Compared with the more
consequent auteurist cinema of Kamila Andini´s impressing Sekala
Niskala (The Seen and the Unseen), Luc Picard´s Les Rois
Mongols looks rather like mainstream and comes close what we
consider as a typical children film. But I am fine with this, the
children, - and youth section is always interesting in it´s
diversity. Side by side one can find conventional storytelling (which
is not by nature a bad thing) and rather experimental cinema like the
film by Andini, I mentioned.
Picard refers in his film
to a chapter in French-Canadian history which is still hardly known
outside of Quebec. The film takes place in the 1970s in Montreal. A
radical leftish movement for the independence of Quebec leads to
violent confrontations with the central government of Canada. One of
the most famous French-Canadian novel, Bonheur d´?ccasion by
Gabrielle Roy takes place in St. Henry, a former slum quarter in
Montreal during World War 2.
In the 1970s, Montreal was
still dominated by the poverty of the french speaking working class.
I have a soft spot for this part of French-Canadian history. The
1970s was the time time when a lot of my friends in Quebec lived
their early childhood, youth or their live as young adults. My head
is full of their stories. My late friend Claude Forget, an activist
for Independent cinema told me about this time when Montreal was
dominated by soldiers and tanks rolling through the city under
Martial Law. My different friends told me a lot what it means to be
French-Canadian. A cinematic time travel taking place in a city I
often visited can´t leave me indifferent at all.
I even recognized some of
the French pop songs used in this film, songs my friends loved in
their youth. The main theme of the soundtrack appeared to me as a
theme of one of these Quebecer folk songs which can be tracked down
to the songs, the first French settlers brought to this once new
world.
The Uproar in the 1970s
was a big crack in the Canadian union and it is visible until today.
In Picard´s film it goes even through families. Forty years ago,
Quebec is still beaten by poverty, the social conscience was almost a
monopoly of the Catholic church.
The two families, the film
is telling about are consequently members of the working class. The
young girl Manon´s family is affected by the deadly sickness of her
father. The mother is unable to cope with this and Manon´s brother
will be sent to a foster family. What will happen with the adolescent
girl remains unclear. The other family, is even more split. It is the
family of her cousin, a teenage boy, a little one and a grown up
young man who sympathizes with the radical group FLQ (Front for the
Liberation) and that brings him in conflict with his father. As much
as the films spins it´s fiction from this background between drama
and elements of a crazy comedy, the fiction sometimes correspondents
with the historical background and sometimes it peels away from it.
That is necessarily not a disadvantage of the film. During watching
this film and days after it, I felt I had two films in my heart, a
film about a historical problem which is not solved today and a
narration about individual characters exemplary for the forgotten and
nameless people who were exposed to the impact of history. Do these
two elements are going always together? Probably not, but the
tension between history which had an impact on this culture and the
conventions of mainstream storytelling is at least interesting. The
film has an unusual bitter end anywhere between Chaplin´s Modern
Times and Truffaut´s The Quatre-Cent Coups. The
characters who suffered under historical circumstances are fading
away in their anonymity this injustice of history.
When the film in it´s
last moment gets finally rid of all it´s fiction, the after taste of
unsolved and unprocessed history – than it appears not anymore as
mainstream or conventional as it looks on the first sight.
Rüdiger Tomczak
To
speak about the slightly rising presence of French-Canadian cinema on
the Berlinale, I can´t hesitate to recognize an irony. If they were
some films who broke ground for a wider interest in this very
interesting film region than it was some films screened in the last
11 years by true independent filmmaker like Catherine Martin, Richard
Brouillette, François
Delisle or Chloé Leriche (whose Avant
Les Rues
was screened at the Generation two years ago).
Screenings:
Wed,
21.2, 15.30, Filmtheater am Friedrichshain
Fri,
23.2, 16.30, Cinemaxx 1
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