Risqué film corpus used as dismissal grounds
MONTRE AL • In the 1970s, Jacqueline Laurent Auger was a beautiful young actress in Paris who took roles in erotic films to pay the rent. She starred in such films as Le Journal intime d’une nym
phomane, Fureur sexuelle and from Sweden Ta mej i dalen, which, according to the website IMDb, offered, in addition to sex scenes, “a realistic and nostalgic look at life on a working farm.”
Ms. Laurent Auger left behind the world of soft-core porn, returned to her native Quebec and enjoyed a successful career in film, TV and teaching. Though she left the porn titles off her resume, she made no secret of how she got her start in show business.
Now, aged 73 and with her last X-rated role nearly 40 years behind her, a prestigious Montreal private school has told Ms. Laurent Auger she is not fit to teach drama after students discovered some of her risqué work online.
On Sunday, Collège Jeande-Brébeuf, a training ground for Quebec’s elite, published a statement on its website explaining why it has not renewed Ms. Laurent Auger’s contract to give the two workshops she has taught there for the past 15 years.
“The fact these films were made 40 years ago does not change their risqué, suggestive — explicit even — nature. Thanks to the Internet, it appears these types of films from the 1970s have come back in fashion,” the school said.
“As educators, we had to ask what message is transmitted to all our students, boys and girls, from the first year of high school to the fifth, by the fact that the teacher of their drama workshops could now be seen on the Internet in the most suggestive of scenes.”
It asked whether Ms. Laurent Auger’s soft-core porn films “are models to follow for high school students discovering the theatre and arts in general?”
Now that her porn past is widely known and available for viewing on the Internet, the school concluded she could not continue teaching students “in a calm setting free of allusions or discomfort that is unfavourable to our educational mission.”
Ms. Laurent Auger has told Quebec media she was stunned when she got the news last summer that she was no longer welcome at Brébeuf.
“It’s completely absurd,” she told Radio-Canada.
“I’m 73 years old. When I made those films I must have been 28 or 29.
“It was to make a living so that after[wards] I could work with great teachers and actors, in Paris and in Quebec. Come on.”
She said it is as if the school’s principal, Michel April, is living in 1950.
“It is too bad he said something so stupid, that I was distracting [the students]. They should have been made to understand what was the cinema of that period.”
By today’s standards, the pornography in which she appeared was decidedly tame. It may seem odd for a high school to get alarmed when teenaged boys snicker over some blue movies, but Brébeuf is no ordinary school.
Former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, his son, federal Liberal leader Justin Trudeau, and former Quebec premier Robert Bourassa are just a few names among the who’s who of Quebec artists, politicians and businesspeople who attended the school.
Once run by Jesuits, it is now a secular institution.
“We had to make a decision based on what we believed to be the best interests of the college’s students,” the school’s statement concluded.
“That is what we sincerely think we have done, even if we know that no matter what decision we made, we could not please everyone.”