Sketches of a lifetime tell woman’s compelling story
Watching Trente tableaux, the utterly original new film from Paule Baillargeon, I kept thinking – we all sometimes forget just how great it is that the National Film Board of Canada exists. It might seem like a funny thing to say, but mull it over for a second.
Baillargeon’s innovative feature documentary reflection on her life and work was made during her two-year stint as filmmaker-in-residence at the NFB. Amazingly enough, the board actually picks two filmmakers every couple of years and pays them a salary for two years to come up to the federally-funded film studio and work on whatever film they feel like making.
Imagine! This is going on in the early 21st-century, an era defined by the concept that there’s most definitely no free lunch and culture is all about keeping a steady eye on the profit margins.
That sort of public largesse might in some instances lead to indulgent film-making, but in the case of Trente tableaux, it gave this seasoned actress and director the freedom and resources to craft a deeply moving meditation on the first 66 years of her time on this Earth.
As the title suggests, it is constructed as 30 snapshots or filmic portraits of her memories.
Most sections start with Baillargeon saying, in voice-over, “I’m 30” or “I’m 10” or “I’m 65,” followed by another slice of this memoir. But it’s no lighthearted look back – there is much unhappiness on display here, coupled with feminist anger.
She talks of lying in her hammock at her parent’s cottage at the age of 10 completely depressed.
Later she says: “I’m 27. I’m writing. I’m writing so I won’t die.”
The film also works as a very personal look at what it’s like to be a woman living in Quebec over the past half-century. She chronicles the desperate housewives of her mother’s generation and then moves on to the fight for female empowerment that came for her generation in the 1960s and 1970s.
“My mother gave me her anger and said ‘avenge me,’ ” Baillargeon says.
But the documentary is no earnest feminist tract. Baillargeon – who just received a lifetime-achievement Jutra Award – hops from age to age, from mood to mood, using a cool mix of archival photographs, her own sketches, animated sequences done in collaboration with the animation whizzes at the Film Board, and clips from some of her previous films.
I like that Baillargeon isn’t afraid to widen the scope of the memoir when she feels like it. So we see an image of Pierre Trudeau, with Baillargeon noting that this was the prime minister who put poets in jail and the army on the streets (during the October Crisis). She also touches on the massacre at the École Polytechnique, sadly (but probably quite rightly) mentioning that “these young women paid for a revolution they were barely aware of.”
In the end, what’s endearing is that she doesn’t try to neatly sum everything up. It’s a series of impressions. That’s it. But these are 30 sketches you won’t forget.