Artists’ visions are breaking moulds
MONTREAL— Quebec’s francophone entertainment universe is small but prolific. It tends to punch above its weight in most per capita calculations.
But its cultural industries still face the same pitfalls: successful business formulas are often imposed upon creative products in the expectation that the box-office successes will also be repeated.
However, the recent laurels for film director Robin Aubert and, separately, for singer-songwriter Philippe Brach have proven there is still room for players with talent and the will to flip the script on Quebec’s cultural moulds.
Aubert actually had two films — Tuktuq and Les Affamés ( Ravenous) — in contention at last week’s Quebec Cinema Gala. But it was the latter production — a bloody, brutal treatment of a village in rural Quebec overrun by face-eating zombies — that took the Best Film prize.
It was also named Best Canadian Film at last fall’s Toronto International Film Festival, carrying on the recent trend of Quebec films dominating the coveted award.
But Aubert didn’t initially think he would be able to make a zombie flick in Quebec, despite his great desire to do so. He has said the success of The Walking Dead, the AMC television series that is now in its eighth season, was likely what convinced financiers to back the project.
The film follows Bonin (Marc-André Grondin), Tania (Monia Chokri), Céline (Brigitte Poupart) and a small group of others who are bound to each other by blood relation, circumstance and the fact they have not yet fallen prey to the infected majority.
They fight with guns and knives and machetes but are eventually overcome — all except the young girl Zoé (Charlotte St-Martin) and a mysterious racecar driver who picks her up at the side of a country road and drives her either to safety or to the eventual next confrontation with the zombie hordes.
The film’s success at the Quebec film gala was no fluke.
It won eight awards in total, including Best Supporting Actress, Best Makeup, Best Sound and Best Director. It also won a prize for the film that gained the most recognition outside Quebec, perhaps in recognition of it being picked up by Netflix (although it won’t be available to Canadian subscribers until next year).
But after the awards show, Aubert confided to Radio-Canada that he was still disappointed by the decision of film’s distributors to produce DVD copies for purchase based on the film’s performance in theatres.
He said the Quebec distributors “don’t understand genre films.”
“They have no idea. What they want are films with Michel Côté,” he said, referring to one of francophone Quebec’s most prolific and longest-appearing TV and movie actors.
Going against convention isn’t just a screen thing.
Singer-songwriter Brach was determined to make heads spin with the November 2017 release of his album Le silence des troupeaux.
The lead track from that collection, “La fin du monde,” is in the running for SOCAN’s francophone songwriting prize, the winner of which will be announced on Monday.
Brach launched the album with what was essentially a publicity stunt. Collaborating with the folk group 2Frères and others, Brach wrote, recorded and created a video for a country-style song, pitching it as a sneak peak at his forthcoming album.
He even performed it live on television. “We based it on musical referenc- es that sell 100,000 albums,” Brach told Radio-Canada’s talk show Tout le monde en parle.
His aim, he later explained, was to heighten the contrast with the real album, the cover of which featured Brach in a facial prosthetic that made the photogenic singer into something resembling an elephant seal or walrus.
The music itself was also something of a departure.
Brach, who is usually accompanied by a guitar, employed a children’s choir in two songs (“La guerre expliquée aux enfants” and “Joyeux anniversaire”), a full orchestra in six of the 10 songs and adopted the musical stylings of a 1950s crooner in another, “Tu voulais des enfants.”
It isn’t the first time Brach, 28, has gone in his own direction. When he was just a teenager, he travelled with friends to Montreal from his home in Chicoutimi, Que., and, on a lark, auditioned for Star Académie, Quebec’s version of American Idol.
He impressed the judges with his voice and guitar and was selected to participate in the show, but declined when presented with the contract, which he said would have bound him to the show’s producers for five years.
Instead, he set off on his own path onto the stage by competing in local festivals, earning his chops, the respect of more established musicians and a devoted audience.
His career took off in 2015 when Quebec’s recording music industry granted him the Revelation of the Year prize.
Brach’s second album, Portraits de famine, cemented his reputation as an artist of talent, but also one with a willingness to push the public rather than to simply please it. The collection contains beautifully simple songs such as “Alice” and “L’amour aux temps du cancer.”
But the most popular track, “Crystel,” was accompanied by a video that, whether for publicity purposes or for provocation, contained a graphic warning due to its images of sexuality and violence.
The quantity of the blood spilled in the 3:35-minute video would have filled an entire scene in Aubert’s awardwinning zombie film.
That’s just one more thing the celebrated singer and the film director from Quebec have in common, in addition to testing artistic expectations in the province.