Claude Jutra's Kamouraska (1973)

This is a marathon (almost three-hour) film based on Québécoise writer Anne Hébert's eponymous novel which in turn is based on a true story. Following from the now disgraced Jutra's successful Mon oncle Antoine, it's not too difficult to discover the reason why this was a box office failure: it's not too easy to follow because it's chopped up, most if not all scenes springing from the main character's mind in an often stream of consciousness style. The fact that it's a historical film set in the 1830s didn't help it any either.

Élisabeth d'Aulnières (Geneviève Bujold) marries the seigneur of Kamouraska Antoine Tassy (Philippe Léotard), and on the face of it it would appear that she's very fortunate in marrying a handsome young man who owns a vast area of land. However, her deflowering is brutal and Élizabeth comes very quickly to realise that she's married a violent drunkard and a frequenter of brothels. She longs to escape, and her family is on her side.

And then along comes her doctor Georges Nelson (Richard Jordan) and they fall in love. The monster must be killed. The servant Aurélie is more or less bribed into doing the deed by giving him a poisoned drink, but it doesn't work. Tassy disappears for some time, Élisabeth is pregant by Georges, and Georges performs the bloody murder. He is disgusted that Élisabeth has had sex with Tassy to make it look as though it's his baby, but anyway now that the impossible love has now become possible, paradoxically it's also now impossible: George flees to the States and to keep up appearances Élisabeth is reluctantly obliged to marry Jérôme (Marcel Cuvelier), which is where the story started: after twenty years of marriage Jérôme is dying and Élizabeth is reflecting on her life.

Claude Jutra's Wow (1969)

 

Wow is something of an oddity, and not a linear one at that: nine teenagers are given pseudonyms, questioned on subjects such as sex, the future and friendship, and note their dreams which are conveyed by film. Often they want to return to a past, and they are certainly unhappy with the present. What we have here is a French Canadian counterculture. But what that culture amounts to is difficult to fathom, apart from refusal to accept society's norms, lack of ambition, a love of sex, music and smoking cannabis. A violent future is forseen, and obviously these young people are living under the shadow of the bomb, but they seem powerless to do anything about it. Politics are absent because there is a general feeling of impotence: what can they do? Absent too are 'underground' magazines so prevalent in American and English (and, significantly, French) society: there seems to be no sense of group solidarity.

Evidently, even though he was almost thirty, Jutra (who never really considered himself to have grown up) seems to have to some extent identified with these people, although he saw Wow as a reversal of À tout prendre in that his first feature had strong autobiographical elements, whereas this doesn't. Or does it? Do these young people represent young French Canada in general, young Montréal, a countercultural cross section, or a vision of Jutra's? And in what way does that relate to the young people blowing up bourgeois homes in the beginning: a wish to begin again? And like the dream sequences, these explosions are in colour, but the rest of the film in black and white: the imaginary world and the documentary world, that of fantasy and that of a kind of reality.

Claude Jutra's Félix Leclerc troubadour (1959)

 

Claude Jutra's second and final foray into NFB's Profils et paysages series, this time on the singer and writer Félix Leclerc. This takes us far further even than Jutra's earlier documentary on actor Fred Berry, and any attempt at spontaneity is broken almost immediately at the beginning when we follow the film crew arriving at Leclerc's house in Verneuil: Leclerc says the whole thing is artifical as this is the third time the car arriving at the house and him collecting mail from his box has been rehearsed.

The illusion of reality is broken, and we see the crew (snatches of Jutra himself) unloading their film equipment. Leclerc gives us a conventional tour of the barn with its exotic hens, and then to his study, where a large movie camera makes its way into the room. He has momentoes of his travels around him, including a large letter 'E' nailed to a wall, which he claims is from Jean de la Fontaine's tomb in Père-Lachaise.

Leclerc then sits down and sings two songs: 'Si tu crois' and 'Vieux Bozo'. His wife then shouts that souper is ready, and we go downstairs to see him with his wife and son in the kitchen. The film makers are invited to join in, as if again to break any illusion that this is a 'real', as opposed to rehearsed, situation: it's another lie.

Previously, Leclerc had pretended to phone singer Monique Leyrac to tell her that the crew had arrived. He wants her to act in a clip in one of his songs. Sure enough Monique arrives, but before they make the clip she sits down and tells him that she's read in a magazine that songs are of little value, and she has several questions to ask him, which he answers in song. In the end she says he wins, rips the magazine article up and tells him that the songs contain 'philosophy, fantasy and love'.

She then goes upstairs to appear in the clip, where she is seen in a flimsy nightdress at the window, the film is shot outside where we see birds flying and we are led down a meandering stream. Fittingly, the song is 'Ce Matin-Là', a tale of illusory love. Towards the end, Leclerc sings 'Bozo', a song filled with illusion and disillusionment.

This is some way removed from the average documentary on a personality.

Claude Jutra's Fred Berry comédien | Fred Berry actor (1959)

 

Fred Berry was a famous québécois theatre and film actor for several decades and Claude Jutra was commisssioned to make a documentary on him for NFB's television series Profils et paysages. If it starts in the wings with its subject coming in, if it shows photos and film clips from Fred Berry's life, it strongly digresses from conventional documentaries in another way.

Instead of bringing in friends and colleagues to talk about him or talk with him individually, all the people are invited join him together in the room to talk with him and reminisce in a quite chaotic way: Germaine Giroux, Henri Deyglun, Gratien Gélinas, Ernest and Fanny Tremblay. And there is no life story from beginning to near end, just (often literal) snapshots of his career. Interesting, and this would be a kind of introduction to Jutra's other documentary in the series: on Félix Leclerc.

Norman McLaren and Claude Jutra's Il était une chaise | A Chairy Tale (1957)

 

This is a weird ten-minute short in which there is no dialogue, just Indian Music (mainly of Ravi Shankar) and Claude Jutra with a moving chair. I'd say there are essentially three parts to the story, the first of which is the chair eluding the man. Jutra enters reading and wants to sit on the chair, although every move he makes towards it the chair escapes from him. No matter how fast the man is the chair still escapes him, like a human inching or running away.

And then in the second section, shall we call it, the man is at grips with the chair, able to handle it, play with it, turn around with it, and yet still the chair doesn't allow him to sit on it. So the man decides to sit and read on the floor.

That is too much for the chair, which begins to move towards the man, circle him, but he initially avoids this object which appears to be courting him. Finally the man tentatively makes moves towards the chair, but it plays hard to get, until in the end the man can sit in peace. And they live happily ever after.

Claude Jutra's Rouli-Roulant | The Devil's Toy (1966)

 

The title of this fifteen-minute short relates to the urban surfboard: the skateboard. The bizarre voiceover is by Charles Denner, who at one point describes the skateboard and various methods of skateboarding with such obviousness that the listener feels that this is ludicrous; at other times, Denner's voice rises with such vociferation to denounce skateboarding that it becomes pure fanaticism.

We see youths in various skateboarding postures, see the police confiscating their boards as it's illegal, and telling the owners that they can collect them at the ice stadium where skating is legal. And, the skaters note, is also flat. Geneviève Bujold sings Pierre F. Brault's song as the titles roll at the end.

Claude Jutra's À tout prendre | All Things Considered | Take It All (1963)

À tout prendre was a daring film for its time, dealing as it does not only with adultery but also abortion and a mixed race relationship. It is also in part autobiographical in that Claude Jutra and Johanne Harelle both appear under their own names and they both had two relationships with each other: first in the late fifties and later during the making of the film; Harelle was not of exotic Haitian origin but she too was born in modest circumstances in Montréal; she was married but, unlike in the film, her pregnancy by Jutra was terminated not by an abortion but by a miscarriage; and Jutra did have homosexual (indeed paedophilic) leanings; Claude drowns himself in the Saint Lawrence River, etc.

The basic story itself is simple to relate: Claude meets Johanne at a party and they fall in love but they want to retain their freedom. In the absence of Johanne Claude has affairs with Monique (Monique Joly) and Barbara (Monique Mercure). Johanne asks Claude if he 'likes boys' and he begins to wonder. When Johanne gets pregnant Claude decides to marry her, then (mentally) brutally changes his mind, gets her an abortion and kills himself in the Saint Lawrence River (as Jutra had done shortly after discovering that he had what was then known as pre-senile dementia. As his soul (?) flies up a hunter shoots it down.

The film is clearly influenced by the French Nouvelle Vague, and on several occasions it's obvious that we're watching a kind of experimental film. But this is seen through Claude's eyes, and Jutra later stated that if he were to re-make it he would have included it through Johanne's eyes too. Throughout the film various continuations of scenes in the film appear as parts of Claude's consciousness: in the beginning, after preening himself in the mirror he fires a shot at it; when he and Johanne are walking down steps in the snow snipers shot them both; two thugs violently attack him at night in the street; and just when he announces that he has an important speeech to make at the bottom of exterior flat steps to just one couple who happen to be passing, he's shot dead.

There are brief apppearances of François Truffaut and Anne Claire Poirier.

Claude Jutra's Mon oncle Antoine (1971)

 Claude Jutra's Mon oncle Antoine is set in the 1940s in Black Lake, Québec, near Thetford Mines, one of the main places in which the asbestos strikes began in 1949, which were later (when the film was in fact made) due to change the course of the history of the province in the 'Révolution tranquille'.

The bland title 'Mon oncle Antoine' is a little cutesy, but it's hiding behind the real nature of this important film in the history the cinema of Québec. Antoine (Jean Duceppe) is in his sixties and runs the magasin général in the village with his slightly younger wife Cécile (Olivette Thibault), and this shop is the focal meeting point of the village, of much more interest than the almost deserted church.

But virtually the whole film is seen from the eyes of the adolescent Benoît (Jacques Gagnon), who grows in intellectual and moral maturity within a very short space of time. He's an orphan taken in by his aunt Cécile (Olivette Thibault) and uncle Antoine (Jean Duceppe) who don't have any children of their own but also have another teenager living with them: Carmen (Lyne Champagne), whose money-grabbing absent father just returns to take her earnings from the shop and promptly goes away.

There are two funerals which sandwich the events: one of an old man when Benoît is in effect a child, and another a very short time after of a child Benoît's age, but by which time Benoît has rapidly aged. The second death is in an isolated area where the husband Jos Poulin (Lionel Villeneuve) represents the only element of true rebellion: he refuses to work in the asbestos mine with the exploitative English-speaking boss and sometimes chooses freedom by going off to be a logger.

The film, in two scenes (one towards the beginning and another at the end), shows two very different worlds in a similar perspective: the general store at Christmas reveals (through the shop window) figures clustered around the crib for the nativity scene at the birth of Christ, and then the finish shows Benoît looking into the poor home of the Poulin family, all looking at the dead son in the box coffin 'lost' by the drunken Antoine.

This is a very powerful film representing an important part of Québec's history, although Jutra's reputation since 2016 has been seriously tainted by the revelation in Yves Lever's book of Jutra's paedophilia, which shook many people and inevitably resulted in a re-evaluation of Québec's attitude towards him.