A NEW STAGE FOR LANCTÔT
Quebec cultural giant returns to the theatre
If there were a Mount Rushmore for Quebec actors, hers would surely be one of the faces.
She made her film debut in Gilles Carle’s 1972 movie La Vraie nature de Bernadette, and not long ago there was a very large picture of her on the corner of Amherst and René-Lévesque publicizing a new series, FataleStation, on Ici Tou.tv Extra. From the look on her face on the poster, the title is not ironic.
She is also in the series O’ on TVA, and in The Disappearance on CTV.
I should also mention the job she probably likes the best: spokesperson for the Prix collégial du cinéma québécois.
She is Micheline Lanctôt, and for the past 45 years she has done all of the following: written, directed and acted for film, stage and TV; she has been an outspoken and iconoclastic analyst of a wide range of social and economic issues; she has won every entertainment award available to her in Quebec and Canada; she has outlived relationships and scandals and all kinds of life challenges.
One might think Tom Petty had her in mind when he wrote I Won’t Back Down.
Some of us older folks know her from The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. She was Yvette to Richard Dreyfuss’s Duddy, and at the end of that 1974 shoot, she wandered off into the Hollywood Hills in the company of the director, Ted Kotcheff.
There is one small but quite lovely postcard from Lanctôt’s time in Los Angeles: the opening graphic sequence of Kotcheff ’s 1977 film Fun With Dick and Jane, starring Jane Fonda and George Segal. Her credit read “title designer.” By 1980, she was back in Montreal.
L.A.’s loss was Quebec’s gain. She returned with a roar to write and direct her first feature, L’Homme à tout faire (The Handyman). Since then, she has directed eight other films, some episodic television and a TV movie. Her latest film, Autrui (The Altruist), the story of a woman who falls in love with a homeless man, was released in 2015.
In all of Lanctôt’s work, she categorically refuses to romanticize or over-sentimentalize her subject. While publicizing Autrui, she spoke out against what she says is the general hypocrisy of so-called altruism.
Lanctôt does not suffer fools readily, and as an artist she takes no prisoners. In 2015, she wrote in the magazine Nouveau Projet that intellectuals are needed now more than ever: “We have deserted thought in favour of sensation and emotion. Intellectuals get bad press. … To know is infinitely preferable than to feel; it requires perspective and analysis, intellectual effort.”
She won the Governor General’s Lifetime Artistic Achievement Award almost a decade before she was cast in the Quebec women’s prison drama Unité 9, in which she played Élise, a woman who murders a policeman and becomes the prison librarian. Quebec audiences loved her so much, she might have to get a second lifetime award.
What she hasn’t done much of is act on stage, but she made a welcome return to theatre this week as part of an all-female version of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross at Usine C, her first acting in the theatre since 1993.
The play, which was made into a film in 1992 with a galaxy of actors, including Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon and Alec Baldwin, is a twisted homage to the brutal, competitive world of selling real estate.
Early in Act 1, the stakes are established unequivocally: “The good news is — you’re fired. The bad news is — you’ve got, all of you’ve got one week to regain your jobs, starting with tonight.”
Just the kind of thing Lanctôt can take a serious bite of. She directed Mamet’s Oleanna in 1994 at Théâtre de Quat’Sous.
Her persona would have led me to cast her in the Baldwin part, although she is perhaps a little too old. Always ready for a challenge, she is instead Shelley (the Machine) Levene, the part played by Lemmon. I suspect Shelley will seem way less needy this time around.
This month she also turns 70. Bonne fête.