In Of Montreal, Robert Everett-Green writes weekly about the people, places and events that make Montreal a distinctive cultural capital.
In 1989, student protesters at Beijing's Tiananmen Square famously built a statue of the Goddess of Liberty. Their discontent with the effects of the Communist Revolution of 1949 demanded a visual allusion to a liberal democratic revolution of 1776.
Revolutionaries are always looking over their shoulders for the path to tomorrow. The most eloquent prophesies in a new Quebecois feature film about a terrorist cell come from vanished revolutionary theorists, such as Peter Kropotkin, Rosa Luxemburg and Pierre Vallières.
Ceux qui font les révolutions à moitié n'ont fait que se creuser un tombeau (Those Who Make Revolution Halfway Only Dig Their Own Graves) is a vivid portrait of four young Montrealers who reject most of their society's norms and values. What they are fighting for is less clear, as they escalate from petty vandalism to firebombing.
Directors Mathieu Denis and Simon Lavoie have made a three-hour mélange of dramatic scenes, news footage and excerpts from revolutionary texts. The film prompted mass walkouts when it was shown at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, though it was also named TIFF's Best Canadian Film. It has been rapturously reviewed by all four major Montreal papers since it hit screens here last weekend.
K-Films Amérique
The prelude to the film's main action is Quebec university students' noisy 2012 campaign against tuition increases, which provoked a crisis for the provincial government. According to the producers' synopsis, the central narrative takes place three years later, after most students have returned to class and everything else has reverted to normal.
The main characters' frustration at this lost revolutionary opportunity has an Oedipal flavour, with good reason. The older folk whose values and routines they despise were themselves part of a failed revolutionary generation. Fifty years after the founding of the Parti Québécois, its main goal is unachieved and its old warriors are, by the film's account, too comfortable to care.
Our quartet, whose noms de guerre translate as Tumult, Justice, Class Struggle and New Order, withdraw into a bunker-like former garage and create their own counter-society. The intensity of their commitment to their cause and each other gradually makes every outside connection seem shallow and unreal.
Here again, the film implies a link to events of half a century ago. This garage coven looks a lot like the hermetic cells of the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ), which in the late sixties segued from mailbox bombings to the murder of provincial cabinet minister Pierre Laporte. It's possible to see Ceux qui font… as an updated fictionalization of one such cell.
Theirs is an environment in which "yesterday does not exist," and where "the future is the only transcendence for those without God." What is most difficult for the quartet is the present, where no gesture against the horror can ever be enough.
K-Films Amérique
They spend much of their time performing revolutionary acts for each other, at home. They burn, paint or destroy things in the garage on impulse, and engage in literally painful sessions of Maoist-style self-criticism. The latter part of the film is almost like a Survivor-style reality show, which ends after one contestant forcefully votes herself off the island.
One aspect of these romantic rebels that can't be projected onto the FLQ is their focus on the liberation of the body and sexual orientation. The four – played by Charlotte Aubin, Laurent Bélanger, Emmanuelle Lussier Martinez and Gabrielle Tremblay – often wander about naked, write slogans on each other's bodies, and sleep or lounge together in a heap.
They're all riveting to watch. Gabrielle Tremblay is especially incandescent as Klas Batalo, the revolutionary equivalent of Candy Darling. Like that transsexual Warhol acolyte, Klas displays conventional femininity while remaining fiercely rebellious. One of the ironies of her friends' way of living is that they revile the whorish wage economy created by capitalism, while living off her literal whoring at a massage parlour.
The group's readings of Luxemburg and other theorists suggest an interest in the big picture, but the authorities they despise are all close to hand: parents, police, a judge trying his hardest to be merciful. They also scorn the complicit, including the Middle Eastern-looking man Tumulto (Bélanger) accosts early in the film as "a parvenu" – an uncomfortable episode, after the Quebec City mosque shootings. In the end, everyone is to blame, which may be why Ordine Nuovo (Lussier Martinez) shows no reaction when an arson attack turns out to have gone further than intended.
K-Films Amérique
Some of those who walked out on this fascinating film may have disliked its unusual form, by Hollywood standards, or slow pace. But its mixture of dogma, drama and news footage are all familiar from vintage works by Jean-Luc Godard and Gilles Groulx, both hailed as major influences by the film's young directors.
Small acts of homage crop up throughout their film. I was struck, for example, by Lussier Martinez's resemblance to Barbara Ulrich, who in Groulx's 1964 classic Le chat dans le sac, asks her malcontent boyfriend if she reminds him of Anna Karina in Godard's Vivre sa vie. In making a movie about petty revolutionaries, Denis and Lavoie couldn't help also looking over their own shoulders at old masters they wish to emulate.
What really makes this film stand out is that it fully embraces the cloudy romantic idealism of its characters. That's what makes them live, and it feels true, and specifically Québécois. The contradictions and self-destructive aspects of what they do are fully apparent too, as well as the uncomprehending sorrow of those around them. In the end, this is a humane and convincing portrayal of people in an extreme situation, living a dream from which there is no painless awakening.