REINVENTING CINEMA GALA
Ghost of Jutra still haunts Quebec film awards
The ghost of Claude Jutra continues to haunt the Gala Québec Cinéma.
From 1999 to 2015, the Quebec film awards went under the name La soirée des Jutra, in honour of one of the most acclaimed auteurs in the history of our cinema. But a biography of the filmmaker published last year included allegations that the director of Mon oncle Antoine had sexual relations with underage boys. Jutra, who was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, died by suicide in 1986.
After the allegations in February 2016, some of Jutra’s old friends tried to defend the late filmmaker, but when media outlets began publishing interviews with other alleged victims, almost all of the support disappeared, with good reason.
The whole affair put Québec Cinéma, the group that organizes the film awards, in a very difficult situation. The organization very quickly removed Jutra’s name from the awards ceremony, which almost everyone
agreed had to be done, and for last year’s gala, they came up with the temporary name Le Gala du cinéma québécois.
Then after months of consultation with the film milieu, they decided on the not-so-different permanent name, Gala Québec Cinéma.
The folks at Québec Cinéma also made the much more controversial decision to shift the dates of the film awards gala, moving it from its traditional berth in March to early June. The newly renamed Gala Québec Cinéma takes place Sunday at 8 p.m., to be broadcast live on ICI Radio-Canada Télé.
That shift was met with widespread criticism in the industry ici. Many complained the ceremony was long after the end of the film-awards season, with the Oscars, Golden Globes, etc., just a distant memory. It also means the gala is taking place just before the summer season, not normally a time when we see many Quebec films on our screens as local producers leave the mutiplexes to the big Hollywood blockbusters.
Part of the reason for the move is that in March, the gala goes head to head with La Voix, on the rival TVA network. Still, why couldn’t Radio-Canada and the gala organizers simply move the awards ceremony to another day of the week rather than Sunday instead of shifting it to June?
Add to this another sad-sack year at the box office for Quebec film and you have a milieu that is in a pretty sour mood going into what should, in an ideal world, be a fun celebration of all that is great in Québécois film.
“To be honest, the award could no longer be called the Jutra Award,” Québéc Cinéma executive director Ségolène Roederer, said in a recent phone interview.
“The milieu has to like this gala,” Roederer added. “We all remember the Gala des masques (the Quebec theatre awards). The people in the theatre milieu so tore themselves apart that the gala died. You tell me that you’ve heard lots of complaints about our gala. But it would be better if the milieu would rally around the gala. And if in the end it doesn’t work for the milieu, let’s just stop, then. You understand what I mean? I’ve been head of this gala for five years and we’ve lived through this major crisis. I can tell you that Radio-Canada is behind us like never before. So the milieu has a choice to make. It’s their choice because it’s their gala.”
Of course, it doesn’t help that the past year has been another dismal one for Quebec film. Local French-language film was booming, both critically and commercially, in the first decade of this century, thanks to hits like Les invasions barbares, C.R.A.Z.Y., Maurice Richard, and La grande séduction. But both the public and the critics have been a lot less enthused in recent years.
The market-share for Quebec film in la belle province in 2005, at the height of the boom, was nearly 20 per cent. Imagine! Almost one out of every five dollars spent on movies here was spent on a homegrown Quebec film. But the market-share has been lower for several years now and dipped again in 2016, to 5.1 per cent, down from 7.2 per cent a year earlier.
Only one Quebec film made the box-office top 20 in the province in 2016. That lone entry was Les 3 p’tits cochons 2, the sequel to the 2007 hit comedy, and many critics, including this writer, felt it was a pretty terrible film by any standard. It landed just two Québec Cinéma nominations, for editing (Jean-François Bergeron) and le Prix du Public, for top box office (which it will obviously win).
The two leading contenders for the Gala Québec Cinéma awards — Xavier Dolan’s Cannes prizewinner Juste la fin du monde and Kim Nguyen’s Two Lovers and a Bear — were not big hits here. The Dolan film rang up just under $800,000 at the cash register in Quebec, a big drop from his previous film Mommy, and Two Lovers and a Bear, sadly, went almost unnoticed in local cinemas.
Neither André Forcier’s Embrasse-moi comme tu m’aimes nor Louis Bélanger’s Les mauvaises herbes — which each garnered nine nominations — were popular successes.
So it’s a gala to showcase films that, for the most part, no one has heard of, in sharp contrast to the other Quebec awards ceremonies — like the Gémeaux Gala and the Gala Artis for the TV milieu — that give prizes to shows that are tremendously popular.
“Of course, the gala would go better if the films did better,” Roederer said. “The films are not accessible to the public, and so they’re not seen. The gala is an important part of the cinema milieu here, but the whole milieu has to be working properly. So everyone in the business here should take a long, hard look at the milieu and start asking questions about the film distribution situation.”
One of the only films of 2016 that elicited both critical praise and ticket sales was actor-turned-director Yan England’s harrowing drama about bullying and suicide, 1:54, and it was almost completely ignored by the Gala Québec Cinéma voters. It received just two nominations, for best actor (Antoine Olivier Pilon) and for Prix du Public, which is not voted on, but based on box-office performance.
In short, few in the milieu seem in the mood for celebration. Sigh.