In January, 2024, I received out of the blue an email from a Montreal film-maker, André Forcier and his partner-collaborator, Linda Pinet.  They wondered if I might like to help with the English sub-titles for some unusual words in a film they were just finishing, entitled Ababouiné.  They explained that a main character in the film teaches in a slum district of South Montreal called le Faubourg à m'lasse because it stinks of molasses used by large breweries in the area (the film is set in 1957).  This teacher is compiling a dictionary of forgotten and invented words, and he's determined to get his pupils interested in language.  Ababouiné, for example, is a nautical term referring specifically to a sailboat becalmed, abandoned by the wind, though it can be used in the larger senses of abandoné.  Throughout the film, there are words such as flagosser and  acagnardage,  and phrases like Enfirouapons la bêtise avec faconde, that would be unfamiliar to even many francophones, especially younger ones.  Forcier expects his usual francophone audience to be puzzled and disoriented by these words, and he wants the same effect for an anglophone audience reading the subtitles.  I suggested we consult the Dictionary of Newfoundland English for equally uncommon words; Forcier and Pinet liked the idea, and the results can be judged in the finished product.

I remembered seeing a Forcier film years ago, La comtesse de Baton Rouge (1997), and being intrigued by its complicated plot and exotic characters.  But I hadn't kept up with Forcier's work.  Although I enjoyed films by Denys Arcand, Claude Jutra, Gilles Carle and others when I saw them occasionally, my viewing of Québec cinema has been anything but systematic.   And so, once the subtitling details for Ababouiné were resolved, I decided to give myself a crash-course on Forcier to put his new film into context.

Marie-Claude Loiselle, in her book, La communauté indomptable d'André Forcier, 1 emphasizes the fact that most of his films are solidly anchored in neighborhoods around Montreal, especially Longueuil, where Forcier grew up and still lives.    His films are often gritty portraits of that impoverished world, showing his early fascination with Luis Bunuel's Las Hurdes, and with Italian neo-realism.  His first feature, Le retour de l'immaculée conception (1971), is about young people doing crazy things, drinking a lot of beer, trying to get a job and get laid.  One sequence of a winter street with cars stuck in the snow has a documentary feel to it, with a voice over that sounds like a local citizen.  But the film's realist/naturalist qualities are undercut by absurd, disconnected scenes including one with two men dressed like London Bobbies dancing on ice in silent-movie style before randomly shooting at passersby with a rifle.  This combination of realism and farce, social commentary and fantasy, is now what characterizes a Forcier film in my mind. 

Bar Salon (1973) and Night Cap (1974), his first real successes, are quite firmly in the realist tradition -- black-and-white portraits of customers, friends, and family, all basically losers, but handled with humour and affection.  Almost thirty years later, Forcier returned to that Black-and-white, realistic mode, in Je me souviens (2009).  Here, the setting is outside greater Montreal, in a Quebec mining town, circa 1940, with the workers split between unionists and company men. In the tradition of politically charged films such as Arcand's On est au coton (1970), we witness collusion between political leaders, mine bosses, and church dignitaries.  The Monseigneur in this case is called Madore, and he will appear again (played by the same actor, Rémy Girard) in Ababouiné.  Allusions to avant-garde artists and poets (specifically the Automatist movement) also occur in both films, not surprisingly, since both explore the intersection of language, culture, religion, and politics in the formation of communal identity.  In Je me souviens, an important element of the plot revolves around a language as much in danger as Quebec French:  Irish Gaelic. 

But after Nightcap, Forcier's work began to move increasingly into the fantastic.  Some people have used the words "surrealistic" or "magic realist" to describe that tendency. L'eau chaude, l'eau frette (1976), for example, has a host of familiar, low-life characters, cheating and robbing each other, furiously combative, chaotically preparing a birthday party that ends in death by gunshot.  Francine, the delightful young daughter of warring parents, wears a kind of old-fashioned pacemaker at her waist that needs to be plugged in occasionally to keep her alive, but it can also be used to jump-start the battery on her friend's motorcycle.  She is one of a series of the hyper-intelligent, dangerous, anti-establishment youngsters in Forcier's films reminiscent of characters in novels by Réjean Ducharme and Marie-Claire Blais.  Having impassively accepted the attempted murder of her father by her slow-witted friend, Julien, followed by the rifleman's suicide, she rides off joyously into the sunset with her pubescent boyfriend on Julien's motorcycle.

L'eau chaude, l'eau frette also introduces a serious complication that comes to trouble the lives of the "indomitable communities" in several later Forcier films:  jealousy and sexual competition between couples, siblings, children and parents.  By the time of Une histoire inventée (1990), the amorous plots and sub-plots have become as tangled as in a Marivaux play, but in this case, the play within the film is Shakespeare's exploration of jealous love, Othello. This is a very strange production financed by the director's rich Mafia uncle, so alarmed at seeing Desdemona mistreated that he eventually shoots Othello on stage.  Meanwhile, the audience has been papered with aging Italians eating pizza and sausage, delighted each time the Shakespeare play is interrupted by the crazy uncle.  Also meanwhile, the actor playing Othello has made the mistake of cheating on his young leading lady, who not only takes revenge on him, but infuriates her mother by seducing the middle-aged trumpeter that she, the actress mother (constantly followed by a mob of fifty, star-struck, love-sick young men), has been pursuing for years. 

These entanglements of true and false love, desire and hate, continue in Le vent du Wyoming (1994) amidst even more unlikely surroundings.   The worlds of literature, a boxing gym, a fantastic bar, even the church and the military, are all mixed up in a whirl of attempted and induced (by hypnotism) seduction.  Places associated with violence become places of love, and vice versa.  There is a kind of gratuity to it all, an out-of-control energy that doesn't worry about probability.  And the same mode continues in La Comtesse de Baton Rouge (1997), with the added complication of a kind of cinematic meta-fiction, a film within a film investigating the magic of the art form, as a young Québec documentarist, seeking advice from a cyclops who can project films directly from his one eye, falls in love with a beautiful, bearded lady and follows her to a circus in Louisiana, where he becomes a human canon ball.

His misadventures then transform into a film, and we eventually see people involved with the original director, his film, and the film about his film, all interacting back in Montreal.

This is, of course, a gross over-simplification of a highly complex structure, unavoidable in any attempt to summarize a Forcier film.  

Later works such as Coteau rouge (2011, set precisely in Forcier's "hood") and Embrasse-moi comme tu m'aimes (2016) continue with the affective complications and extravagant situations already mentioned, but there is a certain shift of emphasis back to Quebec politics.  In Coteau rouge, Forcier vaunts and taunts his South Shore neighbors, admiring their energy and survival instincts, satirizing their vices and vanities.  A major theme here is the gentrification of local property, as a money-hungry speculator buys up his neighbor's wartime houses with the promise of allowing them to live out their lives in the condos he develops.  But in the kind of crazy complication typical of Forcier, this speculator, while trying to cheat his neighbors and relatives out of their property, is also depending on his mother-in-law to give birth to the child that he and his glitzy wife (who pretends to be pregnant) desire.  And behind the complex sexuality of Embrasse-moi (including incestuous desire) is the history of wartime Quebec with its poverty, class struggle, violence, and resistance to conscription.  A comment on all of this by Marie-Claude Loiselle (from La communauté indomptable d'André Forcier, p. 109) seems particularly apt to me.  She had mentioned the importance of Pasolini to Forcier, but she goes on to insist:

But it's Jacques Ferron [medical doctor; prolific writer of plays, stories, novels, historical essays; co-founder of the Rhinoceros Party] who comes to mind here; Ferron who endlessly tore from the heart of popular culture a host of legendary figures, each more fabulous than the other, in spite of the fact that they all seem familiar to anyone who knows anything about Quebec and the "ordinary people" the author always identified with. 2

What I've given is not a complete account of Forcier's films, not even a satisfying description of their complexities and craziness, but I hope it can help situate Ababouiné, since this most recent film treads on familiar thematic ground, with characters that remind us of earlier ones.   In the first few minutes, the audience might be lulled into thinking it's watching a feel-good story of kids and baseball, but gradually, the actualities of 1950s Montreal begin to emerge, especially the arrogance, corruption, and power of the church.  On the humorous side, there is the portrait of Cardinal Madore, with his small army of motorcycle-riding zouaves, dressed in outlandish outfits and carrying 19th-century long guns recalling their history. 3 However ridiculous these figures may be, they can still suppress dissident books, trash a printer's shop, and threaten people's lives.  References to Refus global and the history of the Automatist movement during the Duplessis years 4 remind us that this is not entirely fantasy.  Here is Forcier dancing again between hilarity and rage. But there is certainly nothing amusing in the portrait of the fanatical priest, Father Cotnoir, who, while urging his superior to crack down on secular dissent, sexually abuses children from the local school.  Both clerics despise their molasses-infused neighbourhood and dream of escaping together to Italy.  Meanwhile, the children who are front-and-centre, charming and cunning as so many of Forcier's child characters are, conduct a baseball war against the clerical regime and eventually win, with the help of a local radio station that broadcasts the games of the Montreal Royals 5 .  There are also some miracles involving the heart of Brother André, stolen from Saint Joseph's Oratory and ecstatically cooked into delicious meatball stew by the boy-narrator's devout, adopted mother (played by Pascale Montpetit).  Here, the satire becomes so over-the-top I can't wait to see how the film is received in Montreal.

But we shouldn't forget that central to Ababouiné is the question of language: the need to preserve and encourage it.  The opening words of the sweet-faced boy narrator are, "Aimes-tu la poésie?"  The need for poetry and dreams is paramount, as in so many of Forcier's other community-based stories.   I wonder if this will again make the film "too Quebecois" for the Toronto Film Festival, as I'm told were the words used to reject previous submissions.  It's exactly the Quebecois character of his films that makes Forcier interesting to his main audience, of course, and attractive to major actors in the province (Jacques Chenail, Jacques Marcotte,  France Castel, Michel Côté, Céline Bonnier, Guy l'Écuyer, Françoise Berd, Albert Payette, Roy Dupuis, to name only a few) who appear faithfully, though the films may not be huge money earners.   

But Forcier seems to be getting some of the attention he deserves.  In early April, 2024, there were screenings of three of his early films, and an appearance by himself and Linda Pinet during a six-day screening of Quebec cinema at the Anthology Film Archives in New York City.  On June 10, Forcier received the important Ordre des arts de des lettres du Québec in recognition of his œuvre. 

Notes

1. Marie-Claude Loiselle, La communauté indomptable d'André Forcier.  Montréal:  Les Herbes Rouge, 2017 ↩
2. Loiselle, p.109. ↩
3. In the 1870s, a group of soldiers organized in Montreal were sent to Italy to help defend the Pope during the Italian wars of independence.  Their uniforms were exotic but their history was not glorious. ↩
4. Refers to a period in Quebec politics characterized by the forceful presence of Maurice Duplessis, an arch conservative, populist and devout Catholic who ruled as Quebec Prime Minister from 1944 to 1959. ↩
5. Montreal-based minor league baseball team that once served as farm team to the Brooklyn Dodgers and is famous for having featured the great Jackie Robinson the year prior to his breaking of the Major League color barrier in 1947. ↩

Volume 28, Issue 8-9-10 / August 2024 Film Reviews   ababouiné   andré forcier   canadian cinema   linda pinet   political cinema   quebec cinema