A REEL OTTAWA EXPERIENCE
Outdoor movies back at Rideau Hall
If you’re making a movie and want a scene that is quintessentially summer in Canada’s capital city, you’re in luck. Movie nights are back at Rideau Hall.
On Friday and Saturday, Gov.Gen. David Johnston will again host free movie nights outdoors on the grounds of Rideau Hall, that palace of pomp and ceremony and all things regal in Canada.
The nights ooze Canadian-ness, and not just because the movies, Passchendaele and La Passion d’Augustine, were both made in Canada. The films also represent both official languages (the former English and the latter French), and, in another Ottawan stroke, each will be screened on its own night, so as to not take precedence over the other (Passchendaele on Friday, La Passion d’Augustine on Saturday). To bridge any language gap, each film will be subtitled in the other language.
The films also represent two formative moments in Canadian history. Passchendaele was the First World War battle fought in 1917, when all was disquiet on the western front. The offensive was controversial, and the Canadian Encyclopedia describes it as “a vivid symbol of the mud, madness and the senseless slaughter of the First World War.” Nothing in the 2008 film will change anyone’s mind about the battle as an appalling tragedy.
The French film, La Passion d’Augustine, is a small story of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution in the 1960s. The 2015 film follows Mother Augustine as she attempts to preserve her highly successful, and musically talented, convent for girls against a provincial government that favours an increasingly secular public school system.
Passchendaele was the passion project of Canada’s Paul Gross, who, with producer Niv Fischman, will be at Rideau Hall for the screening on Friday. At 8 p.m. they’ll speak about the film before it screens at 9 p.m. On Saturday, there’ll be a similar talk at 8:30 p.m. with La Passion d’Augustine producers Lyse Lafontaine and François Tremblay, and actors Andrée Lachapelle, Danielle Fichaud and Élizabeth Tremblay-Gagnon. The movie will screen at 9:40 p.m. When Passchendaele was released it was seen by some as a sort-of war movie. Much of it is set not in France but in Alberta, where it tells the story of a romance that, like so much else, struggles to survive the war raging in Europe. Most critics were unkind and they gave the movie a 36 per cent rating on rottentomatoes.com, where viewers gave it a 57 per cent approval rating.
“It is a pretty good war movie … at least in the scenes where it is a war movie at all,” wrote the Citizen’s Jay Stone, who said it’s “less about the open wounds and bloody guts of battle and more about the devotion that survives it.” Stone said the romance in Alberta “plays like some special-event TV movie,” and I too remember feeling that those peaceful moments were an ungainly contrast to “the muddy promise of authenticity in the battle scenes.”
I also remember the final moments of the film, when the battle is unflinchingly brutal, with men slogging through rain and mud to slaughter each other with bullets, blades and even bare fists. No glory here, it seems to say, as another knife slices through a throat in high-def and full surround-sound. In the film’s climactic moment of grotesque surrealism, Gross kneels in the mud before a soldier who an explosion has left crucified in the middle of the battlefield. The allusions to Christ are unsubtle, and in 2008 I found the sequence to be overwrought and even absurd. Oddly enough, when I saw the scene again this week I found it to be moving, and from a moviemaking perspective, perhaps even courageous.
I asked Christine MacIntyre, of Rideau Hall, if there were concerns about violent scenes being shown to small children. “It’s not a kids’ movie, for sure, but we’re hoping that context” — the context of telling an important story of Canadian history — “will help.”
La Passion d’Augustine has a 7.3 out of 10 rating on the Internet Movie Database (imdb.com). The Montreal Gazette gave it 3.5 out of five stars, and T’Cha Dunlevy — who first noted that “ever since The Sound of Music, movies, music and nuns are a match made in heaven” — also wrote that, “What could have been a simple story of teenage revolt against the stuffy adult world turns into a nuanced tale of generational shift, personal transformation and the galvanizing power of music.”
Each movie tells an important Canadian story, albeit very different stories. Both stories will be shown under the stars and among the trees on the plush grounds of an important Canadian property, as our vice-regal officer — the Queen’s own representative — mingles with his people, in both official languages. It’s a small Canadian story of its own, and one that’s as Ottawa as Ottawa can be.