SCANDAL AND SNUBS
Quebec film awards have lost name — and purpose
It’s the awards show that dare not speak its name.
There will be no 18th annual Soirée des Jutra. On Sunday, Quebec’s film milieu will gather at the Monument National for the first- ever Gala du cinéma québécois and it’s likely the only year the local film awards ceremony will go by that name.
The Prix Jutra were named after the late Claude Jutra, one of the province’s most renowned filmmakers, but Québec Cinéma, the group that runs the awards show, quickly dropped the Jutra moniker when a new book alleged that Jutra was a pedophile.
A major scandal erupted ici in February when film historian Yves Lever’s biography of Jutra reported that the director of Mon oncle Antoine had sex with under- age boys.
So the brain trust behind the gala had to scramble and within days they’d come up with the bland, inoffensive new name. Things took a comic turn this week when Québec Cinéma announced that it had created a Comité de sages — roughly translated as committee of wise men and women — to guide the not- so- wise film awards organizers through the post- controversy fallout.
The committee — and I’m not making this up — includes a retired judge, a psychiatrist, an ethics expert and a filmmaker, and these big brains are meant to find “equilibrium” and “justice” in coming decisions made by the organizers. I guess that means they’ll brainstorm to find a new permanent name for the film awards ceremony.
Meanwhile, there’s still an awards show to be thrown together this weekend. The gala will be broadcast live on ICI Radio- Canada Télé Sunday at 8 p. m., with a half- hour spot- the-
vedette red- carpet special airing right before. Hosts Pénélope McQuade and Stéphane Bellavance will have the challenge of trying to keep this all light and entertaining without constantly referring to the elephant in the room.
The funny thing is that the Quebec film awards were dogged by controversy even before the pedophile scandal broke. When the nominations were unveiled in late January, many in the media and film business here wondered why the voters seemed to favour little- seen art films at the expense of films that people actually plunked down their hardearned cash to watch.
The leading nominees are Corbo and La passion d’Augustine, which each nabbed 10 nods, including for best film. Director Léa Pool’s La passion d’Augustine is actually the only top nominee to have made decent money at the box office. It rang up $ 1.8 million at the cash register, making it the third- most- popular Quebec film of 2015. ( All sales info here comes from Cinéac, which compiles box office data here.)
Augustine is a touching drama about a nun, played with verve by best actress nominee Céline Bonnier, who wants music to be the heart and soul of the convent she runs in rural Quebec in the mid1960s. But the convent’s future is threatened as the government starts to focus more on supporting public high schools. It’s a film that clearly clicked with viewers who remember that era.
But Corbo, also set in the mid’ 60s, didn’t fare nearly so well at the ticket wicket. Writer- director Mathieu Denis’s first feature is a look at the early days of the Front de libération du Québec ( FLQ), focusing on the true story of Jean Corbo, a 16- year- old Montrealer who was killed while planting a bomb at the Dominion Textiles factory in St- Henri.
It grossed just $ 106,000 during its theatrical run and it wasn’t even in the top 10 of the topgrossing Quebec films of the year.
The other three contenders for best film also didn’t find much of an audience chez nous. Maxime Giroux’s Félix et Meira, about a francophone guy who falls in love with a married Hassidic woman, made $ 216,000. Anne Émond’s Les êtres chers, a dark drama about a dysfunctional family, generated $ 74,000 and Philippe Lesage’s Les démons, my favourite homegrown film of the year, grossed a measly $ 14,000. The sad- sack ticket sales for that last film, a haunting poetic piece about an anxious boy, proves either that there’s no accounting for public taste or that audiences here have simply lost their appetite for made- in- Quebec auteur films.
Now it’s not entirely the awards organizers’ fault that they nominated a bunch of movies no one’s seen. Fact is that support for Quebec cinema has dipped big time in recent years and, the filmmakers will deny it till they’re red in the face, but that drop is due to the very simple fact that the producers, directors and writers are churning out films that people don’t want to see at the multiplex. It ain’t rocket science.
Here’s a conversation you are not ever going to hear in the real world:
“Hey honey, it’s Friday night, do you feel like heading over to Quartier Latin to see a rather didactic look at a young man joining the FLQ in 1966?”
When filmmakers here make movies that have popular appeal, people go to see them. There was a big appetite for an animated remake of the 1984 kids classic La Guerre des tuques and that’s why it was the No. 1 Quebec film of the year at the box office. No. 2 was the South Shore mid- lifecrisis laugher Le mirage. Critics and Jutra voters might snicker at a film that includes a scene where the character, played by screenwriter Louis Morissette, is caught shaving his pubic hair in a closet. But ordinary folks found that scene, and the entire movie, very funny and very true to life.
Both those hit movies are conspicuous by their absence from the main categories at the Gala du cinéma québécois. La guerre des tuques has nominations in two minor categories and Le mirage has only one, for Christine Beaulieu as best supporting actress.
Okay, neither deserves to be nominated for best film, but they probably should’ve made the short list in a couple of other categories. But the ceremony’s snub of Paul à Québec is more perplexing. This was maybe the only Quebec film in 2015 that pleased the public and the critics, with a moving story of a family coming to grips with the imminent death of the patriarch. Only Gilbert Sicotte was given a nod, as best actor, and he’s likely to prevail again, having won in the same category in 2012 for his astonishing performance in Le vendeur.
But you have to wonder how the voters didn’t see fit to give more love to Paul à Québec. The other film missing in action is writer- director André Turpin’s challenging yet extraordinary time- travelling mind muck Endorphine. It didn’t land a single nomination.
So they’ve ignored the popular movies, missed the boat on one of the best art films made here in years ( Endorphine) and given lots of nominations to films that were ignored by the public.
The bottom line is that this no- name awards gala is not just searching for a moniker. It’s looking for an identity and it may take more than a psychiatrist and a couple of other sages to figure this all out.