of that myth‘s sexless foundling, or the grown-up orphans of those earlier films. These friendships nevertheless present a somewhat optimistic alternative to the normative and closed nuclear family structure, and as such, can be cautiously understood as representing a greater will to inclusion that should not only be dismissed as regressively re-entrenching harmful gender stereotypes.

Perhaps more than the periodization of the 1960s, these films are nostalgic by virtue of their setting in childhood. They both privilege the child protagonist‘s point of view and particular subjectivity. The adults in both films are known only through their

69 Most similar is the character from Léolo (1992), known as the ‗Word Tamer‘ who gives Léolo a copy of Réjean Ducharme‘s L'avalée des avalés (1966), itself the story of the rejection of the adult world by children, a theme that is echoed strongly through these films.

82 sons‘ and daughter‘s voyeurism and eavesdropping. Both filmmakers attempt to elicit in the audience a feeling akin to the powerlessness and naiveté by which the children feel overwhelmed. Furthermore, both titles reflect, in a manner reminiscent of Jutra‘s title change from 1971, the first person subjectivity of Élise (in the case of Pool) and Léon (in the case of Falardeau), and similarly attempt to create the ―phenomenon of spectator identification‖ (as quoted in Leach, 1999, p. 122).70

Despite their overt commitment to the point of view of their child protagonists, both films appeal to an adult audience; that is, while they are films about children, they are not children‘s films. The subject is often dark and depressing, and appeals much more to the perspective of an older person remembering childhood than to a child who is experiencing it directly, especially in Falardeau‘s film, where Léon is startingly self- aware and articulate. As such, the films are largely mediated by the experience of memory. And while the stories might be anything but, the setting in childhood, however

―realistic‖ or full of disillusionment, is necessarily an optimistic positioning. It is a time before the world closes in on a person and compromises them, as it has done to the adults depicted in the films. As such, it is an idealistic period of possibilities, of dynamism and potential, a time before memories begin to weigh too heavily. Children, especially young children, are not generally considered to be nostalgic ―because they cannot keep time‖

(Mavor, 2007, p. 52). Nostalgia is generally understood as the result of a ―divided or split consciousness‖ (p. 53); that is, to yearn for childhood you have to have lost it, grown up.

But the children in these two films are nostalgic, desperately so, because of the loss of

70 It is likewise interesting to note that both titles, Maman est chez le coiffeur and C’est pas moi, je le jure!, refer to lies told by the child protagonists: Élise tells a local busybody that her mother is at the hairdresser‘s in order to avoid explaining the scandalous situation of her real absence; Hébert‘s novel and the film title evoke the way in which Léon, perpetually guilty and constantly caught in flagrante delicto, maintains his innocence against all odds.

83 their respective mothers. Their eloquence, or that of the film, in articulating this sense of longing is largely what distinguishes these films from children‘s fare. Furthermore, through their depictions of families in conflict, the nostalgic desire to remember a bucolic and happy childhood is challenged by (re)locating the home and family as a source

(perhaps the source) of trauma, thus implicitly rendering the entire project of intergenerational continuity and memory untenable, and further questioning its desirability.

Critics of coming-of-age films and (melo)dramas have often linked representations of the domestic and family with the nation more broadly. In his article,

―Childhood and nostalgia in contemporary culture,‖ Joe Moran (2002) suggests that the complex phenomenon of childhood nostalgia in contemporary culture, and its attendant

―myth of childhood innocence,‖ has ―often been mobilized . . . in order to valorize a more

‗innocent‘ national past‖ (p 157). Similarly, in her book, The Queen of America Goes to

Washington City, Lauren Berlant (1997) describes her ―Theory of Infantile Citizenship‖

(p. 25), wherein

either a child or an innocent adult identified with children, goes to the capital. The

crisis of her/his innocence/illiteracy emerges from an ambivalent encounter

between America as a theoretical ideality and America as a site of practical

politics . . . Because children cannot read the codes, they disrupt the norms of the

national locale: their infantile citizenship . . . [though] eliciting scorn and derision

from ‗knowing‘ adult citizens but also a kind of admiration from these same

people, who can remember with nostalgia the time that they were ‗unknowing‘

and believed in the capacity of the nation to be practically utopian‖ (pp. 28-29).

84 Though neither of these films depict the pilgrimage to the capital scenario as laid out by Berlant, these descriptions resonate strongly with the aforementioned description of Muller‘s ―multilayered friendships‖ and the ―best selves‖ they evoke. Their location in childhood, however unhappy it may ultimately be, inevitably invokes the location of a particularly utopic subjectivity, one that can still remember a time when the future held out limitless possibilities.

Ultimately, Berlant argues that these portraits of infantile citizens work to infantilize their audience by privileging the childlike, naïve perspective of their heroes over that of the corrupt and embittered ―adults‖ that they come into contact with. In turn, such portrayals of childhood work to reinforce dominant narratives of gender, class, nation and the family. Moran (2002) is slightly more optimistic about such depictions, which, though they are ―necessarily individualistic and backward-looking . . . [and indicative of] a form of ‗false consciousness‘ tied to dominant ideologies, [also point to] a sentiment that resonates with our own deepest longings for identity, security and belonging‖ (p. 171).

These theories are especially compelling in terms of Pool and Falardeau‘s films, given the context of Quebecois‘ orphan cinema, which tends to associate the child protagonist of the films in question with a contemporary (conflicted) Quebecois subjectivity, in opposition with its parental figures and adult society more generally.

Given this, what are we to make of Falardeau‘s oft-repeated desire to not portray Léon as a victim?71 Initially, one might see his desire to create a type of anti-Aurore, responsible

71 Falardeau makes this assertion in several interviews, especially in relation to his decision to change Hébert‘s ending where Léon wakes up in a mental hospital: ―Même sail a clairement des tendances à l’autodestruction, Léon n’est jamais une victime‖ (Castiel, 2008, p. 38); and ―J’ai horreur des films qui

85 for his proper destiny and actions as a step in moving away from the ―narrative of lack‖ and vision of Quebec as an innocent victim of its own history, as described by

Létourneau. However, it is not nearly as simple as this; just because Léon is never diagnosed with a mental problem or prescribed Ritalin, it does not necessarily follow that he is not a victim of circumstances beyond his control. Falardeau describes how, ―[à] partir du départ soudain de sa mère, Léon vit une véritable tragédie. Les consequences sont terribles pour lui‖ (Castiel, 2008, p. 39), a description that would tend towards a characterization of Léon as a victim of his family‘s dysfunction. Léon‘s advantage, as the director sees it, is his complete absence of a fear of death (ibid), which allows him to take his quest ‗to restart his life‘ to an unparalleled degree.

Looking at both Falardeau and Pool‘s protagonists, one can discern in them a desire to make both of them self-sufficient, though in very different ways that mirror ideas about sexual difference. Léon is independent in that his interior world, strange drives and motivations, are enough to sustain him, especially once the character Léa is introduced as a surrogate for the love he felt for his mother. In a different way, the audience sees Élise step into the role of ―woman of the house;‖ taking care of her younger brother, tidying up after her father, and throwing a blanket on him when he passes out. Her ―mothering‖ extends outwards to the community; in one scene, she even helps her neighbour with his mother, who is suffering from some sort of nervous breakdown, after she passes out in the shower. She does not think that they need a governess, nor does she want to be sent to boarding school, believing as she does that they (she and her brothers especially) are fine on their own. Though her father is

mettent en scène des enfants qui sont uniquement des victimes innocents . . . Tout à fait. Il sait où il s’en va et il dirige lui-même sa propre destinée‖ (Defoy, 2008 p. 18).

86 physically present, he is more absent and scattered in the face of the mother‘s absence than Léon‘s father, who at least struggles in his way to give his sons some structure. In this way, and because she is female and slightly older than Falardeau‘s character, she becomes part orphan and part mother herself.

Reading both Élise and Léon allegorically as markers for Quebec, in a manner similar to the way that film critics in the province have done since La petite Aurore, in some ways confirms the criticisms of scholars such as Berlant and Moran. But in important ways that mirror the lacunae of more general accounts of nostalgia as pathology, their assessment cannot account for the particularities of these stories. If

Aurore represents Quebec during the Grande noirceur of Duplessis, what do Falardeau‘s anti-Aurore and Pool‘s modern Aurore72 represent? In the case of Léon, it seems as though Falardeau is striving to move away from the narrative of lack that Létourneau describes; by depicting him as self-aware and responsible for himself, despite his suicidal tendencies and self-destructive influences, Léon represents a will in Quebec to move away from a national project that is articulated in terms of a particular victim subjectivity.

By virtue of his family‘s economic and political capital, Léon is decisively removed from the stock depiction of a disenfranchised and oppressed Quebecois subjectivity (though as a child, his particular agency is understandably diminished).

His fractured relationship with his mother his equally compelling; Madeleine

Doré might be better understood as an articulation of the split subjectivity of the Quiet

72 Marianne Fortier, the young actress who plays Élise in Maman est chez le coiffeur, also played the title role in the 2005 remake of the seminal Quebec story, Aurore, directed by Luc Dionne. As such, and because it was her first role, she has become indelibly associated with that mythic character. The 2005 remake was surprisingly popular, especially since most home audiences knew what happened and even garnered several national and provincial award nominations, despite garnering much harsh criticism, especially by Anglophone critics. Citing Aurore (2005), as well as Charles Binamé‘s Séraphin: un homme et son péché (2002), André Loiselle (2007) describes how ―[n]ostalgia and a fixation on ancestral roots . . . the dominant ethos of Quebec in the nineties and early in the new century‖ (p. 133).

87 Revolution intellectual, torn between revolution and exile. She cannot stay and fight with her husband; the (federalist) politician has all the power as a male professional of means, so she must leave her family to ‗find herself.‘ From the description, it would seem as though Falardeau is tacitly sympathetic with her in opposition to the exploitative father.

However, the superficial way in which her decision to leave her children is rendered evokes the narcissism characteristic of Hébert‘s own criticisms about his parents‘ generation. Falardeau‘s paternal signifier is not redeemed wholesale, though by the end of the film, he emerges as a more realistic, if hardly ideal, parental figure for Léon and his brother. That said, it is important to remember the final scene of the film, wherein

Léon proclaims his intention to wait for his mother‘s return, no matter how long it takes, invoking his attachment to the utopian promise, no matter how unlikely.

Similarly, the ambivalence with which Pool renders Simone Gauvin evokes the

Quiet Revolution intellectual insofar as she simultaneously condemns the Church (she tells Élise that it is what ―kept them in the dark for so long,‖ referring obviously to the great darkness of Duplessis‘ premiership), but also wants to send her daughter to a

Catholic Boarding school to be taught by nuns who, admittedly, ―smell like cat piss.‖ In this way, she is portrayed contrastingly as both an open-minded, straight-talking mother to Élise, and a somewhat hypocritical woman of Bruno Hébert‘s aforementioned ―me first‖ generation; interested in broader civil rights and change, but (wilfully) ignorant of what is happening in her own house. Pool even suggests that the mother likely suspects her husband‘s infidelity and might have been amenable with letting it go, were it not for the aberrant nature of his homosexuality (Perron, 2008, p. 10). She abandons her children, not because she feels smothered by her domineering husband (as in the case of

88 C’est pas moi, je le jure!), but because he has betrayed their arrangement; her exile not so much spiritual as logistical.

More than any of these things, it is the overall tone of hopefulness, despite their objectively bleak endings and lack of resolution, which lends these films a particular resonance with what Létourneau describes as the productive ambivalences of the

―postnational‖ paradigm. In this way, while seemingly addressing the past, these films reveal much more about anxiety in the present about the future. Léon lies in the fallen leaves, and smiles when he announces to the camera his intentions to wait for his mother‘s return, which he knows is not imminent, even if it takes his whole life. His relationship with his father, though slightly better, is still not great, and in the second to last scene, he is shown trying to kill himself, the third or fourth attempt since the opening scene. His relationship with his older brother is improved, thanks to Léon‘s taking the blame for Jerome‘s long-distance calls to Greece, but Léa still wants nothing to do with him. Yet when he opens his hand and reveals both an egg and his plans to ―take care of

Madame Brisebois‖ while he waits for his mother, the audience is somehow reassured that his indestructibility is intact. In Pool‘s film, Élise and Benoît crouch in the cornfields, hiding from their father‘s plans to separate them. When Benoît asks where they will go, Élise tells him London, but the audience is understandably incredulous of this ‗plan.‘ However, Coco‘s victory lap in his newly finished go-kart at the end of

Maman est chez le coiffeur, strikes a discordant note of optimism, as does the Patrick

Watson song, ―The Great Escape,‖ which swells during the scene.73

73 C’est pas moi, je le jure! similarly concludes with a Patrick Watson song, albeit the slightly more sobering track, made especially for the scene, called ―Just Hanging Around Final.‖

89 In this way, Pool‘s film ends with an affirmation of generational solidarity; of children loosely united against the disappointments of the adult world. To a lesser extent, this is also the case with Falardeau‘s film, though, in keeping with the theme of Léon‘s metaphysical quest, he seems to find the resilience he needs within himself as opposed to in relationships with others. Whereas in the earlier examples of orphan cinema in

Quebec, intergenerational conflict and absence spelt disaster in terms of the lack of a model for becoming,74 both Maman est chez le coiffeur and C’est pas moi, je le jure! break with an idea of the desirability of even using parents as reference points for the future at all. Calling this founding intergenerational principle into question amounts to a radical shift and questioning about the value of the transmission of memory and traditions. Instead of solely nostalgic or infantilizing then, these films, while in many ways backward-looking and reliant on the middle-class mythology of childhood, speak more to the ambivalence of the present and a lack of contemporary models for the future.

74 Poirier (2004a) punningly refers to this as ―un manque de (re)pères,‖ playing on the consonance of ―repères‖ (reference or landmark) and ―pères‖ (fathers) as a way to illustrate the latter‘s importance in generating the former (p. 201).

90 CHAPTER 3: Carrying the past: The filial dimensions of Quebec’s nostalgia

―Dans la ville où je suis né, le passé porte le présent comme un enfant sur ses épaules.‖

—Pierre Lamontagne (Lothaire Bluteau), Le Confessional (dir. Robert Lepage, 1995)

In a society where the provincial motto ―Je me souviens‖ beckons from every license plate, mutely reminding passers-by of their duty to remember, the role of history, and its attendant narratives of memory and tradition, are understandably significant.

Despite the ambiguity of their origins,75 these three words have come to neatly summarize what many historians feel to be the over-arching advantage, or burden, of

Quebec‘s history: its unwavering reverence for the struggles of its forebears. Regardless of where one falls in this debate, the way the past is narrated and consequently remembered plays a crucial role in the imagination of the nation. Throughout its own history, cinema in Quebec has played a determining role in that memory and its changing representations.

In contrast with English Canada, and despite its smaller population base,

―francophone Quebec has produced a popular cinema (alongside its art-auteur cinema), one which . . . is embedded in a star system, publicity apparatus, and constellation of collective cultural reference-points lacking in English Canada‖ (Straw, 1998, p. 524). In

75 According to the Société de l'assurance automobile du Québec (SAAQ)‘s website, the motto was introduced by the architect and assistant commissioner of the Crown Lands Department, Eugène-Étienne Taché, included it under the provincial coat of arms on the entrance to the Palais législatif (today the Hôtel du Parlement) in 1883. Flanked on the facade of the building by bronze statues representing Amerindians, explorers, missionaries, soldiers and public administrators from both the French and English regimes, Taché left no clear indication of what the words meant; the FAQ section of the SAAQ provides only the vague suggestion that ―we can only understand the meaning of the motto by placing ourselves in the context of its creation‖ (SAAQ, 2009). The NFB documentary A License to Remember: Je me souviens (2002), wherein director Thierry Le Brun sets out to discover what Quebecers make its obscure and weighty meaning, helps illuminate its limitless interpretations in the province, as well as its cultural significance.

91 this context, cinematic nostalgia has played a pivotal and mediating role in the shaping of

Quebec from a nation trying to imagine itself into being, into an established and confident national cinema that articulates a particular Quebecois identity within both a domestic and international sphere. Over the last century, cinema in Quebec has also created a crucial locus from which to negotiate and push back at hegemonic and colonizing discourses, while the revolutionary discourse it espouses often makes recourse, in a manner that might initially seem contradictory, to the nostalgic ideals of history, tradition, and continuity. An analysis of the historical precedence for the creative potential of Quebec‘s filmic nostalgia, as well as how it demonstrates society‘s dynamic and selective engagement with its history, is necessary to round out the picture of the cultural work being done in Maman est chez le coiffeur and C’est pas moi, je le jure!, as well as the broader stakes of memory in Quebec film.

History of Cinema in Quebec History

Soon after it was first introduced to Quebec at the close of the nineteenth century,76 cinema had its first run-ins with the Church:77 ticket sales were highest on

Sundays, the one day that workers had off (MacKenzie, 2004, p. 76). The problem gradually expanded and intensified, and the Church began to regard the cinema as a

76 The first film screening in Quebec (which was also a first for Canada in general) was in Montreal in 1896, when the Lumière brothers‘ cinématographe was projected to an audience of ―dignitaries, jounralists, and the mayor of Montreal‖ (MacKenzie, 2004, p. 70). 77 The importance of the Catholic Church in Quebec during this era, all the way up until roughly the mid- twentieth century, cannot be overstated: Quebec society functioned as what Danielle Juteau (1999) describes as a ―Nation-Church‖ (p. 142), which effectively ruled the French-Canadian collectivity of Canada. This hegemony has come to be seen, in the years of and since the Quiet Revolution, as working in an oppressive manner with English Canada and Quebec‘s own Catholic Church and corrupt politicians, to keep the francophone population subservient, economically-inferior and amenable to British rule. This early religious nationalism espoused by the Church envisaged the descendants of French colonialists as a ―Volknation based on common ancestry. Belongingess to the nation was perceived in an essentialist and static manner‖ (p. 147).

92 dangerous and immoral distraction, where different ethnicities, religions, linguistic groups, genders, and classes mingled in unprecedented ways (ibid). By 1912, the Church had begun a campaign of rhetoric against the actual content and images of the films, as

―there was no way to control the contingent actions and debates of the audiences‖ (p. 77); furthermore, as Quebec audiences began to see and expect images of their own communities on the screens, the Church‘s role as supreme arbiter of meaning and French-

Canadian identity lessened. The advent of sound in 1928 added yet another dimension to the debate, as the Church believed that it ―determined the ‗nationality‘ of a film through language‖ (p. 94).

As the battle for souls intensified, and the Church felt increasingly threatened by the cinema‘s latent advocacy of individualism and democracy, it stepped up its rhetoric, and began denouncing the cinema as conspiracy by the Jews and the English to destroy

Christianity (p. 95). Anti-Semitism was especially virulent (and convenient) at this time in Quebec, and helped to shore up the Church‘s nonetheless waning power on the French-

Canadian collectivity. Priest, historian, and well-known anti-Semite, Lionel Groulx, as well as his secular counterpart, premiere Maurice Duplessis,78 both capitalized on a particular rural nostalgia that was growing with the rapid industrialization and forced urbanization of the Depression-era population. The premiere especially made frequent appeal to a particular conservative nationalism,79 which involved the heavy promotion of

78 Duplessis was elected head of the Conservative party of Quebec in 1933, which he fused together with l‘Action libérale nationale under the banner of ―l‘Union nationale.‖ (Dickinson, 2003, p. 325). He was in power and ruled Quebece from 1936 to 1939, and then again from 1944 until his death in 1959 (MacKenzie, 2004, p. 101). The three decades of le chef‘s authoritarian reign are known in retrospect as la grande noiceur (the great darkness) (MacKenzie, 2004, p. 103), for his notorious persecution of ―dangerous others‖ such as communists and Jehovah‘s Witnesses (p. 101), his failed opposition to conscription during World War II, and his complicity with the Church in censoring anything that might threaten the status quo. 79 He also used a host of other corrupt and downright criminal strategies to secure his reign, such as vote fixing and fear tactics (Dickinson, 2003, p. 327).

93 a (nostalgic) notion of ―French-Canadian culture [as one] based on tradition, pastoral existence, devotion to God, the Catholic Church, the family, procreation, and isolation from the cultures of les anglais and les juifs that were eroding their way of life‖

(MacKenzie, 2004, p. 101).

During these years, the cinema served as both a convenient scapegoat for the malaise caused by rapid urbanization and industrialization, and as a respite for people from an oppressive and demanding regime that was ―overdetermined by Catholic notions of guilt, penitence, morbidity, suffering, punishment, and sacrifice‖ (MacKenzie, 2004, p.

103). By 1933, Quebec had a total of 134 cinemas (Dickinson, 2003, p. 265), and its popularity showed no sign of abating; by the postwar 1940s, Quebec had two homegrown production companies (MacKenzie, 2004, p. 102), which catered to a burgeoning desire for Quebecois audiences to see themselves on the screen, and filled the vacuum created by the suspension of imports on French-language films from France during World War II.

This new ―national cinema‖ embodied the tension of a society caught between the a religious, rural past that stressed collectivity, and a present that was moving rapidly towards an urbanizing, individualistic and secular future. Films from this era in the fifties, such as the aforementioned La petite Aurore, l’enfant martyre (1952) and Tit-Coq (1953), to name but two of the most famous, functioned as a type of ―collective group therapy for a culture in the painful process of exorcising Catholicism‖ (ibid), before what would become the final break with the Church in the 1960s with the Quiet Revolution. Through their diegesis, these films showed individuals struggling to reconcile their individual needs with those of the community, usually represented as a traditional family, small rural village, or both. Though the films usually ended with a recuperative narrative

94 wherein the values of the community are asserted over those of the individual, their endings were typically unconvincing and unconvinced, ―[problematically] reaffirm[ing] the supremacy of the Catholic Church‖ (p. 109), usually symbolized as a meddlesome or ineffectual village priest.80

Despite the majority of these films‘ having primarily urban, Montreal audiences, their pastoral setting appealed to an aspect of the popular memory that still located the

French-Canadian identity in the ancestral village and ―affirmed a cultural specificity of

Quebec …even if the lifestyles of the audience itself have changed to such an extent as to be ‗westernised‘‖ (p. 107). Particularly, located the past in the countryside and made the two synonymous: a geographical treatment of nostalgia that persists to this day. This is not to say the countryside was depicted uncritically: the rural setting of Aurore, through the little girl‘s torture and the community‘s inaction, evoked the terror and repression of

Dupplessiste ideology (Lever, 1988), while Tit-Coq showed the way in which small towns (as opposed to the metropolis, Montreal) were rife with gossip and hypocrisy.

It was only a few years later, with the cinéma direct style initiated by the National

Film Board (NFB/ONF)‘s81 move to Montreal in 1956 and the sweeping changes made possible by the Quiet Revolution, that the countryside, and its associations of a rural past full of traditions and ancestral knowledge, was discovered as a potential discursive site for the future. Brault‘s 1958 film Les raquetteurs, and his collaboration with Pierre

80 The shock and importance of recognition that these early films prompted is perhaps best captured in a piece by eventual premier and then journalist René Lévesque after he saw Tit-Coq in 1953: ―Dieu! Que c’est passionnant – et nécessaire – de se reconnaître sur un écran . . . là, pour la première fois, nous sommes‖ (quoted in MacKenzie, 2004, p. 109). 81 Straw (1998) points out the paradox of how this federal cultural institution (and others such as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation [CBC]) ―played crucial (if unintended) roles in fostering a sense of nationalist, even separatist, consciousness in Quebec in the post-war period, in large measure by sponsoring and disseminating images of a population and geographical space undergoing a process of rapid modernization (p. 524).

95 Perrault for Pour la suite du monde (1962),82 are perhaps the most famous examples of this trend. Both of these films, and several others which would come after them, seemed to maintain that Quebec‘s distinguishing feature, and its strength, lay in its rural traditions, and that these should be revitalized and renewed as a way to ensure the future of the Quebecois nation, especially in the face of the encroaching and dominant cultural and economic influence of America and English Canada. Perrault and Brault, both educated, urban, relatively bourgeois filmmakers,83 turned to the country as a way to represent ―the people‖ and the nation through its traditions, and this is especially interesting when one notes that when it screened in Montreal, Pour la suite du monde had to be subtitled for its audiences to understand the highly localized dialect of the islanders

(White, 2003, p. 111). As such, its message is ambiguous; as Marshall (2001) asks,

―[d]oes Pour la suite du monde look backward or forward?‖ (p. 26).

A period of great cultural and artistic renaissance, marked by a new, secular nationalism, an unprecedented optimism for the future, and new articulations of (an empowered) collective identity, the Quiet Revolution is much mythologized today, and used as a type of cultural shorthand to evoke a golden era of positive change and possibility, when Quebecois people finally threw off the shackles of centuries of

82 Pour la suite du monde, for which Perrault coined the term ―cinéma vécu‖ in order to describe its hybridized fictional and documentary form, recounted the story of the inhabitants of Île-aux-Coudres, a remote island on the St-Lawrence, in their annual tradition of the beluga whale hunt. When Perrault arrived though, he found that they had not practiced the centuries-old tradition since 1924. As a result, he convinced them to renew the practice as a way to create new industry on the island and as a way to forge productive links with the past in order to secure a strong future. In this way, the reality of the film is highly mediated, and the stakes are high. The islanders try to recreate the conditions and strategies of the hunt from the recollection of local old-timers who remember it from their youth, and the results are mixed: they catch only one whale, and since the local market for it as a resource have dried up, they instead sell it to an aquarium in the United States. 83 Perrault had studied in Paris and Toronto as well as practicing law in Montreal before beginning his career in film; Brault was already a well-traveled and well-educated production assistant and cinematographer by the time of his collaboration with Perrault.

96 colonization by the Church and English Canada (Létourneau, 2004, pp. 21-23). In this way, it is retroactively understood and imagined as a time of the ―re-founding of Québec‖

(ibid), when the province (nation) broke with (what is often sometimes problematically and one-dimensionally understood as) a historical narrative of ―people with a tragic destiny‖ (ibid), epitomized by the historical markers of the Conquest of 1759 on the

Plains of Abraham and the failed Rebellions of 1837-38 (p. 41). Despite the fact that many of these political, cultural, and intellectual shifts were set in motion before the end of Duplessis‘ reign and the 1960s,84 and the confusion as to when the Quiet Revolution is actually considered to have ―ended,‖85 a historical narrative of ―before‖ and ―after,‖

―lack‖ and ―plentitude‖ has come to dominate and obscure a more critical understanding of the Quiet Revolution.

As such, this period has become a prime location for nostalgia in the contemporary landscape of Quebec, where the embers of nationalist sentiment simmer but no longer consistently ignite. This is partly what makes C’est pas moi and Maman est chez le coiffeur so compelling. While some might see Falardeau and Pool‘s relatively apolitical characterization of that era as a way to lessen the significance of those popular struggles (in a manner similar to mode retro), the Quiet Revolution years are now so mythologized in Quebec, that it actually shows remarkable restraint that the directors chose not to make these sweeping associations; as a result, an important critical space is

84 Specifically, the modernizing effect of changes brought in under Adélard Godbout‘s administration (in a brief respite from Duplessis), during his time as Premier from 1939 to 1944; during this time, Godbout finally enacted women‘s right to vote in 1940, introduced much-needed changes to Quebec‘s labour code, and educational system, and nationalized what would become Hydro-Québec, in 1944 (Dickinson, 2003). 85 Some trace it to as early as 1966, with the return to power of the Union nationale; others to 1970 with the trauma of the October crisis; some still later to the oil crisis of 1973; and finally, many to the first failed referendum which put an end to the optimism for sovereignty heralded by the Parti Québécois election in 1976 (Marshall, 2001, p. 47).

97 opened up for audience interpretation. The changes that the families endure are of course linked implicitly to broader societal changes going on in the nation at that time, but continuity with the past is nonetheless privileged over a history emphasizing rupture and a depiction of modernity as coming overnight to Quebec.

The early years of the Quiet Revolution also witnessed the growth of new forms of fictional, feature films, more experimental in nature than those made earlier during the war years. Claude Jutra‘s semi-autobiographical À tout prendre, and Gilles Groulx‘s Le

Chat dans le sac, both released in 1964, are often cited as key examples and as a manner of ―foundational texts‖ for this new ―cinema of modernization‖ (Marshall, 2001).

Strikingly, both Jutra and Groulx‘s films were a complex blend of fiction and reality, both heavily influenced by le direct and France‘s nouvelle vague, and had as their subject young men (both named Claude) suffering identity crises, linked implicitly (and sometimes, in the case of Groulx‘s film, explicitly) with the nation‘s own identity crisis.

In both films, the male protagonists are in the midst of a complicated (and doomed)

―mixed,‖ urban relationship.86 Unlike Brault‘s and Perrault‘s earlier films and their evocation of ―the people,‖ these features were characterized by ―a new folklore of alienation‖ (Marshall, 2001, p. 56). However, they were equally nostalgic in their own way; in Groulx‘s film, Claude leaves the city (Montreal), to retreat to the country to ―find himself,‖ thus re-entrenching an association between rurality and authenticity which is similar to Perrault‘s film and nostalgic in nature; in Jutra‘s case, the nostalgia lies more

Claude‘s uncanny relationship with his mother, whose strange power over him is

86 In Jutra‘s film, the unknowable love object is Johanne, a woman who initially claims to be Haitian and later reveals her identity as an orphan from Quebec, which confuses and destabilizes the Quebecois identity as she is a black woman; in Groulx‘s, Claude is in the midst of a protracted breakup with Barbara, an Jewish anglophone aspiring actress, also from Quebec, but ―Other,‖ like Johanne, to the (male) French- Canadian protaganist.

98 epitomized in the scene where he steals up to her bedroom in his childhood home, ―like a furtive burglar but also like a devout worshipper‖ (p. 36).

These films, both the documentaries and the fictional features, helped establish subsequent understanding and association of the French-Canadian, Quebecois nationalist identity with a distinctly urban, cultured, male subjectivity, which nonetheless depended on and made frequent appeal to an ideal of the nation as distinctly rural, working-class, and essentially feminine. In the case of Jutra and Groulx‘s films, the privileging of the male protagonists‘ gaze and subjectivity had the further effect of associating Quebec‘s

(unknowable, unapproachable) ―Other‖ with a particularly sexualized and feminine subjectivity. These films also fed into the Quebec cinema masculine auteur culture, which continues to dominate to the present day, and to which Pool is often held up as the exception that proves the rule.

Jutra‘s third and most famous film, Mon oncle Antoine (1971) is central to the current analysis of the films from 2008, as it functions as a type of Ur-text for contemporary Quebecois coming-of-age films. Repeatedly chosen as both Canada‘s and

Quebec‘s best and most influential film (Patry, 1996), Mon oncle Antoine is also responsible for the eponymous Prix Jutra honouring excellence in Quebecois filmmaking, and was recently canonized by being re-mastered and reissued by The

Criterion Collection, which has become a sort of kingmaker in the realm of bestowing prestige on classic or overlooked films. The film was well received when it first came out, though it was initially criticized in Quebec for not dealing more explicitly with the nationalist politics of the day. Released as it was during a time of great political foment and change, three years after the formation of the Parti Quebecois, and one year after the

99 October Crisis, 87 Mon oncle was set in the not-so-distant Quebecois past, during the dark days of Duplessis‘ regime. The action of the film takes place in a small asbestos mining town (it was filmed in Thetford Mines) on Christmas Eve, and is based on the childhood memories of the film‘s screenwriter, Clémont Perron. Critics claimed that it was not a

―true Quebec movie . . . [because] it abandoned the direct cinema tradition that made

Quebec cinema distinctive, . . . [and] it retreated into the past and thus failed to engage with the issues facing Quebec in the present.‖ (Leach, 1999, p. 123). Eventually, critics came to find Jutra‘s film extremely relevant in its ability to ―mobilize collective, national discourses a well as individual and ‗universal‘ ones‖ (Marshall, 2001, p. 141). Instead of simply ―retreating into the past,‖ the setting recalled the ―key strike at Asbestos in 1949, which became a cause célèbre for modernizing intellectuals against the Duplessis regime and has been inserted into a whole linear and teleological history of Quebec culminating the Quiet Revolution‖ (ibid). As a film made in the 1970s about the 1940s, Marshall

(2001) points out the productive ambivalence of the temporal dissonance in a way that evokes comparisons with Maman est chez le coiffeur and C’est pas moi, je le jure!:

Instead of a linear, totalizing reading, [the] relationship between past and present

must partake of the national allegorical tension. The past is both similar (the

origins or previous incarnation of ‗us,‘ ‗our‘ ancestors) and different (its

ignorance and poverty, infant mortality), and often undecidably so (the status of

87 Briefly, the October crisis refers to the kidnapping of British Trade Commissioner James Cross by two cells of the FLQ (Fédération de libération du Québec), on October 5th, and the subsequent abduction of Pierre Laporte, the Québec Minister of Labour, five days later. After demanding that their manifesto be read on Radio-Canada, they found popular support in the province, but their demands for money and the freedom of twenty-three ―political prisoners‖ were met by Prime Minister Trudeau on October 16th with the invocation of the War Measures Act; martial law that suspended habeas corpus and allowed police unprecedented powers in terms of search and arrest capabilities, leading to the detainment of 450 prisoners, only 12 of whom were charged. Soon after, Laporte was found murdered in the trunk of a car, and public sympathy for the FLQ fell dramatically. Cross was not released until December 2nd of that year, and the terrorists were subsequently exiled to Cuba (MacKenzie, 2004, pp. 160-161).

100 the Québécois). The result is a transtemporality, a relatedness, a to-ing and fro-ing

between temporal periods and cultural/political epochs (p. 142).

What is especially interesting in terms of these films from 2008 is their setting in the quasi-rural setting of Montreal‘s then relatively new suburbs on the South Shore.

Here, the countryside no longer signifies tradition and the past, but the modernizing thrust of the Quiet Revolution outwards from the city. Nadeau (2008) describes the similar way in which, in the film C.R.A.Z.Y., the audience is seduced by this vision of ―un

Québec moderne, celui façonné dans le sillage de l’Expo 67 et du grand dérangement banlieusard‖ (p. 6). In these contemporary films, and in a manner quite different from other nostalgia films‘ appeals to a rural and traditional past,88 we can discern a shift away from an exceptionalist portrayal of a rustic and glorious pastoral myth and past, a shift that mirrors the seasonal and class-related changes analyzed in the previous chapter. In

Maman est chez le coiffeur and C’est pas moi, je le jure!, the country setting is rendered ambivalently: it is neither completely isolating nor repressive, nor is it solely comforting and idyllic; appeals to nature are just as often foreboding as they are uplifting.

The 1970s were characterized by more hard-line, urgent nationalism, as opposed to the relatively utopic brand of the previous decade. This was largely the result of the

October crisis, whose dramatic outcome had a galvanizing and polarizing effect on both sides of the nationalist debate in Quebec. The 1970s also saw the rise in another auteur‘s status; Denys Arcand, who had joined the NFB in the mid-1960s (Marshall, 2001), directed the feature-length documentary On est au coton, the title of which refers both to its subject matter as it deals with the textile industry in Quebec, and to the colloquialism

88 Nadeau (2008) makes specific reference to Maurice Richard (Charles Binamé, 2005), Aurore (Luc Dionne, 2005), and Séraphin : Un homme et son péché (Charles Binamé, 2002).

101 meaning ―we‘re fed up‖ (p. 149), with its obvious nationalist undertones. Arcand continued making overtly political films up until the referendum of 1980, after which his disillusionment with the sovereignty project was his primary subject or subtext. In this way, he was a key filmmaker in what came to be called the post-referendum cinema of the 1980s (MacKenzie, 2004; Nadeau, 1992; Weinmann, 1999).

The cinema of this era was characterized by the ―despair felt by left-wing nationalists in the 1980s‖ (MacKenzie, 2004) during a period in which the nationalist movement moved decisively towards the right (p. 173) after the perceived political failures of the 1960s. Economic concerns came to dominate the sovereigntist agenda, which many on the left saw as a ―disavowal of one of the core tenets of the independence movement: the attainment of an egalitarian, non-capitalist society‖ (MacKenzie, 2004, p.

173). Disenchanted by both federalist and nationalist politics, filmmakers like Arcand turned to what they perceived as an increasingly bleak (urban) present, devoid as it was of the optimism of the Quiet Revolution. A product of the postmodern age, this cinema is characterized by pastiche and irony, and its appeals to nostalgia are limited to a view of the present as dysfunctional and in perpetual decline, as well as the ubiquitous and inherently nostalgic presence of sequels, such as Pierre Falardeau‘s Elvis Gratton series, the hugely successful Les Boys franchise, and Arcand‘s own loose trilogy, which culminated with 2007‘s dystopic fantasy, L'âge des ténèbres. Its nostalgia was less explicit; instead, it was channeled into what Nadeau (1992) describes as ―a sisyphian [sic] search for a holy grail: the patriarchal figure of Quebec society, the one which supposedly liberated the parochial spirit of pre-quiet revolution Quebec‖ (p. 6). Nadeau further characterizes the films of this era as embodying a particularly (white,

102 heterosexual) masculine subjectivity, hostile to the ―other,‖ where ―the national obsession has become the spearhead for a discourse attempting to define the new status of the

Québécois man‖ (p. 5).

After the collapse of the Meech Lake Accord in 1990,89 and the second failed referendum on sovereignty in 1995, commentators began remarking on a certain popular fatigue with the nationalist movement, which had begun to lose momentum again.

Premier and PQ party leader Jacques Parizeau laid bare the dark side of Quebec nationalism‘s xenophobia in his frustrated concession speech, when he blamed the ―Yes‖ side‘s narrow loss on ―money and the ethnic vote.‖ This comment would later cause

Parizeau to resign and would haunt him for the rest of his career; while many critics on both sides denounced his comments as racist and xenophobic, others felt that he had simply vocalized an underlying and formative tenet of contemporary Quebec nationalism.

It is perhaps in reaction to this real or perceived hostility to the ―other‖ that Quebec filmmakers began turning resolutely outwards (though all the while tightly clutching a project of self-definition).

While some critics optimistically see this epoch of Quebec cinema as a time of increased openness and raprochement towards the province‘s cultural and immigrant communities, with well-known auteurs turning the focus outwards as a way to

89 Headed by then-Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, the Meech Lake Accord was a series of negotiations held in the aftermath of Trudeau‘s unilateral patriation of the Constitution in 1982, which Quebec objected to as it was seen as an attempt to weaken provincial jurisdiction, among other issues. In an attempt to get Quebec to ratify the constitution, after coming to power in 1984, Mulroney initiated the Meech Lake Accord. While the accord did acknowledge Quebec‘s wish to be considered a ‗distinct society‘ and restored its veto over most constitutional amendments, opposition between the talks‘ initiation in 1985 and its deadline for ratification in 1990 grew steadily. Eventually, Newfoundland‘s Clyde Wells and a native legislator from Manitoba, Elijah Harper, prevented the ratification of the Accord and the possibility it held out for Quebec signing the Constitution. As a result, the Conservative‘s Minister of Environment, Lucien Bouchard, left the federal government along with several other members of parliament to form the pro- independence Bloc Québécois. Another attempt at constitutional reform was made in 1992 with the Charlottetown Accord, but it was defeated in a national referendum (Dickinson, 2003).

103 contextualize and broaden an understanding of Quebec identity in an increasingly international public sphere, others, such as Nadeau, suggest that ―attempts to insert a pluralism are drowned in a political relativism whose goal is essentially to give the dominant white class a clean conscious without menacing its androcentric position‖

(1992, 8). With the approach of the new millennium, the 1990s saw an extension of this outward (ambivalent) gaze towards the other, with films such as Robert Lepage‘s Le confessionnal (1995) and André Turpin‘s Zigrail (1995) depicting their (male) heroes leaving the confines of Quebec in order to seek out new experiences, expand their horizons, and ultimately, return home to confront their pasts. Travel in these films serves as a metaphor for a certain psychological journey or quest wherein the protagonist

(generally male) must ultimately confront their demons through a painful reckoning process with their pasts, usually in the form of intergenerational strife, or a search for origins by way of a search for biological parents. Marshall (2001) describes the way in which Léolo (1992), ―a working-class fantasy‖ (p. 116), used ―ethnic otherness as a sounding-board for the exploration of ‗Québécois‘ identity‖ (p. 269). These films generally use the other (other place, other culture, other person) as a mirror with which to gain a better understanding of self. This trend is not limited to the 1990s however; as recently as C.R.A.Z.Y. (2005), where the hero travels to Jerusalem in a quasi-spiritual quest to grapple with his homosexuality, travel continues to play a key role in the definition of Quebec identity.

Since the beginning of this decade, critics have remarked on a reinvestment in the founding myths and national Quebec heroes in Quebec film; this is evident in the popularity of films like Séraphin (2002), Aurore (2005), Le Survenant (2005) and

104 Maurice Richard (2005). In a recent article for the film magazine Séquences, Madolini

(2008) also stipulates that, regardless of this trend, this is a time when ―the notion of frontiers doesn‘t really exist anymore. The Other lives here, the Quebecois goes abroad,‖

(translation mine, p. 33) adding triumphantly that ―our filmmakers are telling the stories of Others‖ (ibid) and goes on to list films like Philippe Falardeau‘s Congorama (2006) and Robert Favreau‘s Un dimanche à Kigali (2006), as well as the two solitudes buddy- cop film, Bon Cop, Bad Cop (2006).

While this is ostensibly the case, the language is telling: in Quebec, one often comes across the slippery terms ‗nous‘ and ‗nos‘ (‗us‘ and ‗ours‘), which, since Jean

Lesage‘s rallying cry of ―Maîtres chez nous,‖90 have carried heavy implications.

Depending on one‘s perspective, it can be read as inclusive or just the opposite, with its insinuation of a closed, pure-laine91 francophone Quebec identity, as made famous with

Parizeau‘s regrettable speech. While the idea of increased representation and visibility of

Quebec‘s ethnic communities in its films makes one hopeful of an increasing fluidity and broadening of the understanding of these terms, one based more on locality and community than race and origins, the contribution of Quebec‘s minority populations to film is still articulated in a manner uncomfortably similar to an international buffet; as in,

―look at all the great things that these people can bring to our culture!‖ as opposed to a more reciprocal relationship. When reciprocity is invoked, it is often in the alarmist and

90 Translated most commonly as ―Masters of our own house,‖ this influential phrase also serves to highlight the fundamental link between the domestic metaphor and the nation, as well as its inherently gendered connotations. 91 This politically charged terms literally means ―pure wool‖ but it is often interpreted in English as ―dyed in the wool;‖ its meaning is similar to the similar expression ―de souche‖ (old stock), and refers to those French-Canadian Quebecois who can trace their lineage back to the settlers of New France. The term is controversial primarily for its racial overtones of purity and implicit whiteness, but also because it elides and contains the brutal colonialism enacted against the First Nations people, both through forced expropriation, miscegenation, and other cultural violence.

105 protectionist tones made famous by the town of Hérouxville in 2007.92 Troublingly, discussions around the filmmaking practices of First Nations and Inuit communities are often lumped in with that of ―immigrant communities‖ (Marshall, 2001).

In her book All the Rage (2001), Suzanna Danuta Walters makes the case, in relation to the growing visibility of gay characters on television and in film, that increased representation, especially when it is realized in a one-dimensional way wherein the ―other‖ is a foil for the heterosexual, ―normal‖ protagonist, can paradoxically supplant a more nuanced engagement with political inequalities and social issues: ―It is a paradox because the increased visibility of marginalized groups often creates new restrictions and recycles old stereotypes‖ (p. 10).

Despite the tone of its media coverage, the situation in Quebec is not strikingly different from the situation in the rest of Canada,93 where Bannerji (2000) perceives a similar paradox in the institutionalized ―discourse of multiculturalism‖ and language around ―women of colour‖ often, which elides more complicated questions of power and colonization and provides an apolitical way of coping with the complexities of diversity without subverting the primacy of a European, white Canadian citizen‘s subjectivity as the arbiter of its meaning. Perhaps not surprisingly, this is more acute in Quebec, where a French-Canadian national identity must negotiate between its hegemonic status as

92 Hérouxville, a small rural municipality in Quebec of around 1300 people, gained international prominence in January 2007 when town councillor André Drouin came up with an inflammatory and insulting code of conduct for immigrants, made all the more extreme by the town‘s entirely white, francophone, Catholic demographic makeup ("Herouxville's dangerous notions," 2007). 93 In a manner reminiscent of how Lauren Berlant (2008) described the way in which the American South was ―reduced to the region of minor, archaic, and uncanny culture the North has used as its plaything and exteriorized bad conscience‖ (p. 53), Quebec has often served a similar function for English Canada. The frequent allusions to Quebec‘s xenophobia, racism, and ‗backwardsness‘ in the rest of country‘s Anglophone media works to exculpate them from, and thus ignore, similar problems in other provinces.

106 majority in the province and a minority in the rest of the country and continent, as well as its ambiguous and unresolved status as both colonizer and colonized.

It is in this historical context that the contemporary ―nostalgia film‖ must be apprehended and considered, without automatically scapegoating it as a knee-jerk, regressive reaction to increased immigration or rampant xenophobia. If anything, the nostalgia that they foreground is less virulent than the strain which was only latent in the post-referendum cinema of the 1980s and 90s, despite those films‘ contemporary settings.

Paradoxically, these recent, more explicit nostalgia films could more productively be understood as a providing a forum for a more meaningful engagement with the present, which is not precluded by their open retrospection. Maman est chez le coiffeur and C’est pas moi, je le jure! do not hold open the past as a place of escape or promise, but foreclose it as a possibility, helping society get on with the process of mourning, that which Létourneau (2004) describes as ―nothing less than an act of re-foundation and regeneration that makes it possible to move on to other things . . . neither discharge nor renunciation, but rather the production of meaning, in favour of life and the future‖ (pp.

16-17).

Much as Léon‘s wish to return to the womb in C’est pas moi is understood as an impossibility, these films present a missing sixties‘ summer in Quebec‘s history as both desirable and a dead end. Similarly, in the scene in Pool‘s film, where Élise is watching

Claude Léveillé perform his nostalgic hit song from the era, ―Frédéric,‖ on the family‘s black and white television, the nostalgia is so heightened and self-conscious, that the viewer is confronted with a reflection of themselves, looking to the screen for a mediation for their past and finding only images. In the case of Élise, her nostalgia cannot

107 bring her mother home. The films‘ glossiness, period detail, lushness of production and evocative soundtracks extend the promise of ―maternal plenitude‖ only to forecast its untenability; again recalling Freud‘s notion of the Uncanny. Similarly, they reflect a version of ‗nous’ that confronts the audience as at once similar (because it is showing a representation of origins and ancestors) and irrevocably different because of an important generational divide. Describing this fraught filial relationship between ―heirs‖ and

―forebears,‖ Létourneau (2004) describes the way in which, while the former can be very close to the latter, ―and draw on their values and actions, their questions and decision are nevertheless determined by the realities of the present‖ (p. 14).

That said, while the temptation to view Quebec coming-of-age films as allegorical is understandably strong given this context, one must also be wary of how readings of the parent-child relationship in both films (and historical discourse more broadly), can

―flatten out the diversity of Québec, limiting identifications between spectator and screen to a white pur laine collectivity‖ (Gittings, 2002, p. 121). One way to break out of these overdetermined and essentializing constraints of the filial metaphor is through a greater understanding of its appeal and longevity.

To this end, I would like to suggest that there is an important and overlooked connection between what Létourneau (2004) criticizes as of the ―moral propensity of the

(francophone) Quebec intellectual [to imagine the nation as a child in need of their support]‖ (p. 45) and the endurance of orphan cinema and the family romance in the province. In a passage reminiscent of the opening line of this chapter, Létourneau writes:

In relation to their country that is like a child, intellectuals thus find themselves in

a position in which involvement, solidarity and loyalty are obligations. What is

108 more, according to Dumont, intellectuals must carry their country proudly, as one

carries a child, holding its head high. Clearly, intellectuals do not need to look at

the ‗little one‘ they are carrying. Their role is to love; and in that love for their

country that is like a child, all the critical tendencies of the ‗father‘ vanish . . . At

no time will this criticism become self-criticism, that is, a challenge to the

country's foundations in memory and a utopian vision - for that would be to

‗unthink‘ the country. In Dumont's view, then, the intellectual's mission, at least in

a 'small nation,' is to reassure, enfold, and protect his country and his people as a

father loves his child (p. 117).94

Instead of imagining Quebec as incomplete and childlike, Létourneau goes on to suggest, and its constitutive ambivalence as ―a betrayal of the ancestors or the expression of alienation or a pitiful ‗false self-consciousness‖ (p. 124), it should be seen as the productive and fruitful strategy that has ensured the futurity of the nation up until this point. This explanation is instrumental in gaining a broader understanding of the longevity of ―orphan cinema‖ in Quebec, as well as the present‘s perceived obligation to the past, and should be considered in any allegorical interpretation of child protagonists as proxies for the nation.

This ambivalence is in evidence and fundamental to the relevance of Maman est chez le coiffeur and C’est pas moi, je le jure ! Élise and Léon are effectively abandoned by their mothers and neglected by their fathers, not ‗carried proudly with their head held high,‘ yet, the overall tone and message of both films is affirming. Despite their irresolute endings, the audience comes away with the impression that ―the kids are doing fine‖

94 Though problematic, the fact that Létourneau imagines the intellectual in terms of the father as opposed to the mother is in itself not surprising, given the preponderance of male intellectuals he is citing, and the masculinist associations of the sovereignty movement‘s history.

109 (Kelly, 2008). In this way, while not breaking radically with the form and conventions of the family romance and orphan cinema, Pool and Falardeau‘s films signal a decisive move away from thinking of the nation in these familial and burdensome terms. Both films also portray a current mood in Quebec that appears much more at ease with its constitutive ambivalences, and less dependent on an ―Other‖ against which to gauge self- identity. Though the changes these films make are slight, they should not be dismissed as

―only‖ nostalgic: in a cinema and a history as bound up with tradition and continuity as

Quebec, the most important shifts will be those involving memory, and they must proceed cautiously.

Importantly, Quebecois films that depict the past, beyond being ―only‖ nostalgic or regressive, form an important part of the ongoing political project of (national) becoming. Far from representing only a ―deferred homecoming‖ (A. Loiselle, 2007, p.

166), I would argue that the nostalgic experience in Quebecois film can lead to a greater understanding and reconciliation with a polysemic past that has for too long been narrated in unequivocal terms, over-determined by projects exterior to it; this is a necessary step towards what Létourneau describes as the important project of ‗unthinking national mythologies.‘ As such, these nostalgia films do not foreclose an engagement with the future, but contribute to new imaginary landscapes for its foundation.

110 CONCLUSION

In skimming the list of French language films which received funding for the

2009-2010 fiscal year from Telefilm and SODEC, I can‘t help but wonder whether they have taken the media criticism of last year‘s nostalgic turn too much to heart. None of the fifteen films listed are set in the past, (with the notable exception of Le poil de la bête, an unlikely—and, for my money, the list‘s most promising—story about werewolves in New

France). However, as Philippe Falardeau prepares to adapt the memoirs of an FLQ leader exiled to Cuba in the 1970s, and Léa Pool begins shooting a film based on Gil

Courtemanche‘s novel Une belle mort, about an aging man and his fractured relationship to his dying father, it would be misleading to say that confrontations with the past, and their attendant filial issues, are actually on the wane in Quebecois film.

Instead of decrying the influx of films steeped in memory as ―only‖ nostalgic, and thereby regressive, the opportunity to use such films as springboards for a more dynamic relationship with the past should be embraced. Scapegoating nostalgia as pathological navel-gazing, while attempting to deny its very real affective qualities, does nothing to mitigate its importance or its effects; it only precludes a meaningful engagement with a landscape that is common to everyone. In Quebec, where many worry that only a thin line separates nostalgia from reactionary nationalist politics, the need to keep open the window of inquest created by nostalgia is crucial. Films that address cultural memory, even when they are spectacular failures, create significant opportunities for a renewed investigation of accepted history. Instead of reading the national cinema‘s retrospective turn warily, as a symptom of some deeper malaise, efforts should be made to more fully incorporate nostalgia‘s greatest asset, its inherent inconclusiveness, as a way to foster

111 Quebec‘s reconciliation with its own constitutive ambivalences.

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