Quebec's Next Generation: From Lauzon to Turpin

Quebec's new wave of feature filmmakers from the mid-sixties climaxed with Arcand's masterful portrayal of the new Quebec in Delin de l'empire americain (1986). Their achievement encouraged a new generation of directors that had not grown up in the Duplessis era, but rather in the reformed world of the Quiet Revolution and the sovereignty-oriented rhetoric of the separatist Parti Quebecois. After sixteen years of modernizing Liberal rule (1960-1976) and a decade of Parti Quebecois transformation, Quebec was assured in its francophone and its distinctness. The reactionary Duplessis era that formed the youthful world of Claude Jutra and Denys Arcand was far away Paris was from Montreal. The new generation spoke differently. Yet there was a line of continuity, a reality that flowed from that Duplessis period to the two subsequent political epochs that seemed to hold the masterminds of Quebec cinema in a kind of vise. Weren't these film directors interpreting Quebec and wasn't Quebec a society with a history, a symbolic tradition and an iconography that informed its collective consciousness? Claude Lauzon (1953-1997) was the intermediary who created a transition from that early period to the world of the 1990s and beyond. He pointed the way to the power of the new generation represented by Robert Lepage (1958-) Denis Villeneuve (1967-), and Andre Turpin (1965-), none of whom knew anything else except the secularism of the post-Duplessis world and francophone dominance. Lauzon was a working class high-school dropout whose father was a laborer with a grade two education. He returned to university where he became an award-winning student filmmaker and was offered $70,000 to turn his screenplay Piwi into a film, which he did in 1982. (1) The film caused a political stir in Quebec because of its sexual violence. His second film, Un Zoo la nuit (Night Zoo) won 13 Genies in 1988, the largest number of Genies ever won by a single film. Initially he was unable to get the film funded, but eventually it opened the Director's Fortnight at Cannes. Sadly, Lauzon was to create only one other film, Leolo (1992), which was his true masterpiece. He died tragically in 1997 in the crash of the bush plane he was flying in northern Quebec. He was 35 when Night Zoo became a sensation and not yet forty when Leolo challenged the popular imagination with its incredible imagery and style. Un Zoo was described as a complete subversion of the Hollywood action flick, winning Best Motion Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Music, Best Editing and Best Actor plus seven other categories at the Genies. (2) The film tells the story of a criminal released from jail who is pursued by corrupt and sadistic cops who want the money he has stashed away. His father is dying and the two men reconnect and then try to pursue their mutual love of hunting and fishing, activities that Lauzon himself pursued with a tragically Hemingwayesque passion. In the end the son steals his dying father from his hospital bed to go to the city zoo to shoot an elephant. The final scene in the film has the son ritually purify his father's naked body by washing it and then lying down beside it. This scene is meant to balance the opening scene of the movie, in which the son is being raped in prison. During the course of the film the Anglo cop that ordered the rape is dutifully hunted down by his victim. Bill Marshall, a European scholar of Quebec cinema, has pointed out how Un Zoo uses the two male leads (the young man and the old man) to symbolize a continuity between the urban working class and Quebec's rural/pastoral and wilderness past. (3) The theme of continuity is essential to the Lauzon enterprise. As a child Lauzon knew the introspective Quebec world of the 50s and then an adult he knew the contemporary Quebec world of cultural globalization and the detraditionalization of identity and he created a natural bridge between the two worlds. …

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