The Reality of Dreams: A Presentation of L'Ange et la Femme (1977)

On Saturday February 10, 2007, Montreal's La Presse published a survey of the 50 best quebecois films of all time. Compiled from shorter lists prepared by local film personnel, both filmmakers and commentators, this project offered few surprises. At the top there was still Claude Jutra's rendering of a story by Clement Perron, Mon oncle Antoine (1971); Francis Mankiewiecz's direction of a script by Rejean Ducharme, Les bons debarras (1980); and Michel Brault's fictionalized distillation of the testimonies of some 50 Quebec citizens who had been imprisoned during the political crisis of 1970, Les Ordres (1974). (Incidentally, Brault was cinematographer on the first two films as, along with Francois Protat, he also was for Les Ordres.) [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Of the established directors, Gilles Carle and Denys Arcand clocked in with five titles each while Jean Pierre Lefebvre merited only one mention for Les dernieres fiancailles (1973). One anglophone title made the cut--Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (1993), directed by Francois Girard; but--and this was a surprise--there was no mention at all of anything by Lea Pool. Since the 1970s, however, as the list established, the cinema of Quebec has migrated from a focus on politics to a focus on pleasure. It has shifted from a preoccupation with cultural self-definition to the more relaxed values of personal entertainment. Individual alienation has been absorbed within the concatenations of family life. Of course, Mon oncle Antoine and Les bon debarras also involved families; but by the time we get to C.R.A.Z.Y. (2005), the only discernable politics are the politics of sexual difference; and in La grande seduction (aka Seducing Dr. Lewis, 2003), delightful though it be, there is as much politics as in an Ealing comedy such as Whiskey Galore (1949). All aspects of life, however, involve politics of some kind, at least at the level of ideological assumption. assumptions concerning quebecois notions of masculinity are there to be analyzed, if one so desires, in the immensely popular tetralogy, Les Boys (1997-2005), now living on as a television series; but in recent years among theatrical features, except for the work of Denys Arcand and of Philippe Falardeau's La moitie gauche du frigo (2000), an involvement with the political implications of quebecois life has virtually disappeared from Canadian screens. This shift of focus was encouraged by the actual politics of the province of Quebec. With the election of Rene Levesque's Parti Quebecois in 1976, Quebec artists became less involved with the political details of everyday life. Certainly, the election of the Parti Quebecois affected the thinking of Gilles Carle. Although his early films may have been conceptually chaotic, (1) they all focused on political realities, generally in terms of characters seeking to free themselves from the inadequacy of inherited myths. As James Leach once argued: The movement from being exploited to becoming aware is basic to all of Carle's films ... (2) But after 1976, Carle decided to revive an idea he had had as a teenager: he wanted to devise a romantic fairy-tale for film. As he later explained, speaking about L'Ange et la femme: This film doesn't reflect our social reality, which is not to say it lacks cultural roots. Not at all! It's a nordic film full of quebecois imagery. (3) Turning his back on the economic models of the Canadian film industry, Carle assembled a group of film people who were prepared to invest their salaries in the production and, working intermittently over five weeks, produce this film in 16mm black-&-white for only $75,000. (4) Owing largely to the intimate relationship between Carole Laure and Lewis Furey, both on and off screen, the premiere of L'Ange was bathed in scandal. quebecois press was almost totally dismissive. review in Le Devoir was relentless, claiming it was the worst film Carle had ever made. …

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