Film: Le Québécois Libre
Originally published in The Walrus. Read the full text here.
It is sunday morning at an art deco bar in Montreal. The venue is packed with movie extras wearing outfits that scream gaudy ’80s excess. Melvil Poupaud, a well-known French actor in his late thirties, slouches at the bar in a baggy linen shirt patterned in pastel foliage. His fortyish Québécoise co-star, Suzanne Clément, sits across from him in a rainbow blazer, knit tank top, and chunky gold pumps. Between them stands Xavier Dolan, their upstart twenty-three-year-old director.
In Laurence Anyways, the third film of Dolan’s short career, Poupaud plays Laurence Alia, a high school teacher who undergoes gender reassignment surgery. During the scene at hand, Laurence tells his brash girlfriend, Fred (Clément), that he plans to have a sex change but does not want to leave her. It’s an emotionally difficult moment, and the director struggles to get it right. Over five hours of repetitive takes, he requests tiny modulations in how the actors sit, speak, and look at each other.
Dolan is slight and disarmingly handsome, with high cheekbones and a hairstyle somewhere between a box top and a rat’s nest. Although known for his impeccable style (he wore a stovepipe hat and an embroidered jacket to a recent Vogue photo shoot), he dresses inconspicuously on set, today in slim black pants and a burgundy T-shirt. He lacks the wizened authority of a veteran filmmaker but compensates with enthusiasm. At one moment, he confers with the grips about set-up; an instant later, he holds a hushed conversation with his line producer; then he engages in a prolonged embrace with Clément.
t’s fall 2011, and Quebec’s young people have formed an increasingly dynamic and powerful presence. Six months earlier, they cast their votes in a federal election, in which they presided over the ascendance of an eclectic, fresh-faced ndp caucus. Six months later, they will take politics beyond the ballot box, through a tireless student protest against tuition hikes and economic austerity. This generation is proudly Québécois, but with a cosmopolitan strain that has given rise to such celebrities as Karine Vanasse, a star of local cinema and American television; and Ariane Moffatt, a bilingual pop singer who has performed at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, and at the Shanghai World Expo. As one of Québécois cinema’s most promising new talents, Dolan embodies the energy and aspirations of this moment. But as an artist, he remains beholden to his own vision and ideals.
This is an excerpt. Read the full text here.