Stage-Bound: Feature Film Adaptations of Canadian and Québécois Drama 9780773571464

Citation preview

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s ta g e - b o u n d

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Stage-Bound Feature Film Adaptations of Canadian and Québécois Drama andré loiselle

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

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© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2003 isbn 0-7735-2610-2 Legal deposit third quarter 2003 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Funding was also provided by the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Carleton University. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp) for our publishing activities.

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Loiselle, André, 1963– Stage-bound: feature film adaptations of Canadian and Québécois drama / André Loiselle. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-7735-2610-2 1. Canadian drama – Film and video adaptations. 2. Motion pictures – Canada – History and criticism. I. Title. pn1997.85.l63 2003

791.43′6

c2003-901546-7

This book was typeset by Dynagram Inc. in 10.5/13 Sabon.

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Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

1

Stage-Bound since 1942

2

Early Thresholds of Theatre and Film

3

Theatrical Characters Trapped in Cinematic Spaces

4

Stages of Liminality and Historical Intervals

5

At the Juncture of Theatre and Film There Lies a Corpse

6

Conclusion: Theatricality in Film Adaptations since the 1990s Appendix Notes

221

225

Works Cited Index

253

237

3 30 75

117

209

160

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Acknowledgments

I wish to thank the following people for their loving support: Kerri Froc, Éliane Grenier, Sylvie Loiselle, and Odette Loiselle-Hutsal – as well as Christine, Jordan, Connor, Garrick, Émilen, Michel, and Ron. Jackie Lane and her assistants, Mark Larocque and Guimauve, are also to be thanked for their remarkable work on the still unrealized musical score for Here Will I Nest. For their moral support and practical help on this project, I am grateful to: Professors Jerry Wasserman, Brian McIlroy, and Alain-Michel Rocheleau, whose help in the first stages of this project was invaluable; Marc Raymond for his rigorous research assistance; Professors Chris Faulkner, Barbara Gabriel, Mark Langer, George McKnight, Laura Marks, Charles O’Brien, Zuzana Pick, Mitsuyo WadaMarciano, and all my colleagues at the School for Studies in Art and Culture, Carleton University; my friends José Sanchez, Nick Nguyen, James Missen, Peter Urquhart, Barbara Rockburn, and Malek Khouri; Lee Carruthers for her helpful comments on the first draft of the book; the playwrights and filmmakers who, at some point over the past decade, kindly took the time to answer my questions about their work, Denys Arcand, Paul Blouin, Michel Marc Bouchard, René-Daniel Dubois, Robert Favreau, John Greyson, Antonine Maillet, Francis Mankiewicz, Bachar Shbib, Yves Simoneau, and John Beckett Wimbs; Aurele Parisien, Robert Lewis, Joan McGilvray, and everyone at McGill-Queen’s University Press who helped me to prepare this book for publication; and the staff of the National Archives in Ottawa, the Cinémathèque québécoise in Montreal, and the Film Reference Library in Toronto. This book was made possible in part by grants from Carleton University and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

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1 Stage-Bound since 1942

In 1942, Melburn E. Turner’s Here Will I Nest, the first motion picture adaptation of a Canadian play, had its premiere in London, Ontario. Since then, less than forty Canadian and Quebec stage dramas have been made into feature films in this country. Like Hilda Mary Hooke’s play Here Will I Nest (1942), most of the dramatic sources brought to the big screen over the past sixty years have not been among the best-known works of the repertoire, and the films they inspired have rarely been examined in any depth by critics and historians. One of the main reasons critics have tended to dismiss many of these adaptations is that the films seemingly fail to escape their theatrical origins; they are too “stage-bound” (Klady, 19). Even the few instances of film-mediated drama1 that have been well received have still often been criticized for remaining too close to the theatre, or the issue of adaptation has simply been ignored altogether. For instance, in her otherwise insightful analysis of the theatricality of gender in John Greyson’s Lilies (1996), one of the more successful adaptations of the 1990s, Christine Ramsay does not analyse at all the process of transforming the stage theatricality of Michel Marc Bouchard’s original drama Les feluettes (1987) into the cinematic theatricality of Lilies. She refers only once to the original text in passing (Ramsay, 196) and does not seek to elucidate the effect of transposing a play-within-a-play-within-aplay into a play-within-a-play-within-a-film. The purpose of this

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book is to analyse this passage from theatre to film theatricality in works like Lilies so as to demonstrate that the adaptations’ predilection for remaining anchored to the stage is actually crucial to our understanding of the relationship between the original and the screen version. In the process, I wish to reclaim this group of stagebound productions that have generally been conspicuously absent from Canadian film and theatre studies. From the outset, it must be noted that while feature film adaptations of drama represent only a small fraction of the hundreds of movies produced in Canada over the past century, adaptations of novels and short stories have been far more common. Examples of films based on literature include Ernest and Nell Shipman’s silent classic Back to God’s Country (1919, dir: David Hartford), based on James Oliver Curwood’s short story “Wapi, the Walrus”; Claude Jutra’s Kamouraska (1973), adapted from Anne Hébert’s novel; Ted Kotcheff’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974), which transposes to the screen the adventures of Mordecai Richler’s famous overachiever; Silvio Narizzano’s Why Shoot the Teacher (1977), from Max Braithwaite’s book; and Gilles Carle’s Les Plouffe (1981), which retraces the lives of Roger Lemelin’s characters More recently, Canadian filmmakers have also used foreign novels as a blueprint for screenplays. Examples of this contemporary practice include David Cronenberg’s Crash (1996), inspired by J.G. Ballard’s controversial epic; Atom Egoyan’s Felicia’s Journey (1999), scripted from William Trevor’s book; Patricia Rozema’s Mansfield Park (1999), based on Jane Austin’s classic; and Mary Harron’s American Psycho (2000), which seeks to translate into visual terms Bret Easton Ellis’s notorious serial killer fiction. Prose, from both Canada and abroad, thus continues to be a favourite source of inspiration among Canadian filmmakers. Drama, on the other hand, had been almost completely ignored until about a decade ago. There is a historical explanation for this disparity, to which I will return below. The absence of notable adaptations of plays in Canada, at least until the 1990s, contrasts markedly with cinematic practices in other nations. Browsing through Tom Costello’s International Guide to Literature on Film (1994) reveals that while the author itemizes literally hundreds of adapted plays from around the world, there is not a single reference to a Canadian drama having been made into a film. In the United States, the tradition has long been to transpose to film virtually every play that has enjoyed popular and/

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or critical success on stage. As Roger Manvell states in his Theater and Film (1979), from the beginning of the talkies in Hollywood, “the impulse to introduce dramatists into film production was a natural one” (Manvell, 31). The economic logic behind film adaptations in Hollywood is rather straightforward. The production of a film being a costly affair, Manvell explains, “it is worth the film producer’s while to pay a high sum for the screen rights to successful plays in order to secure subjects (or ‘properties’ as they are called) where the initial risks have been tested previously” (ibid., 38). The same logic dictates practices in other large film-producing countries like England, France, Germany, and Japan, where successful pieces from their national dramaturgies are regularly used as sources for movies. Even nations with less solidly established cinematic traditions, such as South Africa, Brazil, and Australia, have also transposed their theatrical canons onto the screen (see Costello). But in Canada, unlike in the rest of the world, most of the best plays have not been brought to the big screen. For example, of the twenty-four canonical plays anthologized in Jerry Wasserman’s two-volume Modern Canadian Plays (2000), only three – John Herbert’s Fortune and Men’s Eyes (1967), Kelly Rebar’s Bordertown Café (1987), and Marie Brassard and Robert Lepage’s Le polygraphe (1988) – have been made into feature films. Since the early 1990s, Canadian filmmakers seem to have finally discovered the stage. In an article published in Theatrum in 1994, Angela Baldassdarre remarks that over the past few years there has been a great increase in the number of Canadian feature films based on theatrical pieces, which leads her to suggest that we are witnessing the birth of a new “stage-to-screen phenomenon” in Canada (Baldassdarre, 18). This point was reiterated in 2000 by Élie Castiel in a review of Robert Favreau’s adaptation of Michel Marc Bouchard’s Les muses orphelines (play, 1989; film, 2000) (Castiel, “Les muses orphelines,” 32). Indeed, the number of plays brought to the screen over the past decade is not insignificant. These include Bouchard’s Les muses orphelines and Les feluettes; Brad Fraser’s Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love (1989; film by Denys Arcand as Love and Human Remains, 1993) and Poor Super Man (1994; film by Fraser as Leaving Metropolis, 2002); Linda Griffiths’s The Darling Family (1991; film by Alan Zweig, 1994); Hillar Liitoja’s The Last Supper (1993; film by Cynthia Roberts, 1994); Robert Lepage’s Le polygraphe (1988; film by

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Lepage, 1996), Tectonic Plates (1988; film by Peter Mettler, 1992), and Nô (from Les sept branches de la rivière Ota, 1994; film by Lepage, 1998); John Mighton’s Possible Worlds (1990, film by Robert Lepage, 2000); Daniel MacIvor’s House (1992; film by Laurie Lynd, 1995) and Marion Bridge (1999, film by Wiebke von Carolsfeld, 2003); Dominic Champagne’s Cabaret neiges noires (1992; film by Raymond Saint-Jean, 1997); Alexis Martin’s Matroni et moi (1995; film by Jean-Philippe Duval, 1999); Caitlin Hicks’s Singing the Bones (1994; film by Gordon Halloran, 2001); and Steve Galluccio’s Mambo Italiano (2000; film by Émile Gaudreault, 2003). Although this book is concerned exclusively with Canadian feature film adaptations of Canadian plays, it is also worth noting that, as with novels, foreign drama has also raised interest among Canadian producers since the 1990s. For instance, Cronenberg’s M. Butterfly (1993) adapts David Henry Hwang’s Broadway hit, and David Wellington pays tribute to the father of modern American drama, Eugene O’Neill, with his version of Long Day’s Journey into Night (1996). Prior to the 1990s, Tyrone Guthrie’s adaptation of Oedipus Rex (1956) was pretty much the only example of a foreign play made into a feature film in Canada. This renewed interest in drama on the part of filmmakers can be dated to 1992, when the considerable success of Jean Beaudin’s adaptation of René-Daniel Dubois’s Being at Home with Claude (1985) demonstrated the artistic and commercial potential of filmmediated drama. Since Being at Home with Claude, Canadian cinema seems to have finally understood the logic that has guided the transpositional practices of other nations: namely, that a hit on stage might very well translate into a hit on screen. But, considering that even this “stage-to-screen phenomenon” has produced just over fifteen feature film adaptations of plays in a decade, one must admit that the corpus remains remarkably small, given that thirtyfive to fifty features are made in this country every year. For the sake of comparison: While only one play was made into a film in 2002, four novels served as inspirations for features. Granted that prior to Beaudin’s film the comparison was even more disproportionate, one must recognize that film-mediated drama is still a marginal practice in Canada. Beyond the diminutive size of the corpus of cinematized plays, one also notes that to this day an important portion of this small corpus comprises plays that are not particularly well known. For

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every famous play by Robert Lepage or Brad Fraser that has been filmed, there are three or four titles that hardly ring a bell at all. The question then is why were those plays adapted? The following chapters on the troubled union of theatre and film in this country since the 1940s attempt to reveal the obscured coherence that unifies the corpus. This coherence rests not in the success of the works (or lack thereof) but in an intricate symmetry between the dialectical composition of the dramas and a tension at the core of the transpositional process. Furthermore, another level of symmetry arises when this tension is considered in the light of a conflict often interpreted as a paradigm of Canadian/Québécois culture. But, before looking at originals and their adaptations, it will prove useful to examine certain problematic questions related to the matter at hand.

questions of media, traditions, and structures One of the main questions that arises when approaching the corpus of Canadian film-mediated drama has to do with the fact that rather than cinema, it is television that has most regularly looked to the stage for inspiration. Acknowledged master works such as Marcel Dubé’s Au retour des oies blanches (1966), Françoise Loranger’s Encore cinq minutes (1967), George Ryga’s The Ecstasy of Rita Joe (1967, in its Royal Winnipeg Ballet version), Michel Tremblay’s Les belles-soeurs (1968), David French’s Leaving Home (1972), John Murrell’s Waiting for the Parade (1977), David Fennario’s Balconville (1979), and more recently Tremblay’s Albertine en cinq temps (1984) have all been made into television shows rather than into feature films (Benson and Conolly, 519–24; Miller). Distinguishing between t v versions and feature film adaptations might appear superfluous since, as one might suggest, the primary purpose of both types of adaptation is basically to bring drama to a wider audience. Given Canada’s small movie market, one could contend that television broadcast simply provides a more convenient means of reaching people than does cinema. This argument, however, ignores two salient differences between feature film adaptations and what is called in French télé-théâtre: first, télé-théâtre often limits itself to a mere recording of an enactment of the text with minimal adaptational treatment; and, second, television and the cinematic apparatus provide radically different viewing experiences.

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While television spectatorship is essentially a discontinuous and domestic activity (except perhaps for the projection of televised sporting events or concerts in bars and arenas), which favours cocooning and a short attention span, cinema remains a public event that involves the gathering of large groups of people and sustained attention for the screening’s duration. As Susan Bennett remarks: “[C]ertainly the cinema and theatre events have much in common. Both are public, generally take place in a building specifically designed for that purpose, and invariably their audiences watch in a darkened auditorium. Both audiences generally react as a group […] Television, above all, lacks the sense of public event that attaches to both theatre and cinema […] [I]t denies the spectator-to-spectator communication (in both its positive and negative aspects) within the larger framework of audience as community” (Bennett, 80, 90). Cinema spectatorship is thus much closer to the experience of attending live theatre than watching a t v program at home alone. Whereas feature film adaptations can potentially recreate for the viewer circumstances akin to those associated with stage performances, and consequently can at least approximate the sense of theatrical “happening” of the original, television drama evacuates all sense of communal event and shatters the element of focused reception common to both theatre and cinema. Not surprisingly, as critic Martin Knelman writes, with his usual dose of irony: “Canadian playwrights have generally fared even worse on the screen than Canadian actors. Among those who might have expected to make a mark in films, but haven’t, are John Murrell, David French, George F. Walker, Michel Tremblay, Sharon Pollock, Erika Ritter and Larry Fineberg. How many times have memorable evenings of Canadian theatre been turned into dead, well-meaning t v events?” (Knelman, 172–3). That Canadian producers and directors have elected to concentrate on “dead” t v adaptations rather than on film versions of plays cannot be fully explained by economic and demographic arguments, for smaller and less wealthy nations than Canada, such as Australia, have long recognized and exploited the cinematic potential of stage drama (Costello, 62–3, 120–1, 152–3, 250–1, 290–1). Many factors can probably explain this “unique” Canadian predicament. One might contend that the best plays of the repertoire, from Tremblay’s A toi, pour toujours, ta Marie-Lou (1971) to Judith Thompson’s Lion in the Streets (1990), adopt theatrical styles that do not translate very well into cinematic terms. Yet this

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hypothesis does not explain why dramatic pieces as “cinematic” as George F. Walker’s “Power plays,” which explicitly borrow the codes and conventions of detective movies and film noir, have never been adapted. A more cogent explanation has to do with the historical development of fiction film-making in Canada since the 1960s. The generation of filmmakers who started making fiction films in the 1960s and created the canon in the 1970s were in general influenced by documentary and auteurist practices (Daudelin, 107–8). As a result, they were and still are naturally drawn away from preexisting texts, especially from drama, which imposes a rigid structure on the adaptor (Véronneau, “Du théâtre au cinéma,” 31). This is certainly the explanation that filmmaker Robert Favreau finds most compelling. “True enough, we are among the very few cultures that do not produce a lot of adaptations,” Favreau told me in an interview on his adaptation of Les muses orphelines. I see a couple of explanations for this. First, our cinema is quite young – 40 years of film history is not very much. We still haven’t reached maturity. Second, the documentary origins of our cinema. Documentary in Quebec developed a certain contempt for the text. This contempt was in part justified because documentary reality is always in motion and can be captured only with a camera, not with a written text. The idea of a pre-existing text is foreign to our documentary practice. But this contempt for the text came along with a fear of the text. We are afraid to work with authors and their pre-existing plays or novels. So the encounter between filmmakers, scriptwriters, and literary authors never really happened in our tradition, or at least not until recently. We had to experience a number of setbacks before we could finally get rid of this fear of the text. (Loiselle, “Les muses orphelines,” 97–8)2

The fear of the pre-existing text, as Favreau characterizes it, is even stronger when dealing with drama than with the novel because, as Manvell points out, film and the stage play both belong to the “dramatic arts” (Manvell, 47). The play script can thus literally serve the function of a film script without any changes, thereby limiting the freedom or creative input of the auteur. In fact, television versions of plays, which are produced in the controlled environment of the t v studio, often adopt the dramatic text as a tele-script. This explains why plays brought to the small screen are so commonplace.

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They can readily be transposed without creative alterations. The novel, on the other hand, while still imposing some constraints on the adaptor, necessitates a process of complete rewriting to transform abstract material intended for the reader (i.e., written words) into tangible percepts to be seen and heard. The phenomenological experience of the novel being radically different from that of the motion picture, the screenwriter is always to some extent the author of the adaptation of a novel because everything about the novel must be reinscribed in visual and aural film terms. The same of course is not true of the adaptor of a play, for even if a play can be altered when brought to the screen, it does not demand rewriting, having already been conceived as something to be seen and heard rather than read. The adaptor of a play can potentially limit her or his input to the inclusion of cinema-specific devices such as dissolves between scenes. That hardly qualifies as auteurship. It is not surprising, therefore, that in a tradition influenced by auteurism and documentary practice, filmmakers would be more inclined to appropriate a novel than a play. So the question remains: Why would Canadian film auteurs choose to adapt these plays? Of course, being an auteur does not necessarily preclude producing adaptations of plays, as could be evidenced by numerous examples ranging from Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948, from Patrick Hamilton’s play) to Robert Altman’s Streamers (1983, from David Rabe’s play). But the type of auteurism that has developed in Canada is different from the auteurism of Hitchcock, Altman, and other comparable directors. While filmmakers working within the American system express their auteurist vision by imposing their filmic signature on pre-existing scripts more or less adamantly assigned to them by an organized industry, Canadian auteurs, from Jean-Pierre Lefebvre and Micheline Lanctôt to Gary Burns, Bruce Sweeney, and Mina Shum, have emerged from a tradition that lacks a solidly established industrial structure. This environment favours, instead, personal projects generated by writers-cum-directors who manage to produce their personal films only through their unshakable determination and the benevolent condescension of bureaucrats working for governmental funding agencies such as Telefilm Canada. Again, using 2002 as an example, of the fifty-four features made that year, forty-two were written or co-written by the directors themselves. The Canadian director, therefore, is one who tends to be involved in the making of a film from its conception to its realization.

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Adapting a play for a Canadian filmmaker is thus a struggle wherein independent creativity clashes with the rigid parameters of the pre-existing dramatic text. I would argue that it is precisely in this tension between creative freedom and dramatic constraints that one can find the beginning of an explanation for the composition of the corpus. As will be shown throughout this book, the plays that have been chosen for adaptation are generally works that embody the struggle that the filmmaker experiences in the very process of adaptation. Filmmakers, I contend, choose to adapt certain plays rather than others as a means to tackle the issue of confinement and constraint in terms of both dramatic theme and filmmaking practice. While filming Les muses orphelines, Robert Favreau admitted, he always had to fight against theatre without quite managing to escape its grasp: “Throughout the production, I constantly had to resist theatre, because theatre was always forcing itself upon the film” (Loiselle, “Les muses orphelines,” 103–4).3 Yet this struggle is one that Canadian filmmakers who choose to adapt plays seem resolute to confront. For instance, when he adapted his own play, Poor Super Man, Brad Fraser was at once eager to escape theatricality and determined to be faithful to the dramatic composition of the original. “The thoughest part,” Fraser said in an interview on the film version, Leaving Metropolis, “was taking a very talky play and making it cinematic, while not being afraid to allow it to be talky. I felt I wanted the characters to speak. I didn’t want to change a lot of the dialogue or drop a lot of dialogue. These are bright, intelligent characters and they speak a lot [… But] I didn’t want it to feel like a play on film” (Hays 30, 31). As film adaptors of plays, both Favreau and Fraser were simultaneously fixated on the dramatic text and dedicated to its undoing through cinematization. The remarkable coincidence is that the creative conflict between remaining faithful to characters and situations originally conceived for the stage and trying to escape the theatricality inherent to these characters and situations is echoed in the dramatic conflict at the heart of the adapted texts. Both Les muses orphelines and Poor Super Man present characters who wrestle against constraining forces from a past that they are paradoxically reluctant to shun completely. In Fraser’s play, for example, drama arises from the characters’ vain attempts to escape the constrictive remnants of obstinate personal histories, whether they be the comic books and compulsory heterosexuality of adolescence, the irritating notoriety

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brought about by short-lived artistic success, the male genitalia that nature mistakenly appended to a woman’s soul, or the ghosts of lovers fallen victim to a i d s . Similarly, the film version constantly seeks to escape its stage antecedents but remains haunted by its theatrical past. This book argues that most, if not all, instances of Canadian film-mediated drama display this parallel between the content of the piece and the process of adaptation. The struggle of Canadian filmmakers to reconcile their customary freedom from the pre-existing text with the limits imposed by drama might be relatively unique. But the tension between the “freedom” of film and the confinement of the theatrical piece has been theorized by critics far beyond the borders of this country. Adaptations of plays, by merging drama and film, combine two forms that essentially move in opposite directions because, as André Bazin suggests, drama is centripetal, focusing on a closed space, a locus dramaticus severed from the real world and at the centre of which stands the actor, while film is centrifugal, moving outwards, towards the environment and away from specifically anthropocentric concerns. Bazin writes: Whether as a performance or a celebration, theater of its very essence must not be confused with nature under the penalty of being absorbed by her and ceasing to be. Founded on the reciprocal awareness of those taking part and present to one another, it must be in contrast to the rest of the world in the same way as play and reality are opposed […] The stage and the decor where the action unfolds constitute an aesthetic microcosm inserted perforce into the universe but essentially distinct from the Nature which surrounds it. It is not the same with cinema, the basic principle of which is a denial of any frontiers to action. The idea of a locus dramaticus is not only alien to, it is essentially a contradiction of the concept of the screen […] In contrast to the stage, the space of the screen is centrifugal. (Bazin, 104, 105)

For Bazin, everything in the theatre aims to converge towards a human drama in a tightly circumscribed human locale. Conversely, on screen, there doesn’t even need to be human beings present, for the entire universe can be the subject of cinema (Bazin, 106). A great number of critics agree with Bazin on the issue of the spatial distinction between theatre and film. Egil Törnqvist, in a Bazininspired comparative analysis of theatre and film, writes: “In the

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theatre, ‘drama proceeds from the actor, in the cinema it goes from the decor to man’ [Bazin, 102]. Thematically, this means that, whereas stage drama traditionally emphasises the conflict between (i) man and man, or (ii) man and God, screen drama will emphasise the conflict between (iii) man and his environment, since the environment is precisely what the film camera can superbly and almost limitlessly describe” (Törnqvist, 19). This means that when anthropocentric drama is transposed for the screen, a conflict emerges between the self-contained character of the stage play and the exoteric nature of film. Variations on this argument about the differences between theatre and film can be found in Kenneth MacKinnon’s useful survey of early comparative theories of the stage and the screen, Greek Tragedy into Film (1986). MacKinnon reminds us that, “for Erwin Panofsky, writing in 1934, the space of the theatre is essentially static, while that of the cinema is essentially dynamic” (MacKinnon, 6). Comparing the effects of film and theatre mise-enscène on the spatial deployment of narrative episodes, the realist critic Siegfried Kracauer similarly argued that “the theatrical story can, in this sense, be classified as ‘closed,’ the cinematic as ‘open› (McKinnon 8). Martin Esslin’s discrimination between theatre and film in The Field of Drama (1987) closely parallels Kracauer’s remarks: [A] decisive difference between live and cinematic drama lies in the fundamental distinction between the theatrical and the cinematic space. Whereas the stage (whether of the “peep-show” type, an open arena or “in the round”) confronts the spectator throughout the performance and is its basic “given,” the cinema or television screens are doors through which the spectator freely enters a space which is infinitely variable and constantly changing […] Because the camera acts as the spectator’s eye, the spectator enters any space into which the camera takes him: he speeds along in a car, runs in and out of houses, approaches and recedes from objects. This increases the spectator’s “mobility in space.” (Esslin, The Field of Drama, 96)

Almost ten years before Esslin formulated his theory, Roger Manvell had already come to a similar conclusion: “The great difference between stage and screen is that the film is always free to use natural or man-made locations, adapting real streets, landscapes, seas, and mountains for its environmental territory; the screenplay unlike

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the stage play, by its photographic nature is liberated from the confines of the theater’s acting area” (Manvell, 27, emphasis added). Following a similar argument, the comparative literary theorist Käte Hamburger establishes a connection in her book The Logic of Literature (1973) between film and the novel in terms of the broad spaces that they can depict as opposed to the narrowly confined area that drama delineates. Hamburger writes: [T]he two dimensional film conveys a more natural spatial experience than the three-dimensional stage. Indeed, to express this phenomenon quite pithily, the two dimensional, i.e., the film, produces a threedimensional spatial experience, whereas the three-dimensional stage produces a two-dimensional one […] [N]ot everything which we see in a film can also be seen on a theatrical stage. We can, however, read it in a novel. When, for example, the sun on the distant horizon slowly sinks into the sea, when a plane lifts off from the ground and disappears into the sky, when couples dance through spacious ballrooms, snowflakes whirl and settle on trees and fences – in such instances we do see something, but we see something which is narrated. The animated image, or motion picture, has a narrative function; it replaces the word at work in the epic narrative function. (Hamburger, 220, 222)

Or in the more straightforward phrasing of Neil Sinyard, “in some ways, the two forms are antithetical: theatre is artificial lighting and illusion, and cinema is open-air and realism; theatre is verbal, cinema visual; theatre is stasis, cinema is movement” (Sinyard, 157, emphasis added). This fundamental distinction between drama, which centres on a confined locus dramaticus closed off from the reality that it reproduces, and film, which can capture the wide vistas of actual landscapes, results in drama seeming, according to David Lodge, “ill-atease in the film medium, and most obviously so when it deserts the economical single setting for which it was originally designed, to take advantage of the freedom of location afforded by film. The two media seem to pull against each other” (Lodge, 86–7, emphasis added). If, as Lodge suggests, film exerts an outward pull on inward drama when the two media are brought together, plays that reproduce this very tension should offer a germane structure for adaptation. In other words, the plays best corresponding to the demands

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of the hybrid medium that cinematized drama constitutes are those presenting a dialectical composition that pits coercive, centripetal pressures against explosive, centrifugal forces. Thus the basic tension between film and drama parallels the difficulty that Canadian filmmakers have traditionally experienced when working with preexisting texts, which in turn finds an equivalent in the conflicts that assail dramatic characters in the adapted texts. This is the hypothesis that subsequent chapters will demonstrate. The constitution of the corpus of Canadian film-mediated drama rests in great part, I argue, on this symmetry between, on the one hand, the conflict that opposes theatre and film and, on the other hand, tensions amongst or within the characters from the plays. Unlike in other countries, where critical and/or popular success seems to determine which stage pieces are brought to the big screen, in Canada, where the success of a feature film is always at best improbable, it appears to be the structural parallel between the content of the plays and the diametric pull between film and theatre that motivates filmmakers’ decisions to film certain dramas rather than others. This book looks at some of the most significant adaptations to show the extent to which the tension between centripetal pressures and centrifugal forces is at once central to the dialectic structure of the plays and at the core of the process of stage-toscreen transposition. In chapters 2 and 3, I propose a detailed analysis of five plays and films. This close reading of a few works, which will provide meticulous perusal of particularly meaningful sections of dialogue, careful scrutiny of pivotal stage directions, and elaborate descriptions of crucial visual compositions and shot sequences, will serve to establish the solid parameters within which a larger sample of works will be examined in the following chapters. While not every single play transposed for film in Canada will be considered, the significant list of titles studied in chapters 4 and 5 will show that a sizable portion of dramatic texts adapted over the past sixty years revolve around characters who are torn between a desire to stay within a confining, claustrophobic milieu and a wish to achieve greater freedom at the expense of security and human contacts. This structure clearly corresponds to the antithetical pressures that drama and film exert on each other. It mirrors as well the conflict with which Canadian film auteurs might be confronted when they decide to transform a dramatic text into a movie.

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Throughout the study, I will also suggest that the tension between claustrophobic safety (drama) and threatening freedom (film) works at a number of levels beyond a narrowly defined structuralist framework. For instance, I will discuss how gender representations often follow the axes of oppressive theatrical masculinity versus eccentric cinematic femininity. Borrowing from traditional dramatic theory, I will distinguish theatre from film in terms of their contrasting use of realist and naturalist conventions. Furthermore, incursions into psychoanalytic discourse will approach the tension between theatre and film in terms of Julia Kristeva’s concept of the “abject” as that which challenges confinement and rules (Kristeva, 12). I will also explore a peculiar analogy between film-mediated drama and the cadaver, which leads Alenka Zupancic to claim that a corpse always appears at the intersection of theatre and film (Zupancic, 80). Closer to questions of national theatre and film praxes, the tension between drama and cinema will be linked to a feature of the Canadian imagination that has been variously labelled: “Wacousta syndrome” (McGregor); “pulsion d’agrippement,” clinging impulse (Harel, 257); and “garrison mentality” (Frye, The Bush Garden, 225). These terms refer to the seemingly prototypical Canadian condition that Margaret Atwood described in Survival (1972): “Families in Canadian fiction huddle together like sheep in a storm or chickens in a coop: miserable and crowded, but unwilling to leave because the alternative is seen as cold empty space. I’d say that this pattern is as true, if not truer, in the literature of French Canada as it is in that of English Canada, though it is more likely there to be symbolized by blocked incestuous love […] The plight of English Canadian characters trapped by their family ties seems mild compared with that of the French Canadian ones: in Quebec, it seems, you can’t leave home at all, and if you do you’ll want to go back, no matter how miserable home was when you actually lived there” (Atwood, 132, 226–7). As much as these notions about the Canadian ethos have been called into question – sometimes rightfully – the fact remains that these speculations on the Canadian tendency to seek refuge in a garrison from which one paradoxically wishes to escape (see Gary Burns’s Calgary film Way Downtown [2000] for a corporate version of this attitude) offer a striking metaphor for the composition of the corpus of Canadian/Québécois film-mediated drama. I am ^^

^^

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not claiming here that the “garrison mentality” is shared by every person living in this country; as a matter of fact, one would be hard pressed to find any shared mentality amongst all the 30-odd million people who happen to be Canadian citizens. What I am suggesting, however, is that one might find in this particular cultural discourse an evocative parallel with the dialectical structure of the works adapted and the diametric pull that drama and film exert on each other. One could even argue that the globalizing threat that Hollywood always presents to the traditionally regionalized Canadian cinema also finds a parallel in the tension that exists in film adaptations of plays, especially those of the 1970s and 1980s. I shall return to this question in chapter 4. At this point, I propose a brief history of film-mediated drama in Canada and Quebec to underline the uncertain evolution of this practice over the past sixty years.

t h e 1 9 4 0 s a n d 1 9 5 0 s : e a r ly t h r e s h o l d s of theatre and film The 1940s and ’50s saw a tremendous amount of activity in the Quebec film industry. This boom began in 1944, in part due to the lack of French films being produced under Nazi occupation. By 1940, films from France occupied about 10 per cent of the market in Quebec (Lever, 120). The shortage of French-language films resulting from World War II encouraged French-Canadian entrepreneurs such as Alexandre DeSève and Paul L’Anglais to produce home-grown features. Furthermore, a number of French film artists had left Europe at the beginning of the Nazi invasions and now formed a sizable community of experienced, French-speaking directors and actors who could offer their expertise to the burgeoning Quebec film industry. Fédor Ozep, a Russian filmmaker who moved to France in 1932 and then to North America in 1940, directed Le père Chopin, which marked the beginning of the boom in 1944. Well over a dozen films were made in the next ten years, some by European filmmakers in Canada, like Ozep, Paul Gury, and René Delacroix, and others by Canadian filmmakers, like JeanYves Bigras, who left the National Film Board (n f b ) to make fiction films. One of the best-known works to emerge from that period of effervescence is Gratien Gélinas’s 1952 adaptation of his 1948 play, Tit-Coq, which will be examined at length in the next chapter.

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Universally recognized as the first major work of the French Canadian national dramaturgy and perhaps as the first true artistic achievement of Quebec’s fiction-film industry, Tit-Coq focuses on an orphan soldier who is torn between the desire to settle down with a nice woman and have a normal family, and the burden of having to live a life of lonely wandering because of the stigma attached to his illegitimate origins. Wishing to fit in but constantly persecuted by oppressive societal forces epitomized by the church, Tit-Coq eventually elects to leave his girlfriend and go on living his rootless, aimless, but free existence. Tit-Coq was initially conceived, in fact, as a screenplay. Following a suggestion from film producer Paul L’Anglais to develop a full-fledged screenplay based on the 1946 revue sketch “Le retour du conscrit,” Gélinas created the character of the orphan soldier Tit-Coq. After a few weeks of work, however, Gélinas decided to write a play on this subject rather than a film script (Bonneville, “Rencontre avec Gratien Gélinas,” 107). The extraordinary popular and critical success that the play enjoyed in the late 1940s and early ’50s, not only in Quebec but across Canada, convinced L’Anglais and producer Alexandre DeSève of the cinematic potential of Tit-Coq. Thus, in the fall of 1952, Gélinas and co-director René Delacroix commenced work on “a faithful adaptation of the celebrated play” (Tremblay-Daviault, 246),4 and the film opened to rave reviews in February 1953 (Véronneau, Cinéma de l’époque duplessiste, 117). One of the most enthusiastic responses to the film came from René Lévesque, who declared, years before becoming premier of Quebec, that with the production of Tit-Coq, “Canadian cinema emerges from the stone age” (ibid., 120).5 Ten years before creating his landmark film, Gélinas had made the short movie La dame aux camélias, la vraie (1942), which was singled out by Ginette Major as marking the inception of fiction film-making in Quebec (Major, 13) and represents the first attempt to use theatrical material as a source for a talking motion picture.6 This parody of the well-known Dumas play, which criticizes the cultural hegemony that France exerts over Quebec, was presented as part of Gélinas’s famous annual theatre revue, Les fridolinades, in 1942. Apart from La dame aux camélias, la vraie and Tit-Coq, the early merger of theatre and cinema produced a few other memorable works. The first feature-length sound fiction film made in Quebec,

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Jean-Marie Poitevin’s À la croisée des chemins (1943), was adapted from Guy Stein’s religious drama La folle aventure, which had been staged in 1942 as part of the 300th anniversary of the foundation of Montreal. À la croisée des chemins centres on a young man who must choose between the stability and limitations of marriage or the “crazy adventure” of missionary life in China. Since the film was conceived by a priest, it is not surprising that the young man decides on the latter. Although À la croisée des chemins was not distributed commercially, its edifying content made it a great favourite in the parallel network of seminarian ciné-clubs, church halls, and school auditoria (Tremblay-Daviault, 89–101). The most commercially successful Quebec film of the time, La petite Aurore, l’enfant martyre (1951) (Lever, 107, 114), is also an adaptation of a play. Aurore, l’enfant martyre, an enormously popular melodrama written by Léon Petitjean and Henri Rollin and premiered in January 1921, presents a dramatized version of the life and death of Aurore Gagnon, a ten-year-old child who died in 1920 as a result of the grave physical abuse inflicted upon her by her stepmother and, to a lesser extent, her father (Petitjean and Rollin, Aurore, l’enfant martyre, 15–23, 51–66). In 1951, Alexandre DeSève asked Émile Asselin (alias Marc Forrez) to write a screenplay on the basis of both the play and the actual events, and hired Jean-Yves Bigras to direct the film. La petite Aurore, l’enfant martyre opened to great popular success in April 1952. The strong melodramatic quality of the play and the film assured immediate and lasting success.7 It is the only film of that period that remained on the commercial circuit during subsequent years and that actually had an international career, apparently screening even in Japan (Petitjean and Rollin, Aurore, l’enfant martyre, 87–95). Shortly after the release of La petite Aurore, and about a year before the premiere of another adaptation of a melodramatic play, Coeur de maman (1953), based on Henri Deyglun’s La mère abandonnée (1925), television came to Quebec, delivering the final blow to an industry that had already begun to falter in spite of the local success of several productions (Clandfield, 61). It would take ten years for Québécois directors to take up fiction filmmaking again and yet another decade to see the first instance of film-mediated drama. But never again would theatre and cinema merge with such tremendous success as during that golden age of the canadienfrançais film industry.

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In English Canada, film-mediated drama never experienced such triumphs. As mentioned above, the first Canadian play, in either language, to be made into a feature-length motion picture was Hilda Mary Hooke’s Here Will I Nest, about Colonel Thomas Talbot, who established a settlement in South-Western Ontario in the early nineteenth century (Turner, Canadian Feature Film Index, 24). The play seems to have been a small local hit at the London (Ont.) Little Theatre, where it opened on 14 November 1938 (Curtain Call 10, no. 2, 12). The film version of the play, also known as Talbot of Canada, was directed by Melburn E. Turner in 1940 and is most notable, according to Peter Morris, “as the first Canadian dramatic feature in colour” (Morris, Embattled Shadows, 187). It received one private screening in 1942 at the Elsie Perrin Williams Memorial Library in London. A rhapsodic local reviewer announced at the time that “cultural history was made in London last night when the private premiere of the all-talking motion picture Here Will I Nest was presented” (F.B.T.). But this was the film’s only moment of glory. Here Will I Nest was never released commercially, and only fifteen of the original ninety minutes of the movie have survived (Turner, Canadian Feature Film Index, 24).

the 1970s and 1980s: theatrical characters tr a pp ed i n c i n em at i c spac e s For the next thirty years, Here Will I Nest would remain the only instance of an original English Canadian play made into a feature film. As already pointed out, the renaissance of Canadian and Québécois cinema in the 1960s emerged from the documentary tradition and coincided with the appearance of the notion of auteurship in filmmaking. This resulted in the complete disappearance of film-mediated drama during the 1960s, although t v versions of plays continued to be made. Only at the beginning of the 1970s were the first attempts made to adapt Canadian and Québécois plays for the cinema. The first feature film adapted from a Canadian play to be completed and released after 1960, in either English or French, was Fortune and Men’s Eyes (1971), based on the famous prison drama by John Herbert (a.k.a. John Herbert Brundage) and directed by Harvey Hart. The film has just recently received renewed critical attention from queer film historians and theorists like Peter Dickinson for its intricate depiction of the drag-queen character, Queenie.

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Ironically, the project to adapt Herbert’s play was initiated by an American filmmaker, Jules Schwerin. Schwerin had acquired the screen rights to Herbert’s Fortune and Men’s Eyes (1967) immediately upon seeing its world premiere in New York in 1967. Having been turned down by most Hollywood studios, he finally secured the financial support of the American major Metro-GoldwynMayer (Hofsess, 81). Although the producers, Lester Persky and Lewis Allen, eventually fired Schwerin and hired Canadian filmmaker Hart to finish the project, the movie remained for many very much an example of “entertainment à l’américaine” (Gay, 30). That the premiere of the film on 15 June 1971 was in New York, rather than in Toronto or Montreal, attests to the pertinence of this criticism (Turner, Canadian Feature Film Index, 115–16). Given the mitigating circumstances that surrounded the production and release of Fortune and Men’s Eyes, the first post-1960 adaptation of a Canadian play that can unquestionably be called “genuinely Canadian” is William Fruet’s version of his own play Wedding in White (film and play, 1972). Although the film features two foreign actors in leading roles, Donald Pleasence and Carol Kane, the content and production history of Wedding in White make it an unmistakably Canadian work. Unlike Fortune and Men’s Eyes, Wedding in White had both its stage and screen premieres in Toronto, the former in February 1972 and the latter in October of the same year. Also, unlike Fortune and Men’s Eyes, Wedding in White was filmed without the support of foreign investors (ibid., 136). Furthermore, Wedding in White, much more so than Fortune and Men’s Eyes, came out of a context that gave English Canada one of its most vibrant and fertile periods of nationalist cultural development. In 1965, when Hebert had Fortune and Men’s Eyes workshopped at the Stratford Festival, the theatre scene in Toronto was so conservative that he could not have his play produced professionally and had to bring the script to New York to be mounted off-Broadway, where it became a genuine hit. By the early 1970s, things had changed drastically. As Denis Johnston writes in his history of Toronto’s alternative theatres, Up the Mainstream (1991): “Between 1968 and 1972, a small group of small theatre companies in Toronto completely changed the way Canadians thought about their theatre. Before 1968, before this flood of new theatres and new plays, there was no such thing as an alternative theatre movement

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in Canada. By 1972 […] the alternative theatres had grown to dominate the theatrical landscape of Canada’s largest theatre market and were on the brink of attaining a national influence” (Johnston, Up the Mainstream, 3). By the time the alternative theatre movement was in full swing, Fortune and Men’s Eyes was already an international success that had to be imported back to Canada (ibid., 39). But Wedding in White, the play, emerged locally, created by one of the smaller of the “small theatre companies” of the alternative theatre movement, W.W. Productions, and benefitted from “grass-roots” government grants, such as the Local Initiatives Program and Opportunities for Youth (ibid., 262). The film was also a home-grown affair. Fruet had written the screenplay for Don Shebib’s prototypical Canadian film Goin’ Down the Road (1970) before working on Wedding in White, and to realize his first feature he surrounded himself with a small community of leading figures in the burgeoning national cinema of Canada, especially cinematographer Richard Leiterman. A camera operator associated initially with the documentary movement, Leiterman went on to shoot such landmark Canadian films as Allan King’s A Married Couple (1969) and Who Has Seen the Wind (1977), Joyce Wieland’s The Far Shore (1975), and Shebib’s Goin’ Down the Road. Leiterman’s own brand of nationalism was expressed most memorably when, while shooting Wedding in White, he launched an attack against the New York based International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Engineers. His resistance against this American technicians union was instrumental in the creation of the Council of Canadian Filmmakers in 1973, an “activist group […] dedicated to the achievement of an autonomous and financially viable Canadian film industry” (Reid, 29). In addition to Leiterman, Fruet also worked with actors Doug McGrath and Paul Bradley, the unforgettable “Pete and Joey” of Goin’ Down the Road, and Doris Petrie, who had begun her career two years earlier at Theatre Passe Muraille, one of the central companies of the alternative theatre movement (Johnston, Up the Mainstream, 112). Along with the distinct Canadianness of its production history, Wedding in White’s plot is also manifestly Canadian. The story, based on Fruet’s memories of his childhood in Alberta (Koller, 45– 6), is set during World War II and depicts a dismal English Canadian milieu in which women are the silent prisoners of cowardly

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men who vainly imagine themselves as courageous British loyalists while finding refuge from the mediocrity and uselessness of their displaced existence in the drunken bravado of Legion halls. As will be discussed in chapter 3, the condition of entrapment of the female characters in Wedding in White echoes the struggle of cinema to escape theatrical confinement. The positive response that the film version of Wedding in White enjoyed in English Canada, Quebec, and the United States; its success at the Canadian Film Awards, where it won three prizes, including best feature film; and its participation in the 1973 Cannes Film Festival, alongside Claude Jutra’s Kamouraska (1973), Gilles Carle’s La mort d’un bûcheron (1973), and Denys Arcand’s Réjeanne Padovani (1973), seemed to augur very well for the future of film-mediated drama in Canada (Loiselle, “Afferent Drama/Efferent Cinema,” 48) However, Wedding in White would prove to be the exception rather than the rule. The next adaptation of a Canadian play, Jack Cunningham’s film version of his own drama See No Evil, Hear … (1972), was produced just a few months after Fruet’s film but triggered much less interest than the former. See No Evil opened at Bill Glassco’s Tarragon Theatre in February 1972 to general indifference. The film that Cunningham made from it in 1973, entitled Peep, remained on the shelves until 1984, when it was shown in a French translation on Radio-Canada television (Turner, Canadian Feature Film Index, 154). Peep is the first in a short series of films made from obscure, unpublished plays that received very limited release and quickly fell into oblivion. A prime example of this trend is Stephen Zoller’s unpublished play Metal Messiah (1975), made into a film by Zoller and Tibor Takacs in the winter of 1976–77 for $62,000. The film had one screening at the International 16 mm Film Festival in Montreal in April 1978 and then vanished from the screens. Maynard Collins’s Hank Williams: “The Show He Never Gave” (1979), filmed by David Acomba in 1980; John Beckett Wimbs’s Memoirs of Johnny Daze (1984), adapted for the screen by Bachar Shbib (also Chbib) in 1984 as Memoirs; Peter Colley’s The Mark of Cain (1984), transposed by Bruce Pittman in 1985; and Layne Coleman’s Blue City Slammers (1985), cinematized by Peter Shatalow in 1987, are other instances of unpublished plays that were made into forgotten films (Loiselle, “Afferent Drama/Efferent Cinema,” 48–9). In fact, some of these adaptations barely qualify as professional

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works at all. John Wimbs, for instance, told me that the script he wrote for Shbib’s film was thrown together in three days and that he never revised this perfunctory draft – and it clearly shows in Memoirs’s dubious plot-line. The first feature to be adapted from a significant play following the release of Fruet’s film, and the first cinematization of a dramatic piece from Quebec in over twenty years, is Richard Martin’s 1974 “big-budget” version of Marcel Dubé’s critique of the suffocating, self-indulgent French Canadian bourgeoisie of the 1960s, Les beaux dimanches (1965). The film stars, in the roles of wealthy but unhappy middle-aged couples who seek to escape their meaningless lives, such celebrated actors as Jean Duceppe, of Mon oncle Antoine (1971) fame, and Denise Filiatrault, who had recently given a flamboyant performance in André Brassard and Michel Tremblay’s film Il était une fois dans l’Est (1973). Incidently, I purposefully exclude from this survey Il était une fois dans l’Est, for, while it borrows much material from Tremblay’s dramaturgy, it does not transpose systematically any of his plays onto the screen. Barely keeping the storyline of Les belles-soeurs (1968), it uses Tremblay’s other famous plays as pretexts to reposition his stage characters in various cinematic situations (Loiselle, “Film-mediated drama”). In spite of many promising qualities, the film was not well received at all. Jean-Pierre Tadros, who had been a strong advocate of Martin’s project in the early stages of production, and who had expressed great confidence in the ability of the all-star cast to convey Dubé’s meaning (Tadros, “Sous la direction de Richard Martin,” V1), had to concede that the final product was a failure. “The film is exceedingly uneven,” he stated. “There are moments when the essence of the Dubé play comes to the fore […] But these moments are few, and what is in between is a futile effort to render the play modern” (Tadros, “Les beaux dimanches”). Similarly, Séquences reviewer Janick Beaulieu left the screening of Les beaux dimanches (1974) feeling that this was a poorly conceived film (Beaulieu, “Les beaux dimanches,” 30). Every cinematic version of Québécois plays produced between Les beaux dimanches in 1974 and Being at Home With Claude in 1992 would receive the same kind of negative response. Almost simultaneously with the production of Les beaux dimanches, John Palmer brought to the screen Martin Kinch’s first

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play, Me? (1973). Palmer, co-founder with Kinch and Tom Hendry of the controversial Toronto Free Theatre (t f t ), had already directed the play on stage in the spring of 1973. Me? focuses on a promising young writer named Terry who wants to isolate himself in order to work but is thwarted in his efforts to complete his latest novel by the sexual demands of his zestful mistress, his estranged wife, who returns to reclaim him, and his gay friend, who happens to be in love with him. No one who saw the premiere of the play failed to see that Terry bore a strong resemblance to the playwright and that all the secondary characters had real-life counterparts in Kinch’s entourage (Lane, 7). Perhaps because of this self-referential quality, the play raised much interest among t f t regulars and was described by Herbert Whittaker as “a startling success” (Whittaker, 14). The film enjoyed much less success, however. While Palmer and his cast and crew had the feeling that they were working on a film “that will really have some meaning for Canadian audiences” (McCaughna, “Making Me,” 24), only a handful of Canadians saw the final product when it had a single showing at the Stratford (Ont.) Film Festival in September 1975 (Adilman, “Me,” 26). Having failed to find a distributor, Me (1974) has since fallen into oblivion, whence it sporadically emerges for a television broadcast. Me bears witness to one of the main differences between theatre and film as cultural practices. While the small stage production could be a “startling success” by simply appealing to local supporters of Toronto’s alternative theatre movement, the film, with a budget of over $100,000 (Turner, Canadian Feature Film Index, 180), had to reach a far broader audience, most of whom would have had no connection to, or knowledge of, the milieu from which the autobiographical story sprung. The film never found that audience. Over the three years following the production of Les beaux dimanches and Me, not a single Canadian or Québécois play of importance was made into a feature film. In 1977, as the Canadian and Québécois film industries were about to enter a period of crisis resulting, in great part, from the Canadian Film Development Corporation’s (c f d c ) ill-conceived tax-shelter policy (Lever, 313), which sold out the industry to sophomoric entrepreneurs set on the idea of creating Hollywood North, two relatively well-known plays were adapted for the screen: Carol Bolt’s One Night Stand (1977) and Louise Roy and Louis Saia’s Une amie d’enfance (1977). These

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two works, whether as plays or as movies, bear witness to the creative exhaustion that followed the creative outburst of the late 1960s and early ’70s and that started afflicting the whole field of artistic production in Canada after 1975. Carol Bolt once admitted that in One Night Stand “there is no issue.” She wrote it “as a technical exercise, to see if [she] could write a play about nothing” (Lester, 151). True enough, this thriller about a lonely woman, Daisy, who unwittingly picks up a murderer in a bar and ends up killing him in self-defense, lacks the political import of Bolt’s earlier Buffalo Jump (1972), Gabe (1973), and Red Emma (1974). It is nonetheless an entertaining piece of theatre, and filmmaker Allan King decided to adapt the play immediately upon seeing its first production at Tarragon Theatre (McCaughna, “Mr Goodbar rides again,” 65). However, responses to the movie were at best lukewarm. J. Hoberman from the Village Voice found the plot wanting in originality. He wrote: “En route to its predictable denouement, One Night Stand offers a few wan reversals” (Heberman, 59). As for Janet Maslin of the New York Times, she dismissed King’s film as “an unpleasant Canadian romance-cum-thriller” (Maslin, C22). Francis Mankiewicz’s film version of Une amie d’enfance (1978) met with similar responses. The play takes place in the backyard of a middle-class home in Duvernay, a dormitory town near Montreal where Angèle and Gaston entertain Angèle’s childhood friend, Solange, and her boyfriend, Coco, at dinner. The gathering is a pretext for Louise Roy and Louis Saia to expose the campiness, the “kétainerie,” of suburbia. By contrasting the universe of plastic palm trees and the artificial standard French of Angèle and Gaston with Solange and Coco’s happy bohemian lifestyle, the authors caustically denounce the narrow-mindedness and comfortable hypocrisy of the middle class. Mankiewicz’s effort to cinematize Roy and Saia’s satire was deemed a failure. Janick Beaulieu even suggested, sarcastically, that “the film should be shown on radio!” (Beaulieu, “Une amie d’enfance,” 23).8 Two other adaptations from Francophone Canada made shortly after Une amie d’enfance were similarly dismissed. Yves Simoneau’s 1979 rendition of Michel Garneau’s Les célébrations (1976), shot for $20,000,9 retains the play’s structure as a collection of vignettes from the life of Margo, a psychologist, and her long-time partner,

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Paul-Emile, a professor of philosophy obsessed with death. Although the play won the 1977 Governor General’s Award for drama in French, the film received rather tepid reviews when it opened in Montreal in June 1979. For Robert-Claude Bérubé, the film amounts to a noisy and empty portrayal of characters who are little more than trendy pseudo-intellectuals (Bérubé, 37). Paul Blouin’s 1981 film of Antonine Maillet’s Gapi (1976) is yet another example of the same predicament. A spin-off from Maillet’s tremendously successful one-woman play La Sagouine (1971), Gapi shows the solitary life of la Sagouine’s husband. Since his wife’s death, Gapi has become a recluse, living alone on a dune and keeping a lighthouse on the coast of Acadia. The film was originally produced for television but had a screening at Montreal’s Festival des Films du Monde in 1982 (hence it’s inclusion in this study as a feature film). However, once again, reviewers were not impressed. Klady, for one, wrote: “The inclusion of the film in Montréal’s competition section is puzzling for even the partisan audience found the stagebound offering uncompelling” (Klady, 19). As we will see in chapter 4, this film is indeed stage-bound. But rather than being a flaw, this is in fact an intriguing parallel between content and form, for the film is as stage-bound as Gapi is dune-bound. The few other plays adapted before 1992 met with similar disapproval from critics.10 Kelly Rebar’s Bordertown Café (1987), filmed by Norma Bailey in 1991, was described by Reg Skene as a “cartoon-like political allegory” about “Free Trade anxiety” (Skene, 16). The play examines the predicament of a young man, Jimmy, who must choose between staying with his mother in their small Alberta café and following his teamster father to the u s . Yet again, the film was reviewed negatively, being denigrated as little more than a “potted t v drama” (Godwin, 37). Vic Sarin’s 1989 film version of Jim Garrard’s Cold Comfort (1981) also focuses on the issue of staying in the Prairies or leaving. Perceived as either “a fascinating exercise in bizarre naturalism” (Rubin, 9) or a “Gothic horror tale” (Weatherbe, 31), the play relates the story of a travelling salesman who falls prey to a deranged tow truck driver and his backward teenage daughter. Throughout the play and the film, the travelling salesman tries to convince the daughter to leave with him, but she is reluctant to break free from her oppressive father. At the end of the play, father and daughter leave their home permanently,

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abandoning the salesman chained to a pipe inside the house. Although Cold Comfort, the movie, was something of a sleeper at the 1989 Festival of Festivals in Toronto, the critics were not impressed by Sarin’s effort. Most revealing is Martin Girard’s remark that, even though Sarin shows several shots of landscapes, the film remains a stagy adaptation (Girard, 53).

si n c e t h e 1 9 90 s: i nc r eas i n gly s tage - b o un d The train of negative critical responses to film-mediated drama finally ceased in 1992 with the release of Beaudin’s adaptation of Dubois’s Being at Home with Claude. The drama depicts a long interrogation by a police inspector trying to extract an explanation from a young homosexual prostitute who has confessed to killing his lover but refuses to say why. Beaudin’s film was the first widely acclaimed cinematic treatment of a play since the relative success of Wedding in White in 1972. Séquences critics Janick Beaulieu and Léo Bonneville both voted Being at Home with Claude one of the ten best movies of 1992, alongside such international hits as James Ivory’s Howards End (1992) and Billy August’s The Best Intentions (1992) (Beaulieu et al., 26). Released exactly fifty years after Here Will I Nest, Beaudin’s version of Being at Home with Claude, which will be discussed in chapter 5 along with films by Denys Arcand, John Greyson, Robert Lepage, and Cynthia Roberts, marks a turning point in the history of Canadian and Québécois filmmediated drama. With this film, we have entered a period in our cinema when adaptations of plays have become a relatively common practice, producing a regular flow of appreciated films. As a growing number of plays are being transposed for the screen, filmmaking in this country is increasingly stage-bound – that is, going in the direction of the stage, with more and more producers looking to the theatre for inspiration. Neil Sinyard has argued that “the task of adapting a play to the screen boils down to one of two alternatives: by making you forget the stage altogether; or by making you hyperaware of it,” and it is those films that clearly adopt one of these two extremes, rather than merely “tinker[ing] around somewhere in between [… that] have proved by far the most interesting and rewarding” (Sinyard, 182, 183). Certainly, the most intriguing instances of film-mediated drama in the Canadian corpus are those works that have leaned to-

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wards “hyperawareness” of the theatrical origins of the scenario. Recent films like Tectonic Plates, The Darling Family, House, Cabaret neiges noires, Nô, Matroni et moi, and Les muses orphelines, which will be considered in the concluding chapter, rather than erasing theatre, make reference to it, using the tension between the two art forms as a means to sharpen the drama’s meaning. Thus, as Canadian cinema appears to be increasingly stage-bound (going towards theatre for inspiration), it also remains very much stagebound, anchored to the stage, for the films’ ties to the theatre are clearly inscribed in the cinematic texts. This book seeks to elucidate the various forms that these inscriptions of theatre into film assume in a number of particularly effective productions.

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2 Early Thresholds of Theatre and Film

^^

For Alenka Zupancic, “film in today’s sense of the word is born or constituted precisely as a step over a specific threshold – the stage threshold or the perimeter of the stage” (Zupancic, 74). The intriguing quality of the corpus studied in this book is that most Canadian plays adapted for film since 1942 present characters who are positioned at the threshold. They are torn between, on the one hand, the sometimes safe, often oppressive domesticity of the contained theatrical space and, on the other hand, the sometimes liberating, often menacing, and forlorn expanse of the open cinematic landscape. This is not to say that every film based on a Canadian or Québécois drama necessarily contains such a literal image of the threshold or even something that comes close to this visual configuration. But at a metaphorical, if not always a literal, level all the works analysed in this and the following chapters include at their core such a tension. As Zupancic’s statement implies, this dramatic tension is central to the very relationship between theatre and film. In the works examined here, this liminal condition does not remain tacit but is foregrounded and problematized through the adaptation process. ^^

^^

here will i nest and the canadian settler’s predicament The two early French Canadian films, La petite Aurore, l’enfant martyre and Tit-Coq, offer clear evidence of the clash between the

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contained dramatic space and the natural filmic environment, in terms of both the content of the texts and the formal composition of the adapted material. This tension is less obvious, however, in the first feature film adaptation of a Canadian play, Melburn Turner’s version of Hilda Mary Hooke’s Here Will I Nest, in great part because only fifteen minutes of the feature have survived and the sound track is missing. This makes it almost impossible to evaluate the degree to which the film departs from its source. The following analysis, therefore, must remain highly speculative. Yet an attempt to interpret some elements of Here Will I Nest is worthwhile, if only to vindicate a film that has been ignored by historians1 despite its significance as the first feature ever inspired by a Canadian play. Regardless of the absence of audible dialogue and the brevity of the scenes that still exist, one can nonetheless notice an intriguing dichotomy in the visual material that comprises the first quarter of an hour of the film, a dichotomy that becomes more meaningful in the light of the original play. As the opening credits appear, the viewer sees a bucolic Canadian landscape across which a horse and carriage move at a leisurely pace. There follows a conversation between two British officers standing in a small room. While the exact content of the discussion remains unclear, one is struck by the contrast between the liveliness of the introductory scene outdoors and the rigidity and artificial deportment of the actors in the confines of the den. This stiff and unrealistic behaviour on the part of the actors is sustained in the few outdoor scenes that follow the initial dialogue. In the exterior scenes, the contrast between the pleasant, domesticated natural landscape and the awkward, stagy human figures becomes even more evident. In these shots there emerges a visual conflict between a pleasing conception of nature and the characters’ inadequate response to this setting. Knowledge of the exact content of the various verbal exchanges that occur outside is not required to appreciate that the characters should feel at ease strolling in this environment. Yet they are seemingly paralyzed, unable to fully occupy the space in which they stand and disconnected from the world that surrounds them. The actors’ comportment could potentially be explained by the fact that amateurs were cast in the roles of these early-nineteenthcentury ladies, gentlemen, and officers; perhaps they did not have the skills necessary to portray characters moving in space normally. This argument is somewhat discredited, however, when one considers Turner’s later but equally amateurish The Little Canadian

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(1954). The in-door scenes in this film are as stilted and unnatural as the opening dialogue of Here Will I Nest. However, in the many sequences shot outdoors, the rather incompetent actors of The Little Canadian still manage to engage with their environment in a way that is never found in the few remaining sequences of the 1942 film. For instance, the scene in which the old eccentric “Deacon” (Wallace Robb) chases a chicken around his backyard and ends up face down in a swamp shows a degree of involvement with the materiality of nature that Turner’s earlier film never displays. Thus, rather than blaming the characters’ behaviour on the actors’ lack of skills, I would propose another explanation for the aforementioned discontinuity between figure and ground. I would argue that as personae created for the stage – that is, personae existing primarily as linguistically constructed subjects rather than as bodies in action through space – the characters of Here Will I Nest are literally out of place in the natural decor that cinema provides. André Bazin’s observations on the issue of the actor on stage as opposed to the actor on screen suggest that the theatrical emphasis on character collides with the cinematic focus on natural landscape: “[T]he human being is all-important in the theatre. The drama on screen can exist without actors […] Like the ocean in a sea shell the dramatic infinities of the human heart moan and beat between the enclosing walls of the theatrical sphere. This is why this dramaturgy is in its essence human. Man is at once its cause and its subject. On the screen man is no longer the focus of the drama […] The decor that surrounds him is part of the solidity of the world. For this reason the actor as such can be absent from it, because man in the world enjoys no a priori privilege over animals and things” (Bazin, 102, 106). In “Acting: Stage vs. Screen,” Leo Braudy also argues that the cinema is in continuity with the world. Therefore, the film character does not stand apart from the world as the distanced theatre character does: Character in film generally is more like character as we perceive it everyday [sic] than it is in any other representational art. The heightened style of silent film acting could be considered an extension of stage acting, but the more personal style allowed by sound film paradoxically both increased the appeal of films and lowered their intellectual status […] The line between film actor and part is much more difficult to draw than that between stage actor and role, and the social dimension

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of “role” contrasts appropriately with the personal dimension of “part” […] In our minds the stage actor stays within the architectures he has inhabited, while the film actor exists in between as well, forever immediate to our minds and eyes, escaping the momentary enclosures that the individual films have placed around him […] Film actors play their roles the way we play ourselves in the world. (Braudy, 248, 252)

While their arguments on the contrasts between theatre and film diverge in many respects, Bazin and Braudy do agree on the notion that the film character is linked to things in the world, while the dramatic character remains divorced from the world, trapped as it were within “the enclosing walls of the theatrical sphere” or “within the architectures he has inhabited.” Thus a dramatic character put in a cinematic milieu may come across as an artificial construct in a natural world, as a “role” that is not “part” of the realistic environment of film. Without speaking as specifically as Bazin and Braudy do about the stage actor compared to the film actor, other critics have also noted the gap that separates the closed artificiality of the theatre and the open realism of the screen. This breach could explain the difficulty inherent in the transplantation of stylized characters written for the stage into the realistic world of cinema. Martin Esslin contends that films based on drama run the risk of creating a fissure between the theatrical attributes of a dramatic text and the cinematic environment within which it is inserted: “The photographic nature of the film and television medium, moreover, allows a much greater degree of realism in the backgrounds. On the other hand, this same photographic element also militates against anything stylised, removed from realism; even costume drama becomes a problem in the cinema and in television – the further the period of the action recedes from the present, the greater becomes the clash between the realism of the background and costumes and the contemporaneity of the language used by the characters. Verse drama becomes an even greater problem” (Esslin, An Anatomy of Drama, 78–9). Here Will I Nest presents a clear instance of this clash, where the theatrical characters are utterly disengaged from the natural setting generated by photographic reproduction. The chasm between the anthropocentric world of theatre and the natural world of film, not only in Here Will I Nest but potentially in every film adaptation of

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plays, results from the fact that, as Neil Sinyard states, “the two forms are antithetical: theatre is artificial lighting and illusion, and cinema is open-air and realism; theatre is verbal, cinema visual; theatre is stasis, cinema is movement” (Sinyard, 157). It does not come as a surprise, therefore, that stage characters thrown into the midst of a cinematic landscape do not appear fully integrated in this environment. Rather they stand in a liminal position between their selfcontained theatrical existence and a boundless filmic milieu. The issue of transplanting theatrical characters into cinematic soil will be explored at more length in the next chapter. At this point, I would submit another interpretation for the peculiar attitude that characters display towards their environment in Here Will I Nest. This interpretation takes into consideration a cultural paradigm that informs some of this study: namely, the Canadian’s ambiguous response to the landscape. Gaile McGregor has coined the term “Wacousta syndrome” to abstract this particular trait of the Canadian/Québécois imagination. As already mentioned in the previous chapter, my point here is not to claim that McGregor’s theory explains the actual behaviour of actual Canadians. Rather, I see McGregor’s approach as part of a literary discourse that has been quite influential (especially in its Fryean version) and that offers a striking parallel to the dialectical tensions that exist within the adapted dramas and between theatre and film. The Wacousta Syndrome, like Northrop Frye’s Garrison Mentality, are nothing more – but nothing less – than intriguing cultural metaphors for the recursive symmetry that appears to govern the composition of the body of works studied in this book. Surveying an impressive variety of artistic and literary works from anglophone and francophone Canada, as well as several texts from the United States to provide points of comparison, McGregor’s treatise, The Wacousta Syndrome (1985), offers perhaps the most exhaustive analysis of the seemingly endemic tendency among Canadians to recoil from the landscape. Already identified by Frye and Margaret Atwood and further tested in French Canadian literature by Simon Harel, Micheline Cambron, and others, this impulse, McGregor argues, which finds its prototypical expression in Major John Richardson’s nineteenth-century life-in-the-garrison novel, Wacousta (1832) – hence the syndrome’s nomenclature – recurs throughout the canon of Canadian/Québécois cultural productions. The Canadian character, McGregor claims, has long been influ-

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enced by an ambiguous relationship with the environment, an equivocal “opposition between centre and ground, between ‘self’ and ‘not-self› (McGregor, 5). This ambiguity ensues, at least in part, from a contradiction between conceptions of the environment and actual perceptions of the environment that dates back to the early days of colonization in Canada. Influenced first by romantic notions of nature imported from Europe and later by the American definition of the Frontier as a “great crucible,” to use Frederick Jackson Turner’s term, where the colonist could go “to re-capture that Renaissance condition where each man was potentially able to realize his broadest ambitions” (ibid., 50), early Canadians “embraced enthusiastically a romantic cult of primitivistic wilderness-worship” (ibid., 51). This cult, however, clashed drastically with actual perceptions of the Canadian environment as harsh, unthinking, and impossible to dominate. In art, this gap between a romantic vision and a traumatic first-hand experience of nature is apparent throughout a corpus that extends up to the 1920s with the Group of Seven. As McGregor suggests, “it would seem that the Group, no less than their colonial predecessors, whatever they might say about the effects of nature actually saw something there that was far from wholesome” (ibid., 56). In early Canadian paintings, as well as in the work of the Group of Seven and other expressionistic paintings of the 1920s and ’30s such as those of Emily Carr, McGregor finds ample evidence “of the tension between the Canadian’s desire for and fear of reconciliation with nature” (ibid., 57). A similar ambivalence exists in the early literary tradition of Quebec, the romans du terroir, which “reveal a great deal of antipathy toward the landscape even as they eulogize the pastoral tradition” (ibid., 62). McGregor argues that these early examples of the Canadian/Québécois paradoxical attitude towards the environment persist, albeit in different forms, in more recent cultural products. Hooke’s Here Will I Nest contains a similar ambivalence, which might have translated on screen into the tension discussed above. On the surface, the play presents a positive depiction of the rustic life that awaits those who join the settlement that Colonel Thomas Talbot wished to establish on the shores of Lake Erie in the early nineteenth century. As Talbot tells a friend: “Who’d have thought, George […] twelve years ago, that to-day we’d be sitting opposite one another in this beautiful wilderness, at a table made by our own

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hands, in a house every log of which we’ve set ourselves […] I’d rather be eating this homely fare than the best dinner in London. I regret nothing. It’s been a glorious struggle; and we’ve won, so far” (Hooke, 62). But this idyllic view of Ontario wilderness, which conveys a romantic vision of nature not unlike that which McGregor detects in traditional visual or literary accounts, is undermined in certain respects. A few marginal but revealing comments intimate a more profound menace than is first perceived. For one thing, Talbot informs a new settler later in the play that “We’ve lost almost all our animals with wolves coming in at night; we must safeguard yours better” (ibid., 74). Furthermore, the native population of the region is viewed as a threat to be reckoned with. As Talbot’s subaltern, George Crane, explains: “That troupe of Indians that slept in the kitchen last week took away half the barrel [of salt pork] with them […] I’d keep the house shut up, then they’d have to sleep in the woods, as we’ve done before now.” Talbot prefers not to shut out the Natives, but less because he enjoys their presence than because he is afraid of them: “I shouldn’t want to lock the door against them. They’re friendly enough, and they’d be bad enemies to make” (ibid., 61). What we see in Talbot’s response is a noteworthy sign of his ambiguous relationship with nature: Whatever friendliness he might claim to see in Natives, and by extension in Nature, actually hides a fear of hostility. While Talbot claims to enjoy the wide open spaces, what he actually wants to do is create a small abode for himself, quite literally a nest, that would be self-contained and safe: “Who would not trade civilization for the glorious freedom of these woods, for the feel of open spaces – above all, for the knowledge that this corner is mine, my nest, my castle […] ‘The Talbot Settlement’ […] villages springing up, towns, schools, churches – a truly British colony, self-contained and self-supporting” (ibid., 67, 68). Whether or not McGregor is right in claiming that the Wacousta Syndrome applies to all of Canadian literature, it certainly applies to Here Will I Nest. Talbot clearly embodies in his speeches the tension between a romantic attraction for the wilderness and an urge to recoil from a threatening environment and build a “garrison” around himself and his community. Incidently, another feature by Melburn Turner, the Frenchlanguage Étienne Brûlé, gibier de potence (1952), seems to confirm

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the filmmaker’s awareness of the distinction between the self-contained garrison and the attractive but threatening open spaces. Set in the early years of the French regime in Canada, Étienne Brûlé contrasts the regimented world of Samuel de Champlain (Jacques Auger) in the small settlement that is now Quebec city with the earthy, pagan environment that explorer Étienne Brûlé (Paul Dupuis) discovers when he starts living with the Natives. Not unlike Richardson’s Sir Reginald Morton, a.k.a. Wacousta, Brûlé is transformed by his association with the natural world of the Native population into a hypermasculine sensualist and a heartless traitor. But as much as a 1950s audience would have probably been expected to side with Champlain, in filmic terms the rigidity and artificial demeanour of the actors depicting the French settlers are no match for the carnal energy of Brûlé. Much like Colonel Talbot, Turner’s Samuel de Champlain might praise the noble Hurons who help him against the Iroquois, but when he is faced with the threat that the white-man-turned-native embodies, he quickly resorts to segregationist rhetoric, proclaiming that the French will always remain as they are and will never be swallowed up by this dark continent. Talbot’s “nest” represents a similar resistance against the corruptive effect that nature might have on British civilization. Talbot’s attitude is evidently in keeping with Frye’s notion of the “garrison mentality” as formulated in his often-quoted “Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada,” published in The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination (1971). This garrison mentality, Frye explains, developed in Canada roughly at the time of Talbot’s settlement as a result of the country’s constitution as a compound of “[s]mall and isolated communities surrounded with a physical or psychological “frontier,” separated from one another and from their American and British cultural sources: communities that provide all that their members have in the way of distinctively human values, and that are compelled to feel a great respect for the law and order that holds them together, yet confronted with a huge, unthinking, menacing and formidable physical setting” (Frye, The Bush Garden, 225). But, while the garrison offers Canadians protection against the terror elicited by the environment, it also provokes an internal terror as a result of the strictly unquestionable rules that it imposes on its members. Frye notes that “in a perilous enterprise one does not discuss causes or motives: one is either a fighter or a deserter.” “The real terror,” Frye continues, “comes

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when the individual feels himself becoming an individual, pulling away from the group, losing the sense of driving power that the group gives him, aware of a conflict within himself far subtler than the struggle of morality against evil” (ibid., 226). Although Talbot does not impose unchallengeable rules on his settlers, some part of his speeches do convey dictatorial tendencies. He calls his settlers “my subjects” (Hooke, 77) and his “flock” (ibid., 76). At the very end of the play, Talbot tells his settlers, “I give you – the Talbot Settlement,” and they all reply in unison, “The Talbot Settlement” (ibid., 78). This suggests the type of forced unity and harmony at the core of the garrison mentality. In this short play glorifying Canadian history, Hooke does not explore in much depth the issue of the garrison mentality. Rather, she presents the superficial happiness of the settlers with certain hints (probably unconscious on the playwright’s part) of the fear of the outside world and the oppressive potential of the group’s leader. I would argue that the film, or what is left of it, functions along the same lines. While on the surface the landscape and its inhabitants live in harmony, in reality there is a marked dissonance between the surroundings and the reluctant settlers. Significantly, although one does not actually see a garrison or a fortress in the few existing minutes of the film, one can sense that each character, in the stiffness and artificiality of her or his comportment, becomes an incarnation of the fortress. This is again in keeping with Frye: “It is much easier to multiply garrisons, and when that happens, something anticultural comes into Canadian life, a dominating herd-mind in which nothing original can grow. The intensity of the sectarian divisiveness in Canadian towns, both religious and political, is an example” (Frye, The Bush Garden, 226). Individuals, either as overly disciplined British officers or as ladies shackled in a corsetted gown, carry with them the ramparts of the garrison. As they move through the landscape like automatons, cut off from their natural surroundings and even from each other, the characters of Here Will I Nest evoke the liminal tension that results from the centripetal/centrifugal dialectic described in chapter 1. In observing these awkward figures severed from the natural setting with which they (fail to) interact, one can surmise that they are at the threshold between internal, colonial, dramatic confines and an external, feral, cinematic expanse. In chapter 5, I will discuss how the performance of death on stage and in film evokes similar connotations.

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At this point in our analysis, however, lack of filmic material makes it impossible to speculate further on the meaning of Here Will I Nest. More conclusive interpretations can be reached when considering the two early Quebec adaptations, La petite Aurore, l’enfant martyre and Tit-Coq, which are both available in their complete form. The dialectic between the theatrical indoors and the cinematic alfresco is as present in the two French-language films as it is in Here Will I Nest. Indeed, the conflict between the oppression of the closed setting and the chaotic threat of the outside world, which is only hinted at in Here Will I Nest, becomes central in TitCoq. In La petite Aurore, l’enfant martyre, while the harsh enclosure remains, the outside world acquires quite a different meaning; it comes to signify, at least on the surface, the spiritual freedom that Catholic faith associates with ascension to heaven. But this equation of nature with traditional Catholic faith is undermined by an array of ironic connotations. These result in part from the ambiguous relationship that the film entertains with both its theatrical antecedent and the ideological discourse that dominated Quebec at the time of its release.

t o r t u r e , t h e a t r i c a l i t y, a n d a u r o r e , l’enfant martyre Aurore, l’enfant martyre by Léon Petitjean and Henri Rollin is very much a melodrama of captivity. In addition to taking place exclusively inside, the two closed spaces in which the play unfolds – the house of Aurore’s father and a courtroom where the abusive parents are being tried for the child’s murder – are clearly identified as loci of entrapment and torture. There is a difference between the first and second halves of the drama: While the former exposes the various degrees of Aurore’s horrific sequestration at the hands of her stepmother, the latter displays society’s “justified” prosecution and condemnation of the sadistic matron. However, there is an uncomfortable similarity between the oppressive behaviour of the stepmother and that of the state, regardless of legal justifications. Therefore, the play must distinguish between the type of punishment imposed by society and the tyranny of the stepmother. This is achieved by setting the stepmother’s violence, which is offered as a spectacle, apart from the state’s violence, which remains abstract. On the one hand, the cruelty of the stepmother is presented in its

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very performance on stage as being grotesque, disgusting, repugnant. The socially condoned cruelty of justice, on the other hand, is sanitized, as it is not manifested on stage. The sentence of death by hanging is pronounced but not shown (Petitjean and Rollin, Aurore, l’enfant martyre, 255), unlike the atrocities inflicted on the child by the stepmother, which are displayed in full view. Certain productions even advertised as their main attractions episodes worthy of Grand-Guignol,2 such as scenes in which the girl is whipped, burned, and thrown down a flight of stairs (ibid., 74). We will return later to the effect of this distinction between graphically performed violence, which is naturalist in style, and verbally implied violence, which assures the realist containment of naturalist excess. At this point, what must be examined is the way in which judicial violence is not only sanitized and abstracted, but actually made almost holy through the strong religious overtones of the drama. The religious content authorizes social persecution while condemning its counterpart in the private domain. There are two moments in the four-act play when a sense of religious liberation emerges, first at the end of act 2, when Aurore, delirious as she is dying, sees heaven above her: “Soon before God. The skies are opening, angels are smiling. It is so beautiful. Mother come get me! I want a better fate. [She dies]” (ibid., 194).3 The second moment of liberation, at the very end of the play, has the same tone, but this time Aurore is herself an angel, coming down to implore God to forgive her stepmother as she is sentenced to death (ibid., 254–5). A reviewer who saw a performance of Aurore in the summer of 1921 perceived the finale precisely in terms of a spiritual liberation after a lengthy spectacle of bondage, pain, and punishment: “The horrible tragedy unfolds before the spectators’ eyes, with its incredible brutality, but the illuminated cross of divine consolation shines at the dawn [aurore] of deliverance and the audience, relieved at the sight of heaven, applaud wholeheartedly the performers, who manage to transform this abominable spectacle into a triumph of Faith in the face of human persecution in its basest form” (ibid., 56).4 This final instance of liberation conferred by Catholic faith serves to condone the punishment imposed by a society that supports the church’s castigation of the unnatural actions of the woman who should have performed the sacred maternal functions but indulged instead in sadistic practices. By counterbalancing the death penalty

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imposed by the judge with a heavenly apparition, the play cleanses society of its involvement in physical violence and effaces all correlations with the crimes of the stepmother. The play, therefore, negates all ambiguity concerning the guilt of the stepmother and the sanction of the court. The screen version is significantly less straightforward. The film does not include such specific moments of religious redemption. This might be because realistic cinema does not lend itself as much as the stage to artificial deus-ex-machina apparitions. But a more probable explanation for the absence of explicit religious visions in the film is the transitional period of its production. By the early 1950s, the church along with its political ally, the ultraconservative Union nationale party, led by the formidable Maurice Duplessis, had already started to lose some of the overwhelming power it had exerted over the population of Quebec. As Christiane Tremblay-Daviault explains in her close analysis of the film, by 1951 the church was increasingly seen as part of the problem of French Canadian alienation rather than as a solution (TremblayDaviault, 215–16). While more conservative in its politics than TitCoq, La petite Aurore, l’enfant martyre still bears witness to the changing complexion of a culture that was at the threshold of the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s (Conway, 90–4). The film does display some positive religious content, which is expressed in great part through a representation of the natural environment absent from the play. But these positive images are problematized by an awareness that in its very acceptance of pain and torture, the church contradicts its own tenets of love and kindness. As Valerie Gray Hardcastle suggests in The Myth of Pain (1999), with Christianity’s emphasis on Christ’s suffering, “pain became a form of divine retribution or a sign of having been chosen by God, both of which encouraged an acceptance of pain and suffering” (Hardcastle, 3). Paradoxically, therefore, torture is at once a punishment for the guilty and an honour for the chosen. H.B. Gibson, author of Pain and Its Conquest (1982), agrees while stressing the gendered tendencies of pain infliction: [T]here are many Biblical texts that can be interpreted to mean that pain is divinely ordained as a punishment for original sin […] Attempts to alleviate pain were viewed with grave suspicion by the Church until comparatively modern times […] To provide relief from pain in childbirth

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was contrary to the teachings of the Church […] [E]ven after the Church had lost its directly coercive power […] there were priests and religious doctors who still objected strongly to the privilege of relief from pain being extended to women in childbirth […] Many feminists will regard the long-continued denial of analgesic relief to women in labour as part of the cruel domination of women by men in our history. (Gibson, 22, 24)

While the original melodrama disavows the church’s implication in the infliction of pain, the film highlights the fissure in the church’s argument, especially through the priest’s (Marc Forrez) inaction late in the film. After having learned of Aurore’s situation, he offers no solution to the girl’s pain other than prayers, as though suffering in a female subject was not worthy of remedy. At the same time as the film criticizes the church in its subtext, it consciously attempts to confirm the moralistic stance inherited from the theatrical original. The liberation that is achieved on stage through religious deliverance is approximated on film through cinema’s partial liberation from the prison in which the stepmother (Lucie Mitchell) confines Aurore (Yvonne Laflamme). Cinema signifies liberation through the depiction of the world outside of the father’s house and breaks with the claustrophobic theatrical antecedent of the work. However, the elements of sadism and masochism that underlie Catholicism lead to certain contradictions in the film’s putative condemnation of the evil stepmother. The distinction between good and evil becomes sometimes as blurred as the distinction between inside and outside, containment and transgression. But, by the end, these oppositions are solidly reinstated, as the film closes with the theatrical conviction of the Matron, whose overacted, agonizing screams in the self-consciously prison-like decor of the courtroom underline the staginess of the concluding scene. In general terms, the film opens up the drama, allowing characters to evolve outside of the house where most of the action takes place. Like in Here Will I Nest, some outdoor scenes in La petite Aurore, l’enfant martyre attest to the breach between the theatrical characters and their cinematic environment. The opening scene of the film shows Aurore’s father, Théodore (Paul Desmarteaux), arriving at a blacksmith’s shop. The composition of the long shot through which most of this scene is presented centres on the threshold of the blacksmith’s shop, where Théodore stands, circumscribed by the proscenium-like doorframe. Furthermore, the outside vista

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behind Théodore is clearly a rear projection suggesting a rural setting. From the start, it could be argued, the characters are partly anchored in their original theatricality even as they move within a cinematic setting. But in a number of other sequences taking place outside of Théodore’s house, theatricality is much less obvious or even disappears entirely. Several scenes were shot on location in the village of Ste-Geneviève (Véronneau, Cinéma de l’époque duplessiste, 109), and although the acting would probably not qualify as “realistic” by today’s standards, it is not nearly as stilted as what is witnessed in Here Will I Nest. An evocative correlation is established early in the film, which qualifies the use of natural settings. This correlation reinvests nature with a semiotic design beyond its ontological participation in the film’s diegesis. The outside world, when it is shot in a natural environment, is repeatedly associated with positive values of generosity, kindness, and truth, in contrast to the negativity ascribed to Théodore’s house, where deception reigns supreme and where tortures are inflicted upon Aurore. The first shot of the film that was clearly recorded in a natural environment takes place in a churchyard, the vessel of Christian charity, with the priest at the centre of the visual field and religious statues figuring prominently in the frame. A later outdoor scene, in which Aurore’s compassionate Aunt Melvina (Nana de Varenne) notices early signs of abuse on her niece, also takes place in a religious environment, the peaceful cemetery where Aurore is visiting her mother’s grave. Not all scenes shot outdoors include such explicit religious signifiers, but they regularly include characters who, like the priest and Aunt Melvina, are linked to the more humane tenets of the church. Among these characters, perhaps the most consistent example is Catherine (Jeanette Bertrand), the good, religious neighbour who will alert the priest of Aurore’s situation late in the film. Her connection to the church and the outdoors culminates in her last appearance in the film, when, standing under a tree in the churchyard, she convinces her husband, Abraham (Jean Lajeunesse), to take care of Aurore’s siblings after their parents have been condemned for her murder. Although they are poor and already have several children, Catherine and Abraham display a happy acceptance of the extra burden that these children will present and are thus clearly alined with the Catholic promotion of humble finances and large progenies. Catherine’s strong association with the

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outdoors and Catholic benevolence imply her natural motherly attitude, which welcomes children as a blessing and woman’s devotion to them as her only valid role in society. Conversely, the evil, unnatural stepmother, Marie-Louise, is primarily filmed inside closed spaces, with a few striking quasiexpressionist shots taken from inside cupboards and closets to further emphasize her connection with captivity, deceit, bondage, and torture. There are also instances when the stepmother appears outside the house. These scenes, however, are either counterbalanced by the presence of positive characters, like Catherine, who alleviates the stepmother’s negative aura, or theatricalized by having nature rendered in an artificial way, as it would be on stage with plastic props and photographic backdrops. In one such scene, approximately thirty minutes into the film, the stepmother meets her husband in the field to complain about Aurore’s “bad behaviour” (the girl refuses to call her stepmother “maman” and calls her “madame” instead, which enrages Marie-Louise). The brief exchange between the spouses, although set outside, exhibits “unnatural” qualities and as such seems to be taking place in the dark antechamber of the external world. The artificial key light, which casts unusual shadows, the flat still-life background, and the dark motionless clouds that loom over the couple imbue the scene with an element of falsehood that parallels Marie-Louise’s unnatural attitude towards the child. The character of Marie-Louise, who clearly dominates her husband as he cravenly gives her permission to discipline Aurore, is thus projected onto the environment. Interestingly, in a later outdoor scene in which Théodore insists on bringing Aurore to visit her mother’s grave in spite of MarieLouise’s objections, the father’s dominance of his new wife, albeit fragile, and his positive treatment of his daughter, however temporary, translates into a pre-eminence of the natural world over the artificiality and distortions of reality related to Marie-Louise. The negative connotations, deceitfulness, fabrication, and theatricality evident in the field scene are also in stark contrast to the scenes that bracket it, which are shot in bright, sunny outdoors. The former, set in a bucolic glade, shows Maurice (Roch Poulin), MarieLouise’s surprisingly gentle young son, kindly consoling Aurore after an outburst of violence from her stepmother, and the latter begins with Catherine closely followed by the stepmother. In this sequence, the stepmother moves in a natural, cinematic milieu along

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with Catherine and later with Maurice and Aurore. Here, MarieLouise adopts an amicable façade that is meant to fool Catherine. However, as soon as the stepmother is alone with Aurore (or so she wrongly believes, for Catherine’s then husband-to-be, Abraham, actually observes the scene from a distance) and resumes her cruel behaviour, plunging Aurore’s head into a thorny shrub, theatricality re-emerges as the dominant aesthetic mode. The close shot of Marie-Louise’s hands covering Aurore’s head with spiked branches, reminiscent of crucifixion imagery, appears theatrical for a number of reasons. The loud melodramatic organ music, which drowns out the ambient sounds, the bogus appearance of the shrub itself, and the abrupt cut that follows the insert serve to isolate this shot as a moment of dramatic brutality set apart from the gentleness of the rest of the segment filmed in nature. This scene, like every other scene recorded outside, is a pure cinematic construct that has no equivalent in the original play. However, the moments within the strictly cinematic material that reproduce the cruel, oppressive character of the original text are visually bracketed in such a way as to draw attention to their disjunction from the filmic narrative. The link between theatricality and Marie-Louise is most obvious when she performs her dual role as the “devoted wife” and the “evil stepmother” within the closed space of Théodore’s house. While the former is a performance within the film, which spectators are meant to recognize as a front of deception and lies, the latter is the performance of the actress Lucie Mitchell, which is not acknowledged as “performance” within the reality of the film. It is still recognized (and evidently enjoyed) by the audience, however, as a riveting performance of villainy that includes, as part of its machinery of evil, the performance of righteousness. Mitchell’s acting during her villainous performance of goodness is actually more realistic than the segments in which she is not supposed to be performing, but rather simply being her evil self. Her affected tone when she utters threats to both Aurore and Maurice, the menacing posturing she adopts when overpowering Aurore, the artificial organ music that accompanies the scenes of torture and pain, and the exaggeratedly gothic attic with fake spiders in which she detains Aurore combine to present Marie-Louise’s “true” identity in terms of the meretricious conventions of theatrical melodrama. Ironically, but not surprisingly, the acts of torture themselves are not convincing in realistic terms. In one scene in which she “beats” Aurore with a

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belt, Mitchell is clearly hitting not the girl herself, but the floor several inches behind the child’s unconscious body. In another scene, when she proceeds to burn Aurore’s hands on the hot stove, the framing, which masks the actual point of contact between the stove and the girl’s hands, the lack of smoke or sound of burning flesh as the hands are seared, and even the slightly wavering movements of the actress’s hands off-screen, which implies that no solid object is actually being touched, deny realism and stress artificiality. At another level, Marie-Louise’s melodramatic theatricality is expressed in her constant repression of language. As both Heinz Weinmann (41) and Christiane Tremblay-Daviault (219) have argued, one of the stepmother’s main objectives is to silence Aurore, who knows that the evil woman is responsible for her mother’s death and for her own physical afflictions. Marie-Louise attempts to obliterate language through physical tortures such as forcing the girl to eat soap or burning her tongue with a hot iron. In this last instance, the camera assumes the position of the tortured girl, in what was quite a shocking point-of-view shot in 1951, as the stepmother presses the iron against the camera/Aurore while snarling, “You will never speak again. I’ll burn your tongue.” This destruction of the tongue (the word langue in French means both tongue and language) has been interpreted as a graphic allegory for Quebec’s situation in the confederation, as the English oppressor (the stepmother) tries to eradicate French Canadian culture (Aurore) after the mère-patrie, France (the deceased mother), has disappeared (Wiennman, 42). The spectators’ recognition of this metaphor of their colonized condition explains the tremendous success of both the play and the film with French Canadian audiences. For our purpose, however, the main interest of this and other similar scenes is that Marie-Louise suppresses language through the performance of lurid physical gestures, which is an essential trait of stage melodrama. Not only does the traditional villain always seek to silence the victim – a model that, following Hartmut Ilsemann’s application of the Freudian schema, grants the villain “oral-sadistic” attributes (Ilsemann, 203) – but minimal language and optimal physicality represent the very foundation of melodrama. Historically, the emergence of melodrama in the late eighteenth century is directly connected to linguistic interdiction, as the genre was created in France in response to harsh restrictions on the usage of spoken language on stage. The word melodrama comes from the French mélodrame, which was coined by Jean-Jacques Rousseau for

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his play Pygmalion (1770), in which music served as background for the dialogue. Since the Comédie Française (the only legitimate theatre in Paris) had a monopoly on plays with spoken dialogue, the new genre was immediately adopted by the illegitimate theatres to evade the regulations on spoken dialogue (Banham, 655). A similar regulation in England fostered an equally rapid growth of melodrama in the illegitimate theatres of London (Brockett, 459–60). The legal necessity to have music either accompanying or, at least, punctuating lines, combined with the fact that the theatres presenting melodramas were large buildings crowded with mainly uneducated audiences who lacked the linguistic abilities of the legitimate theatre goers, soon dictated that early melodramatists had to abandon the neoclassical emphasis on long, intricate, spoken passages in favour of brief exchanges complemented by the broad and overemphasized gestures of the actors. By the early nineteenth century, in melodramas such as those of René Guilbert de Pixérécourt, dialogue had gained importance. But it was still in great part subordinated to action (Banham, 771). A telling example of the ascendancy of malevolent action over spoken words is found in Pixérécourt’s landmark melodrama Coelina (1800), in which the main male character, Hubert, is mute. Writing about Coelina, George Kernodle notes in The Theatre in History (1989) that “the audience had no chance to forget that mime was the principal medium of performance, the central character, spoken of as the Mute Victim, can never tell on his torturers; they have cut out his tongue” (Kernodle, 565). Not surprisingly, contemporary opponents of Pixérécourt’s popular genre, such as neoclassicist Jean-Louis Geoffroy, criticized “its abuse of pantomine” (Carlson, 215). Although it might be an exaggeration to claim along with Frank Rahill that melodrama could barely tolerate words (Rahill, 297–8), the fact remains that physical action not only dominates language, but often launches an attack against the spoken word. Marie-Louise is thus very much an incarnation of the melodramatic condition, as her physical performance is directly implicated in the subordination of meaningful speech. Furthermore, as Peter Brooks has argued, melodrama is rooted in a discourse of discipline and punishment imposed on the body that is very much in keeping with the stepmother’s despotic attitude (Brooks, 18). The sense of melodramatic physicality associated with the stepmother functions as an evocative parallel for the woman’s unnatural treatment of her stepdaughter, a behaviour that is set in stark

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contrast to the natural (cinematic) attitude of Catherine, who is a loving stepmother to the children of her new husband and even adopts Maurice and his baby brother after their parents’ condemnation. This theme was already identified by theatre reviewers as early as the first run of the play in 1921. Reviews all insist on the play’s moralistic denunciation of the unnatural stepmother and the hasty widower who carelessly married her (Petitjean and Rollin, Aurore, l’enfant martyre, 55). Another point often stressed by 1920s drama critics is the extreme realism of the performances. This issue warrants some examination in the context of this reading of the play and the film since my argument to this point has been based on the conflict between the artificiality, unnaturalness, and theatricality of the oppressive stepmother and the cinematic realism of the positive characters, who exude religious liberation rather than oppression. The February 1921 comment from La Presse’s reviewer that the play “is presented in a way that is perhaps too realistic” (ibid., 55)5 suggests that the connection that I draw between theatre, artificiality, and unnatural maternal behaviour is not justified since at least the production referred to in this quotation appears to have displayed unnaturalness on stage with excessive realism. It is important, first, to distinguish between actual theatrical performances and the idea of theatricality as deployed in La petite Aurore, l’enfant martyre and other films based on plays. Timothy Corrigan uses the term “cinematic theatricality” to describe a style used in films like Robert Altman’s Come Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982). This expression does not imply that cinema actually uses “a similar set of mechanisms” as theatre to tell its story, but rather “mechanisms and styles whose artificiality and spatial limitations could expose or critique the false realism of social identities, as well as the commodified realism of movies themselves” (Corrigan, 64). In other words, cinematic theatricality is a certain practice common among adaptors, but not necessarily limited to them, through which commentaries on personal aesthetics or political theatrics, such as in Peter Brook’s Marat/Sade (1966), are conveyed through the foregrounding of techniques that recall theatrical performances. However, actual theatrical performances, in their essential presence, can never be reproduced on screen. As Christian Metz theorized in the 1970s, the fundamental difference between film and the performing arts is that the latter

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do not consist of images, the perceptions they offer to the eye and the ear are inscribed in a true space (not a photographed one), the same one as that occupied by the public during the performance; everything the audience hear and see is actively produced in their presence, by human beings or props which are themselves present. This is not the problem of fiction but that of the definitional characteristics of the signifier: whether or not the theatrical play mimes a fable, its action, if need be mimetic, is still managed by real persons evolving in real time and space, on the same stage or “scene” as the public. The “other scene,” which is precisely not so called, is the cinematic screen (closer to phantasy from the outset): what unfolds there may, as before, be more or less fictional, but the unfolding itself is fictive: the actor, the “décor,” the words one hears are all absent, everything is recorded (as a memory trace which is immediately so, without having been something else before), and this is still true if what is recorded is not a “story” and does not aim for the fictional illusion proper. For it is the signifier itself, and as a whole, that is recorded, that is absence. (Metz, 248–9)

Jean-Louis Baudry suggested at the same time that the strong impression of reality created by the cinema comes precisely from “perception of an image passing for perception,” as in dreams or hallucinations (Baudry, 314). Thus, while images on film can look stupendously real, they always remain literally “imaginary.” The opposite is true for theatre. While theatrical sets, costumes, and even performances may appear painfully artificial, their ontological materiality is undeniably anchored in the real. The degree of realism noted in early stage performances of Aurore is thus a realism quite different from the images of reality associated with the natural, open spaces that intimate a sense of liberation in the otherwise claustrophobic, oppressive, “theatrical” environment imposed by Marie-Louise. This kind of stage realism might be associated less with an impression of reality than with a rejection of a certain theatrical decorum that dictates moderation in the depiction of controversial themes – for realism, as a theatre movement, is typified as much by the disturbing issues that it examines on stage as by its mimetic style. The emergence of realism in the late nineteenth century is linked to an increased attempt to reproduce the real, but the purpose of realism was also to tackle social questions that were not deemed appropriate in earlier periods of theatre history. Henrik Ibsen’s significance as a realist playwright,

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for example, comes less from his meticulous recreation of the real in dramatic form than from his insistence on exposing the truth about hypocritical Victorian Europe. Bjørn Hemmer, in an article on Ibsen’s realistic problem drama, argues that “it is not to be wondered at that Ibsen’s dramas provoked scandal and outrage” because the playwright’s very determination to be realistic about the ugly, hidden truths of the bourgeois society of 1870s and ’80s Europe presented a radical challenge to a stage catering to that culture of propriety and etiquette (Hemmer, 74). ‹The Truth,› says Hemmer with regards to Ibsen’s constant emphasis on this loaded word, “will necessarily be a controversial and ambiguous phenomenon” (ibid., 72). And “above all it was A Doll’s House [1879] and Ghosts [1881] that shocked conservative readers,” according to Oscar Brockett (549), because these plays dared to describe in realistic terms the disturbing “truth” about the condition of women in patriarchy and the debilitating effects of venereal disease. Interestingly, while Ghosts, which Hemmer refers to as a “tragedy of real life” (Hemmer, 87), is clearly one of Ibsen’s most realistic plays, it is not a play that insists at any particular length on the construction of an environment that is rigorously faithful to the real. Although there are relatively detailed stage directions, the sketch that the dramatist provides of Mrs Alving’s country house is not nearly as obsessively detailed as the minute descriptions of the Tesman household in Hedda Gabler (1890), whose opening didascalia is easily three times as long as that of Ghosts. Yet Hedda Gabler is already moving away from the realistic mode towards a form of spiritualist drama (Ellis-Fermor, 12–13). Realism, as a theatrical style, is thus less an attempt to put the real on stage, since it is always already there, than an ideological position aimed at disclosing in public a culture’s dirty little secrets. This is why Bertolt Brecht could argue that his epic plays “were realistic because they gave insights into the real world, the world as it is, regardless of the poetic and anti-illusionist devices he used” (Esslin, An Anatomy of Drama, 61). It is not surprising that early productions of Aurore, in their exposition of a recent case of child abuse, would be criticized or even censured for their realism (Petitjean and Rollin, Aurore, l’enfant martyre, 104). The suggestion that the unnatural behaviour of the stepmother is akin to the theatrical and in opposition to film’s preoccupation with the natural landscape is thus not contradicted by comments on the extreme

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realism of the play, for this notion of “realism” has to do with the play’s denunciative attitude towards a certain reality, whether or not this reality is presented in mimetic form. But further consideration of the original play’s “realism” is necessary. Criticism from self-righteous authorities against Aurore in the 1920s and ’30s did not arise exclusively from the play’s disclosure of unpleasant truths. It was also in response to how these truths were presented. A number of reviewers described the spectacle of Aurore’s martyrdom as shameful, disgusting, revolting, and filthy (ibid., 98–9). These terms are closer to criticisms of naturalism than realism. Indeed, if 1870s and ’80s realists where already shocking enough with their emphasis “on social problems, on critical perspectives and contemporaneity” (Hemmer, 71), the naturalists who followed in the late 1880s and ’90s were outright crude and bestial. The term rosserie was often used by late-nineteenth-century French critics to describe “naturalistic plays which treat base and ignoble characters […] and in which the playwright with callous and bitter irony, draws aside the cloak of respectability to reveal the ugly and bestial underneath” (Brockett and Findlay, 94). Not unlike naturalist plays, Aurore wallows in rosserie, violence, and crudeness. There are two main differences between theatrical realism and naturalism. First, the latter puts a much greater emphasis on the materiality of the environment, where every aspect of the natural world, no matter how repugnant or bestial, is given a place on stage. The bleeding carcasses of beef on the stage of André Antoine’s Théâtre Libre for the 1888 production of Fernand Icre’s Les bouchers is the best known example of the naturalist’s fascination with concrete animal imagery (ibid., 91). The second difference is in the general structure of the plays. While realist dramas such as Ibsen’s follow the tight organization of the well-made play, naturalist works, adopting Jean Jullien’s “slice of life” metaphor, are much more fragmentary and undermine contrived techniques such as the three neoclassical unities of time, place, and action usually respected by realists (ibid., 94). Late-nineteenth-century American author Frank Norris, a staunch defender of Émile Zola, claimed that realism and naturalism were actually at polar opposites, paradoxically relating the latter in its excess to romanticism. For Norris, realism was a confining style. “The reason why one […] quarrels so pointedly with Realism,” says Norris in his article “A Plea for Romantic Fiction” (1903), “is that Realism stultifies itself. It notes

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only the surface of things. For it, Beauty is not even skin deep, but only a geometrical plane, without dimensions and depth, mere outside […] Realism is minute; it is the drama of a broken teacup, the tragedy of a walk down the block” (Norris, 215). Naturalism, like romanticism, “takes cognizance of variations from the type of normal life [… and] may even treat of the sordid, the unlovely – as for instance, the novels of M. Zola (Zola has been dubbed a Realist, but he is, on the contrary, the very head of the Romanticists)” (ibid., 215). Naturalists and romanticists dare to sit “among the rags and wretchedness, the dirt and despair of the tenements of the East Side of New York” (ibid., 218) and to explore “the unplumbed depths of the human heart, and the mystery of sex, and the problems of life, and the black, unsearched penetralia of the soul of man” (ibid., 220). Realism is very much a strategy of confinement contained, as it were, within Mme Vestris’s box set (Brockett, 472).6 Naturalism, on the contrary, ranges in its subversive themes from the steamy love affairs of Maxime Champenet in Jullien’s La sérénade (1887) to the cruelty of Auguste Linert’s Conte de Noël, performed on Christmas Day 1890, in which a child is killed and fed to the pigs (Knapp, 234; Brockett and Findlay, 95). The abusive treatment of Aurore on stage clearly trespasses the limits of confining realism and falls into the excess of naturalism. Actress Thérèse McKinnon, who played Aurore on stage for years and has a cameo in the film as Aurore’s dying mother, recalls being physically bruised and even burnt on some occasions because of the “naturalism” of the performance (Petitjean and Rollin, Aurore, l’enfant martyre, 71–2). Thus, as much as Aurore is a play that respects the unities of time, place, and action, it also has at its core a naturalist character, the stepmother, who breaks the limits of realist theatre. Marie-Louise embodies a certain version of naturalist theatre that is contained by the overall realism of the play, in particular through the “sanitized” punishment imposed on her by the legal system. As in Ibsen’s realist dramas, rational language at the end of Aurore allows extreme violence to be referred to while restraining the transgressive potential that its performance materializes. Marie-Louise’s function on film is very much in opposition to her role on stage since on screen she embodies the confining theatrical pull against the liberating centrifugal force of cinema. The tortures inflicted on screen come across as unnatural rather than naturalis-

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tic, as they would appear on stage. And, conversely, freedom on stage is represented through the artifice of religious apparitions, in contrast to the depiction of pastoral freedom in the film through the link between religion and nature. Marie-Louise, therefore, stands at the threshold between theatre and film, acting in a confining theatrical way on screen, while exploding the limits of box-set realism on stage. In the 1920s and ’30s, the victory of legal confinement versus naturalistic torture on stage signified the unproblematic ascendancy of tradition, law, and order. The “triumph” of the legal system on screen, however, is highly mitigated. The film’s ending stresses the contradiction that emerges from the law’s involvement in the cruel treatment of human beings by creating a cinematic closure that is visibly theatrical and that works against the positive imagery otherwise associated with the traditional values that the film seems to promote. This is precisely because the film itself stands at the threshold between two eras and proceeds to undermine subtextually the message that it ventures to convey on the surface. The traditional rural values that putatively characterized French Canadian culture in the 1950s are contradicted by the knowledge, as Tremblay-Daviault suggests, that Catherine and Abraham’s seemingly happy decision to adopt Aurore’s siblings condemns them to a life of poverty and alienation (Tremblay-Daviault, 224). The modern, urban model of legal procedures outside the parameters of religious morality (embodied in the film by the physician who examines Aurore’s corpse and the judge who condemns MarieLouise) may be more efficient than its traditional counterpart but lacks an understanding of the human condition. The physician can identify the symptoms but is unable to understand the deep cause of the social disease (ibid., 224). According to Heinz Weinmann’s reading, the physician is as impotent as the priest; he admits himself that he cannot do anything for Aurore and does not understand her case (Weinmann, 45). Janis Pallister agrees that the film “shows a young child (Québec itself?) as the prey of human institutions, all of which fail her: family, friends, Church and society” (Pallister, 32). As such, La petite Aurore, l’enfant martyre stands as the symptom of a crumbling culture caught between old values that are no longer suitable to the reality of contemporary life in post-w w i i Quebec and new paradigms that have yet to prove their validity. The film closes with a dual reference to failure. First, it implicitly stresses the failure of the state to distinguish its means of punishment from

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those of the criminal that it seeks to castigate, as the courtroom is filmed in a quasi-expressionistic style clearly reminiscent of the scenes of bondage transpiring in Marie-Louise’s house. Second, the film signifies its own failure to escape theatre by situating its climatic scene not in a natural environment, but in the theatrical locus dramaticus. As the modern alternative to the traditional stage, film fails as much as the physician to bring the people of Quebec out of the great darkness. The physician’s and judge’s substitution of Catholic faith with reason and scientific knowledge proves as incapable as cinematic technology to alter the tragic unfolding of Aurore’s drama.

t i t- co q : b eyo nd th e th r es h ol d o f r el i gi ou s r h eto r i c an d t he pas t Although Bill Marshall argues that La petite Aurore, l’enfant martyre “marks the beginning of disengagement of ‘French Canada’ from its family romance and the process of its increasing autonomy” (Marshall, 110), it is really Tit-Coq, rather than Aurore, that succeeded in bringing French Canadian film audiences out of “l’âge des cavernes,” the stone age, to use René Lévesque’s phrase (Véronneau, Cinéma de l’époque duplessiste,120) – for Tit-Coq, unlike Aurore, is not merely an unconscious symptom of crumbling societal values, but a clear assertion on the author’s part of the failure of traditional French Canadian institutions and a thinly veiled call to action and resistance against the false rhetoric of reason. The final scene of Aurore, which underlines confinement and theatricality, stands in polar opposition to the ending of Gratien Gélinas’s film, which asserts the shapeless freedom of the centrifugal medium. But, whereas the films are significantly different, Tit-Coq, like Marie-Louise, is also positioned at the threshold between theatre and film, confinement and freedom, stifling traditions and unknown prospects. Two scenes in both the play and the film literally take place on a threshold. In the first instance (act 1, scene 4), the orphan soldier Tit-Coq stands with his new found love, Marie-Ange. After having gone out on their first date, they exchange a few pleasantries before the young woman goes into the apartment that she shares with her cousin Germaine. The second instance (act 2, scene 6) takes place on the same threshold several months later, after Tit-Coq has come

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back from his turn of duty in Europe to find that his girlfriend has married another man. The light-hearted romanticism of the former scene is replaced by bitter cynicism, as Tit-Coq requests that Germaine convey a message to Marie-Ange, whom he now despises because of her betrayal. That the two scenes take place at the threshold of Germaine’s apartment is significant, for they both represent turning points in the play and the film. The former suggests the potential for Tit-Coq to enter Marie-Ange’s world, while the former signifies his expulsion from it. The connotation of kinship associated in French with the name Germaine is also relevant, for the space at the threshold of which Tit-Coq stands is very much defined as the family unit that the orphan is eager to join. If, as Thomas Price argues in his book Dramatic Structure and Meaning in Theatrical Productions (1992), the structure of a play or screenplay is predicated on “the dramatic character’s overriding wish” (Price, 23), then the crux of the matter in Tit-Coq is very much the eponymous character’s wish to become a full-fledged member of a legitimate family. But, while the threshold in both scenes does serve as a metaphor for Tit-Coq’s initial hope to get into and ultimate obligation to get out of Marie-Ange’s family circle, the play does not translate this dialectic in spatial terms, with clear oppositions between open, public areas signifying Tit-Coq’s itinerant life and closed domestic spaces symbolizing the family. Like Aurore, l’enfant martyre, the original stage version of Tit-Coq unfolds entirely within closed spaces signifying tradition, security, and oppression. The only hints of open freedom appear through the threshold scenes, which only indicate an alternative that is not explicitly shown. The sites in the original play seem to suggest two different worlds: the family and the army. But, in fact, every closed space in the play stands for the same notion: the close-knit family unit that surrounds Marie-Ange and the equally tightly woven surrogate family that Tit-Coq found with the army. Both give the impression of protection and understanding but actually function similarly as agents of repression and discrimination. As long as Tit-Coq obeys the rules of these two closed universes, he is welcomed and treated well. This is why, for the most part, the army padre in whom TitCoq confides comes across as a positive character willing to listen to, and to help, the lonely man. As long as Tit-Coq behaves like a good Catholic boy who only wants to marry a nice girl and have a

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normal Catholic family, the padre proves to be a kind and understanding friend. But when Tit-Coq tries to break free of the circumscribed space afforded him by traditional French Canadian culture, the padre ceases to support Tit-Coq’s quest for happiness. It could be argued that the padre changes allegiance, functioning first as TitCoq’s adjuvant, to use A.J. Greimas’s structuralist terminology, and later as an opponent to Tit-Coq’s objective (Greimas, 155–6). But, in fact, the padre’s only allegiance is always to the traditional values of the Catholic Church and he responds to Tit-Coq accordingly. Similarly, Marie-Ange’s parents are benevolent and generous towards Tit-Coq as long as he manoeuvres within the narrow moral parameters that delimit their lives. One of Gélinas’s most remarkable insights is to have recognized that those parameters were still so rigidly in place by the time he wrote the play that any alternative to these traditional values had to be situated outside the immediately perceivable space of the drama. All that Tit-Coq shows on stage are current circumstances. Whatever the future holds for Tit-Coq (and Quebec) is beyond the threshold of the theatre. Tit-Coq’s forlorn, amoral, and sometimes violent but free existence as an orphan soldier is thus outside the purview of the play. Conversely, the film version includes images that set Tit-Coq (Gélinas) apart from both the army and the family as comparably coercive institutions and that evoke the alternative that Gélinas sought to propose to his audience. The ending of the film is telling. When Tit-Coq is convinced by the padre (Paul Dupuis) to leave Marie-Ange (Monique Miller) so that she can live a “happy” life with her husband, it is the lonely orphan who walks away free, by the railroad tracks, literally moving towards the light at the end of the tunnel. Conversely, Marie-Ange, her brother, JeanPaul, (Clément Latour), and the institutions that they represent are locked behind a wire fence at the train station (Weinmann, 63). The play is not as explicit in its ending. Tit-Coq simply leaves Marie-Ange in Germaine’s apartment “as a man harassed, beginning a long journey” (Gélinas, Tit-Coq 1967, 84). Without the visual clues of Tit-Coq walking towards the promising light and the entrapping fence that suggests Marie-Ange’s dreadful future within the prison of an unhappy marriage, the theatre audience is left to assume that the utterly negative conclusion that the author provides is a way to denounce how things are and urge the public to imagine alternatives. At least one reviewer noted after the premiere of the

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play, on 22 May 1948, that the ending is difficult: “If it hurts, and if one wants to say: ‘it should end differently,’ one is also forced to admit that in real life, it would also end this way” (quoted in Sicotte, 235).7 As a drama that presents not the struggle between good and evil with the clear victory of the one over the other, but rather a deadend argument that necessitates an unarticulated solution, Tit-Coq could be described, in Thomas Price’s structuralist terminology, as adopting a synthetic-implied structure. “The synthetic-implied structure,” says Price in his description of this most ironic mode of dramatic writing, “develops an oppressive conflict between two equally dysfunctional forces … and leaves the struggle either stalemated or so unhappily concluded that, in either case, the auditor is drawn to supply in his own mind an acceptable alternative” (Price, 309). The dysfunctional forces in Tit-Coq are the army and the family unit, which both have superficially positive qualities but in the end prove equally stifling. The play begins in the padre’s room in a military camp around Christmas 1942, a few months after MacKenzie King’s controversial conscription plebiscite, held in April of the same year. Arthur St Jean, alias Tit-Coq, and Jean-Paul Desilets are being reprimanded by the commanding officer for having started a fight at a downtown café. Here we learn that Tit-Coq, thus nicknamed because of his cocky attitude, punched his buddy Jean-Paul after the latter called him “a little bastard.” Being literally a “bastard,” Tit-Coq reacted violently to Jean-Paul’s generic insult. The padre, with his characteristic well-meaning condescension, suggests that, as a sign of goodwill, Jean-Paul bring Tit-Coq to his family’s house to celebrate Christmas. It is there, at the Desilets’s, that Tit-Coq meets and falls in love with Marie-Ange in scene 2. Like the padre, who first comes across as a kind, understanding man, Jean Paul’s large family all appear as good-hearted working-class people who welcome orphaned Tit-Coq with open arms. As Renate Usmiani puts it: [S]imple working class people, every one of them with a heart of gold, mellowed even further by the combined effect of family reunion, Christmas holiday and the occasional glass of whiskey, mother and father, brothers and sisters, uncles, aunts and cousins together give TitCoq a demonstration of family togetherness which makes him acutely and painfully aware of the emotional privations of his past life […] To

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Tit-Coq, who has grown up in rooming houses and cheap barrooms, and whose only contact with women so far has been the occasional streetwalker, Marie-Ange instantly becomes the embodiment of the Good, the True and the Beautiful. Marie-Ange returns his love moved by the idea that, except for her, this young man is all alone in the world. (Usmiani, 38)

Depicted as robust, generous fellows who use an earthy popular slang – whose realism was praised as one of Gélinas’s most significant innovations (Gélinas, Tit-Coq 1987, 12–13) – the Désilets are not constructed as antagonistic characters. They are “not rich nor extremely intelligent! [They]’re just an ordinary working family,” as Father Désilets says (Gélinas, Tit-Coq 1967, 16). But their endearing simplicity also makes them wont to the prejudices shared by many French Canadians at the time. Much later in the play, these prejudices against “such children, conceived directly in sin,” as Aunt Clara Désilets charges (ibid., 45), are used as arguments to convince Marie-Ange to break up her relationship with Tit-Coq while he is in England and to marry instead the more respectable Léopold Vermette (Usmiani, 39). Not out of malevolence but ignorance and prejudice, Father and Mother Désilets encourage MarieAnge to cheat on Tit-Coq: f a t h e r : To us, [Tit-Coq] is just a little soldier without a family, who came out of nowhere two Christmases ago and spent a couple of days at our place. We thought he was alright, very sympathetic. Only that’s all the good we know about him. m o t h e r : He went out with you just a few weeks, and now, for almost two years, he’s been away at the other end of the world. If ever he comes back, God alone knows when it will be … and in what shape [ … ] We don’t curse him yet, your Tit-Coq, but we would if we’d see you waste away because of him, and getting ill for good. f a t h e r : So tonight, if you want my advice, you’ll get your gay spirits out of the mothballs, doll yourself up, and go out with young Vermette. (Gélinas, Tit-Coq 1967, 54–5)

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One of the main strengths of Gélinas’s writing is how, in this scene, he presents Father and Mother Désilets as well-meaning parents in spite of their prejudice and makes it possible to interpret their behaviour in a positive light. Gélinas, however, also criticizes the parents expressly through Marie-Ange’s own recognition of their negative influence on her. To show Tit-Coq that she was forced to break up with him and marry another man, she says: “You had only yourself to fight against. While me, instead of helping me stand up, everybody was pushing me down, everybody, driving me crazy with objections, wishing I’d never met you, swearing that I was wrong to wait, too young to know if I really loved you … Repeating in all tones from every side, that this war would never end, that you’d forget over there, and never come back to me […] Making me doubt you as I might have doubted there’s heaven above, so they could force me into the arms of another man” (ibid., 72). While the dialogue in the play does not present Marie-Ange’s entourage in such a dark light, her words convey an awareness of their scheming manipulations to circumscribe the young woman verbally and compel her to get married. Similarly, the padre can be read as the voice of reason when he convinces Tit-Coq not to elope with the unhappily married MarieAnge. John Ripley’s reading of the play is telling in this regard: “At the last moment, thanks to the intervention of an army padré, TitCoq realizes his love for Marie-Ange is inseparable from his urge to belong to her family, a privilege that will be denied him by his illicit union” (Benson and Conolly, 555). However, a close reading of the padre’s argument, in addition to a knowledge of Gélinas’s personal attitude and a consideration of the cultural context in Quebec in the late 1940s, permits an interpretation of the text that cuts through contrived rhetoric and reveals the author’s intentions. The padre, who is presented from the very beginning of the play as someone who has the power to convince (Gélinas, Tit-Coq 1967, 3), advances the seemingly logical argument that, since Tit-Coq’s attraction for Maire-Ange pertains primarily to the legitimacy of her family ties, her breaking up her marriage to be with him, and consequently alienating her parents, would negate his fundamental desire. While on the surface the argument makes sense, the padre’s learned rhetoric is scattered with contradictions that often leave the uneducated orphan at a loss for words (ibid., 70) and confused (ibid., 78, 82). Careful perusal of the text exposes the religious man

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as a calculating orator who, as pointed out above, has only one objective in mind: upholding the tenets of the Catholic Church. This does not make him a “villain.” But he certainly comes across as cunningly manipulative in his final argument against Tit-Coq. Early in the final argument, the padre, playing the role of the good friend rather than the priest, states: “There’ll be no question of religion” (ibid., 78). Yet, a few lines later, he starts building his argument precisely on religious grounds: “Take her, your MarieAnge, and go away with her. Yes. It’s true, God is infinitely just […] And when you appear before him, he may have nothing against you; you’ll have paid so dearly for your little forbidden love, so dearly that you’ll already have atoned for all its evil on earth” (ibid.). In this understated cataplexis, the padre adopts a benevolent façade in which there is, apparently, “no question of religion.” His claim is clearly undermined not only by the fact that the Christian God is mentioned, but also and more significantly because the “forbidden love” is deemed “evil” by the padre. This challenges the pretense that his statements aim only at proving they will make each other unhappy. “So Marie-Ange you wish to leave with him,” continues the padre. “Because you think you’ll bring happiness to a poor devil who certainly deserves it […] Well! I am sorry but you’re wrong. It’s unhappiness you’ll bring him, unhappiness to him and to yourself” (ibid., 78–9). If all that mattered to the padre was the happiness of his friends, he would not see there union as “evil,” but rather as merely a misguided plan. A few lines later, the padre states again, “There’ll be no question of religion, I repeat” (ibid., 79). But, again, religion raises its ugly head, this time to convince the lovers that Marie-Ange’s husband, Léopold, will never grant her a divorce because “he is a Catholic” (ibid., 80). Beyond this pretense, the padre also tries to convince the couple by using an epitropic apagoresis – that is, a rhetorical tactic whereby he seemingly leaves it to Tit-Coq and Marie-Ange to decide their fate, while stating the tragic outcome of their decision. “And I can do no more,” says the priest at the end of his tirade, “Your lives are your own: you are free to spoil them if you feel you must” (ibid., 82). This sentence, which understandably causes bewilderment in Tit-Coq, is a clear example of the padre’s rhetorical strategy: He gives the young couple the impression that they are free, while in reality imposing an inexorable judgment on the outcome of their “free choice.” Where the padre’s reasoning is most

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delusive, however, is when he reformulates previous conversations with Tit-Coq. Early in the play, the padre had suggested that by marrying a woman like Marie-Ange, Tit-Coq would gain a family. “The day you marry a good girl, you’ll belong to a family too […] you’ll have her father and mother, brothers, cousins, uncles, aunts … and children to love, like everybody else” (ibid., 20). Later in the play, while on their way to Europe for their tour of duty, the padre agrees with Tit-Coq’s wish to be by his future wife’s bed when she gives birth to their first child (ibid., 37), and he pronounces one of his facile similes to condone Tit-Coq’s desire for a family: “Do you know what you remind me of, Tit-Coq? A branch torn off an apple tree by a storm. If it is left where it has fallen, it will rot. But if it’s picked up in time, it can be grafted to another tree, and will bear fruit, as if nothing had happened” (ibid., 38). At the end of the play, however, even though the padre refers to these earlier discussions, he manipulates the elements of the discourse to convince Marie-Ange that Tit-Coq never loved her, but only loved what she symbolizes: pa d r e : Two years ago, you met a decent girl and you realized that from the moment she married you she’d take you out of your loneliness to give you a home, a family’s affection, your own, and the respect of others. That day, you swore in your deepest will that there was for you the only possible destiny [… To Marie-Ange] Can you still offer him that happiness, Marie Ange? [… To Tit- Coq] You may deny it in front of her, you may lie to yourself, but you know it is true. Shall I recall your own words? […] One fine evening, you’d be the most important man on earth, for you’d have in your arms the wonder of children and by your side your own wife; brand-new wife, so clean she’d have washed your stain away. And you’d be on your way to greet your relatives, her own, the finest in the world, those you showed me so proudly in the album you always carried with you over there. The foundling lost in his misery, you’d seek him in vain in all that tidiness and love. There was your one and most ambitious dream. Did you say that or no? ti t - c o q : If I did say it, I didn’t know what I was saying.

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pa d r e : You knew. Your own actions have proved it since then.This woman you loved less for herself than for what she could bring you. That, too, you have proved. [Turning toward Marie-Ange] Did you ever wonder, Marie-Ange, why he didn’t marry you before leaving? ti t - c o q : I had my reasons. pa d r e : Yes, a most logical, most moving reason for a man who never knew his father: he wanted from the first day to kiss the child you would give him; he did not wish to deprive it, for a single hour, of the tenderness he himself never enjoyed. And that passion, Marie-Ange, was stronger, of itself, than all his desire to possess you. Your body – your body which will grow old – lost the match two years ago; how can it hope to win now? […] And yourself, how could you be happy with him, knowing that he is unhappy because of you. (Ibid., 80–2)

In this passage, the padre uses language to frame Tit-Coq and Marie-Ange. With the weapon of education and language on his side, to say nothing of his religious authority, the padre is granted the power to omit parts of the earlier discussions, enlarge other issues, and plainly invent certain terms of the argument. Most obviously, the padre’s anamnesis, or recalling Tit-Coq’s “own words,” comes across as a fallacious ruse when examined closely. These are not Tit-Coq’s words. First, Tit-Coq did not use the learned metaphors to which the padre resorts to make his point. Second, and most importantly, Tit-Coq’s desire to have a family with Marie-Ange is not presented as an exclusive dialysis the way the padre formulates it. The conversation to which the padre refers is as follows: ti t - c o q : I don’t see myself as a senator in parliament some day, nor a millionaire in a castle. No, when I dream, I see myself in a streetcar, on a Sunday night about a quarter past seven; with my baby in my arms and, holding on to me, my wife, neat and tidy, diaper bag in her hand. And we’re on our way to spend the evening at Uncle Alcide’s … My uncle by

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marriage, but my uncle just the same. The little bastard all alone in life, gone and done with. In the streetcar there would be just a man like the rest, very plain with his grey hat, white scarf, wife and baby. Just like the rest. No more but no less! Some might call that a mighty dull future, but me, with that, I’d be right on the peak of the world. pa d r e : I understand … and I congratulate you. ti t - c o q : Don’t congratulate me. A man has no merit in wishing the only sort of life that could ever satisfy him. pa d r e : The only sort? ti t - c o q : Yes. Silly, but that’s how it is. I could never be happy without that. It’s all in the back of my head. (Ibid., 38)

While by and large the padre’s citation of this conversation resembles Tit-Coq’s original utterance, there are significant differences. For example, while Tit-Coq admits that this is the only way for him to be happy, nowhere does he “swear in his deepest will that there was for him the only possible destiny.” The padre’s rendition of TitCoq’s confidence is not merely more eloquent than the original, but also bears the fatalistic conviction of preordained destiny. There is a fundamental difference between Tit-Coq’s determination to have a family and the padre’s proclamation of family as the soldier’s exclusive destiny. By turning a human desire into inescapable fate, the padre excludes any other option for Tit-Coq and Marie-Ange’s happiness. He makes happiness an impossibility. Tit-Coq also never said that “one fine evening, he’d be the most important man on earth.” It is quite the opposite actually: Tit-Coq stated only that he wanted to be an average man with a family. Again the padre’s rhetoric puts such a hyperbolical spin on what is really quite a mundane aspiration that he makes it impossible for the couple to imagine any alternative. Gélinas makes a very important point, in this regard, earlier in the play. When Tit-Coq first realizes his interest in Marie-Ange, he requires the padre to articulate his ideas for him, for he is unable to give materiality to his own thoughts through language. Tit-Coq had thought about Marie-Ange

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as a person who could give him a family, but he couldn’t believe that anything would happen until the padre verbalized his desire for him. “I’d thought of that,” said Tit-Coq after first confessing his love for Marie-Ange, “But I wanted to let you say it … because … on my own, I wouldn’t have dared believe it” (ibid., 20–1). What the author suggests very effectively here is that if the padre’s skillful discourse were essential for Tit-Coq to believe that he had a future with Marie-Ange (“Damn it, you talk well! Go on … You’d make a hell of a fine Bishop,” says Tit-Coq in the same dialogue), the very same rhetoric could serve conversely to crush this belief. The padre also proves especially prejudiced against Marie-Ange, commenting on the unattractiveness of her body. It is true that TitCoq did not marry Marie-Ange before leaving because he wanted to be by her side when their child was born. But the padre turns TitCoq’s good intentions into a binary opposition between Tit-Coq’s attraction towards Marie-Ange and his desire to have a legitimate child. In a rather unconventional metalepsis, the padre thus argues that Tit-Coq does not truly love Marie-Ange because he actually resisted having sex with her before leaving for the front. The sophism rests in the padre’s conception of Tit-Coq’s desire for a family and his desire for Marie-Ange as mutually exclusive, claiming that his wish to have a normal family precludes any actual love for the young woman. The padre’s final line is the most obvious leap of logic: “And yourself, how could you be happy with him, knowing that he is unhappy because of you.” Putting the blame on MarieAnge is an especially dishonest manoeuvre on the part of the padre, for Tit-Coq has always been unhappy and, if anything, Marie-Ange gave him the only bit of happiness he’s ever had. The padre, therefore, stands as the force which ensures the containment of Marie-Ange and Tit-Coq in a way that is less obvious than the fence at the end of the film but that is no less effective since it operates through the rhetorical weapons of the educated, religious man. It could be argued that this reading of the padre’s role results from the changes in morals in the half-century since the premiere of the play. As early as the second run of Tit-Coq in October 1948, however, one reviewer commented that “the last words of the play, while the Padre is injecting Tit-Coq with strong dose of moralism, seem pompous” (quoted in Sicotte, 239).8 When the play was first published in 1950, literary critic Arthur Laurendeau also noted that in his written form, the padre comes across as a banal charac-

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ter full of truisms and clichés and that “it is hard to believe that such a weak character could manage to control Tit-Coq’s instinct” (quoted in ibid., 261).9 Thus, even at the time of its production, the play was interpreted, at least by some spectators and readers, as a denunciation of the padre’s moralizing discourse. This reading of the padre, not as the embodiment of reason but rather as an agent of Catholic repression, is made more convincing if one is aware of an earlier work by Gélinas: “La vie édifiante de Jean Baptiste Laframboise,” a sketch staged in 1945. This skit, which is presented as a fairy tale dedicated “to all the little Canadians who are anxious not to waste their lives” (Usmiani, 28), relates the life of Jean Baptiste, a highly intelligent and talented young man who dreams of becoming a great poet. From the start, however, he is thwarted in his ambitions. His mother is afraid of his precocious intelligence: “Ah, it’s not good for children to be too bright,” she says, “they start to sin earlier” (ibid., 28). Later he is expelled from school for having been caught with a copy of Les fleurs du mal (1861) and soon becomes a pariah in his small village, where even dogs seem annoyed by his erudition. Unable to reconcile his literary aspirations with the pressures from his ignorant parents and the conservative society around him, Jean Baptiste consults the ultimate expert in all matters: the benevolent parish priest. “You must remember that on this earth the parents represent the divine authority,” the priest says, “if it had really been your vocation to be a writer, God would undoubtedly have enlightened your parents” (ibid., 29). Incapable of opposing the priest’s argument, Jean Baptiste gives up his dream of being a poet, marries an unattractive woman, and works hard all his life to please those around him. When he dies, God appears before him. Here the meaning of the skit is made blatantly clear as the Almighty shows Jean Baptiste all the magnificent poems he could have written if only he had decided to follow his dreams rather than following the priest’s advice. Realizing that his situation is not unique among the people of Quebec, Jean Baptiste tells God: “I was nearly a genius … without knowing it … I never thought that could happen to a Canadian. You see, God, the big failing of my people is that they have no confidence in themselves” (ibid.). The connection between Jean Baptiste and Tit-Coq (named Arthur St Jean because he was christened on St Jean Baptiste Day) is obvious. Although they have very different aspirations, their respective

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desires are met with equal resistance by their peers. Furthermore, they are both repressed by clergymen who, though perhaps wellintentioned, deny them the freedom to take risks. Given the realist style of Tit-Coq, Gélinas could hardly include a scene in which God would have shown the lonely orphan all the wonderful children he could have had with Marie-Ange. But the author does imply that Tit-Coq, like Jean Baptiste, should have had more confidence in himself and followed his dream to be with his lover. Gélinas followed his own advice, taking the tremendous risk of presenting Tit-Coq in English in Toronto and Chicago in January 1951 and on Broadway in February of the same year. The Toronto production was a critical success, with Herbert Whittaker’s rave review appearing on the first page of the Globe and Mail (Sicotte, 273). Tit-Coq became a theatrical event almost as significant in Toronto as it was in Quebec (ibid., 274). In fact, the Grand Old Daddy of English Canadian literature, Robertson Davies, singled out Gratien Gélinas as the one man who might have been able to create a true national theatre in Canada in 1951 (Davies, 41–2). The reception in Chicago was lukewarm, with only a few performances reaching the degree of popular success enjoyed in Toronto and Montreal (Sicotte, 274). Tit-Coq on Broadway, however, was a failure. Reviews from the New York Times, the Daily News, and the Herald Tribune while not scathing were certainly not positive. After only two performances, the play closed. Gélinas returned to Montreal a broken man (ibid., 281–3). Yet, while Gélinas failed on Broadway, he still took the risk, as Jean Baptiste and Tit-Coq should have done. Certain cultural commentators argued that the play’s lack of success in New York had less to do with the quality of the text than with inadequate publicity and the greed of Broadway producers (ibid., 284–5). Gélinas’s own attitude – terror at the prospect of failure but determination nevertheless to realize his ambitions (ibid., 267–9) – thus seems to support the reading of Tit-Coq as a play that concludes not with the triumph of reason, but rather with the defeat of freedom. The padre does not play the role of raisonneur, therefore, but rather of defender of an institution – the Catholic Church – set on denying individual liberty. And, even if the padre does represent the voice of reason in the play, it is important to note that circa 1948, reason had acquired a dubious function in the cultural discourse of French Canada. Reason and logic were being used by religious conservatives in a sophist

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strategy to argue against everything from divorce to fashion. For instance, in the late 1940s, the editorial board of the Jesuit magazine Relations published articles using seemingly watertight rationales to condemn freedom-seekers – “les apôtres de la liberté à outrance,” the apostles of excessive freedom, as one writer calls them (“Divorce, un suicide national,” 287) – and to promote Catholic values. One such article, titled “Logique et décence,” seeks to demonstrate rationally that if women wear suggestive dresses, it will inevitably lead men to behave like animals (“Logique et décence,” 231). An article on the destructive impact of divorce on nations claims that those who demand the freedom to break up marriages fail to understand the superior interests of the nation and should stop imposing their misguided views on the more enlightened segment of the population (“Divorce, un suicide national,” 287). Moreover, by the late 1940s, an increasing number of intellectuals and artists had started rejecting reason and logic precisely because they were seen as tools of oppression. In an article on the emergence of modernity in Quebec, André-G. Bourassa remarks that World War II had a profoundly disturbing impact on French Canadian culture. Either through the influence of soldiers and journalists returning from Europe or through the presence of European émigrés in Montreal, French Canada was exposed for the first time in the late 1940s to radical artistic and political ideas. This radicalism quickly infiltrated Quebec culture and triggered a fundamental change in the French Canadian ethos (Bourassa, 95). The first significant expression of a radical artistic movement in French Canada was the publication in 1948 of Refus global, a manifesto signed by Quebec painters, dancers, actors, musicians, and writers, including artist Paul-Émile Borduas, actress Muriel Guilbault, and playwright Claude Gauvrau. In a nutshell, this manifesto negated the dogmatic authority of the church and the state and proclaimed the supremacy of freedom, desire, and irrationality. These artists called themselves “Automatistes” to signify their rejection of reason and self-control. Without claiming that Gélinas was directly related to this subversive movement, it must be noted that Muriel Guilbault played the role of Marie-Ange in the second run of Tit-Coq in October 1948 and that she had played the original Marie-Ange in an embryonic version of the play entitled “Le retour du conscrit,” a sketch performed as part of Gélinas’s popular annual revue, Les fridolinades. At the same time as she was performing in Gélinas’s famous shows,

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she was also acting in obscure experimental works, most notably Claude Gauvreau’s Bien-être, which was published in Refus global along with two other “objets dramatiques” by Gauvreau: L’ombre sur le cerveau and Au coeur des quenouilles (ibid., 96). According to Patricia Smart, Gélinas actually attended the performance of Bien-être on 20 May 1947 (Smart, 78). He was thus aware of these radical tendencies even if he would never embrace them himself. As much as Gélinas, unlike the subversive Automatiste artists, always remained on the legitimate side of culture, showing respect for Maurice Duplessis when he came to see Tit-Coq and reprimanding the defiant Guilbault for her disregard for the premier’s authority (ibid., 169), I would suggest that with Tit-Coq he expressed in a popular, mainstream idiom a resistance against tradition similar to that unleashed by the Automatistes through radically more innovative artistic forms. Although Gauvreau’s Au coeur des quenouilles (Gauvreau, 81–4) is of a style completely different from Tit-Coq, it deals with a surprisingly similar theme. As I have written elsewhere, paraphrasing Gauvreau, Au coeur des quenouilles is about desire as an irrational fortification of the impulse to break through all censorship (Loiselle, “Au coeur des quenouilles,” 296–7). The drama revolves around a man (L’Homme) who has committed violent crimes and is now trying to escape the authorities. As he floats down a small river on a rowboat, describing in graphically evocative terms his insane deeds, he is confronted by an angel blocking his way. While the angel remains silent, the head of a drowned fugitive (La Tête) emerges and warns L’Homme against trying to pass through the angel. No one has ever had the courage to defy the angel and thus La Tête and all other fugitives have ended up at the bottom of the river. L’Homme ignores La Tête’s admonition and passes through the angel as though it were a mere shadow. La Tête, filled with regrets, sinks back into the water. When taken side by side, Au coeur des quenouilles and Tit-Coq bear witness to the emergence of a new episteme in 1948: namely, an impassioned resistance against “rational” intimidation. Gélinas’s padre embodies an intriguing equivalent to Gauvreau’s angel and Tête, since he is at once a rational (head) and religious (angel) agent of dissuasion. Furthermore, while L’Homme’s poetic tirades – filled with savage imagery, references to sex, blood, violence, and death – differ markedly from Tit-Coq’s everyday working-class slang, they

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serve the similar purpose of challenging the “proper” literary idiom. Not surprisingly, when Gélinas was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Université de Montréal in 1949, a number of purists denounced this academic recognition of a play that could certainly not qualify as “real” literature given its populist character (Sicotte, 244). Also, while Gauvreau’s fugitive comes across as a sexual predator who has little in common with the orphan soldier, Tit-Coq’s display of earthy sexual irreverence – he freely talks about his dealings with prostitutes – is almost as radical as L’Homme’s perverse behaviour in the context of 1948 Quebec. Finally, La Tête’s grief over its own cowardice following L’Homme’s defiance of the immaterial angel is reminiscent of both Tit-Coq’s dejection at the end of the play and Jean-Baptiste’s crushing realization that he has wasted his life. The new episteme implied in Gauvreau’s and Gélinas’s respective works found an explicitly political expression a few months after the publication of Refus global and the premiere of Tit-Coq in the 1949 asbestos strike. This event united workers and intellectuals, such as Pierre Elliott Trudeau, against the authoritarian government of Maurice Duplessis and the church – with the notable exception of Mgr Charbonneau, the archbishop of Montreal, who supported the workers (Brown, 609–10). The intellectuals who supported the strike, especially journalists with the leftist newspaper Le Devoir like Gérard Pelletier, were characterized by Duplessis as subversives who sought to undermine law and order, and bring about chaos and anarchy. This rhetoric was regularly paraphrased in the editorial pages of the pro-Duplessis newspaper Montréal-matin (Bourbon, 146–7). While Duplessis used more or less legal means to silence the radicals of Le Devoir and other enemies of his regime (Godin, 84– 5), his discourse appealed to reason and rationality. As Bourque, Duchastel, and Beauchemin point out in their exhaustive analysis of Duplessis’s demagogy, the semantic parameters of his argument were “logique, bon sens, équitable, juste, raisonnable, raisonnée” (Bourque, Duchastel, and Beauchemin, 104–5, italics in original). The religious right also relied on a rhetoric of reason à la padre to control heretic urges among the people. In a 1949 Relations article entitled “Le Respect de l’autorité,” Albert Plante argues that “faith and reason attest that civil authority must be respected. Reason: authority, aimed at reaching the common good, requires respect to ensure the unity of action in a society. Faith: ‘Put Christians in mind to

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be subject to principalities and powers, to obey magistrates’ [Letters of Paul to Titus, III.1]” (Plante, 118–19).10 In another article from the same period, Marcel Clément writes: “Social Catholicism rejects, for moral reasons, both liberal individualism and its promotion of illicit profit, and the suppression of legitimate freedom resulting from Marxist collectivism. Social Catholicism thus reasonably encourages a type of economic life based on the free and reasonable collaboration of the employers and the workers’ unions […] This is the true, the ultimate, goal of the Church’s social doctrine as Pius XII expressed it on 25 January 1946 […] The authority of the social and economic doctrine articulated by the Popes, and guaranteed by the solicitude of the Almighty, has now been empirically demonstrated through the painful failure of those who defy it” (Clément, 206, 207, italics in original).11 These examples bear witness to the way in which the church, like the padre, tried to control the working class through a discourse that presented religious dogma as reason. Tit-Coq, therefore, like Au coeur des quenouilles, Refus global, and even the asbestos strike, incarnates an emergent desire for freedom from the state of imprisonment in which the people of Quebec lived in the late 1940s. In the play, this imprisonment is depicted spatially through the closed settings and verbally through the confining rhetoric of reason that the padre uses to keep Marie-Ange trapped in her submissive condition. When Tit-Coq leaves Germaine’s apartment as the curtain falls, he may be lonely and dejected, but he is at least allowed to cross the threshold that suggests his eventual liberation from social and religious confines at the end of his long journey. The film’s ending is more explicit than the play in its depiction of Tit-Coq’s liberation, allowing him to walk away towards a brighter future. The changes that the film effects are not primarily related to changes in the dialogue, for the screenplay is very close to the original. For instance, the padre’s use of language to entrap the lovers within the “logique de la conformité” is almost identical on screen and on stage (Tremblay-Daviault, 254). Although the film was well received, some reviewers did find that it relied too heavily on dialogue and that it came across at times as little more than “théâtre filmé” (Le Devoir review quoted in Sicotte, 309). Several scenes do break visually with the confined sets of the drama. During their courtship, for example, Tit-Coq and Marie-Ange are seen enjoying

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themselves in various recognizable outdoor locations in Montreal, like the formidable steps leading to Oratoire St Joseph. But the difference between the film and the play is not due primarily to the number of outdoor scenes. The true innovation that the film brings to the play rests in Gélinas’s emphasis on cinema’s potential for intense, even frantic movement. While much of the film is static, hence the criticism that it is a “pièce enregistrée,” merely a filmed play (Photo-journal review quoted in Véronneau, Cinéma de l’époque duplessiste, 119), some cinematic scenes stand out for the vivid motion they display. The first images of the film, especially, have the effect of a slap in the face: no establishing shot, no dialogue, just Tit-Coq punching Jean-Paul and starting a brawl. René Lévesques was exhilarated by the chaos of the opening images and described the film in terms of its frank and effective brutality: “From the very first scene, [Tit-Coq] jumps at you and finds, over the next ninety minutes, every possible ‘opening’ to punch you in the solar plexus […] Tit-Coq is alive, rude, aggressive […] All of a sudden our interest in ourselves is no longer merely documentary. We are not only moved by human brotherhood. Rather we are cut to the quick; we are exposed, raped by the camera’s eye […] We can laugh and cry looking at our traits, our mannerisms, our reality in a magical and brutal mirror” (Véronneau, Cinéma de l’époque duplessiste, 120–1).12 Nowhere in the play does Tit-Coq act as brutally as he does in the first seconds of the film – in a sense, the Tit-Coq of the film is thus closer to Gauvreau’s murderous Homme from Au coeur des quenouilles. Later there is another violent scene, when Tit-Coq breaks a glass and knocks over a table in frustration over Marie-Ange’s less than regular correspondence after she has started dating Léopold Vermette (Jean Duceppe). That the film features more aggressive actions then the play can be interpreted as a result of cinema’s greater ability to create a sense of physical chaos through camera movements, rapid cuts, etc. There is also a historical explanation rooted in an increase in violence between 1948 and 1952. The violence that marked the asbestos strike was surpassed, according to labour historian Roch Denis, during the 1952 textile strike in Louiseville. In December 1952, just as Gélinas was completing the production of Tit-Coq, the Loi de l’Émeute, Riot Law, was proclaimed; police beat up strikers, arrested them, and raided union headquarters (Denis, 137–8). In a culture where governmental authorities resort to

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brutality to crush their political opponents, it is not surprising that violence would appear on screen, both in Tit-Coq and in La petite Aurore. But excessive movement in Tit-Coq is not limited to explosions of violence. The scene in which Tit-Coq joins the Christmas party with Jean-Paul’s family is not violent in any respect but still emphasizes motion in contrast to the stasis of most other scenes. The shots are more quickly edited, and there are more pans and dollies, and more bodies in motion. Gilles Marcotte of Le Devoir, who criticized the film for its theatricality, praised this and a few other scenes for their cinematic quality: “In the very few passages where Gélinas used cinema’s potential, the results are very good. The fight scene that opens the film with a storm is excellent. The Christmas party at the Désilets’s, where the uncle sings an old-fashioned song in the living room while the young in the kitchen dance the foxtrot, is also excellent. Excellent as well is the confrontation scene between Tit-Coq and Marie-Ange in Carré Saint-Louis. If only Gélinas could have made up his mind, he could probably have made a good movie” (quoted in Sicotte, 309).13 While Marcotte’s comments are in general disparaging, he does make an important point: One of the few cinematic scenes in the film serves to contrast the old and the new. Taking our cue from this interpretation, a reading of sequences where motion is most obvious reveals that this emphasis on the clash between the theatrical origins of the film and its cinematic form parallels a conflict between the status quo and potential change. The cinematic scenes that challenge the stasis of drama happen at moments when the characters’ past (theatre) enters into radical conflict with their present and potential future (film). The opening scene is a clear example of this situation, as JeanPaul’s calling Tit-Coq a bastard throws all of the latter’s traumatic personal history into the sharp focus of the present. Other scenes that work similarly include the Christmas party at the Désilets’s, as well as the scenes of courtship between Tit-Coq and Marie-Ange. The scenes in which the two lovers explore the city together, take a train ride through a park, dance late at night, have their picture taken at the Oratoire, and kiss on a park bench mark a clear passage from Tit-Coq’s lonely past to his romantic present. Immediately following the first scene at the threshold of Marie-Ange’s apartment building, this sequence uses outdoor movement and dance to suggest the potential for transformation. This potential is

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reasserted through a brief sequence of parallel editing that juxtaposes images of Marie-Ange and Tit-Coq reading each other’s letters during the first year of Tit-Coq’s tour of duty in Europe. Interestingly, when it appears that their long-distance relationship has reached a certain stability, cinematic montage is replaced by a theatrical scene (static camera without rapid cuts) taking place in the barracks as Tit-Coq shows his photo album and describes his perfect family to his fellow soldiers. In the next few episodes, the stasis in Tit-Coq’s situation continues to be depicted theatrically, as is Marie-Ange’s life with Germaine (Denise Pelletier). Theatrical cinema remains the principal mode of narration for a few minutes until Marie-Ange’s old Aunt Clara (Juliette Béliveau) drops by and starts lecturing her niece on the risks of focusing her emotional attachment solely on Tit-Coq. This scene is not highly cinematic but does contain a few camera movements and evocative camera angles. Noticeably, this scene reintroduces a tension in Tit-Coq and MarieAnge’s relationship that culminates in the second violent scene of the film, during which Tit-Coq aggressively throws a table to the floor. This scene bespeaks a return of Tit-Coq’s insecurities, and he immediately resumes his old ways, spending an evening with a prostitute. Theatricality is re-established as Tit-Coq’s past circumstances recommence and lingers through the second threshold scene, when Tit-Coq confronts Germaine. Following this, Marie-Ange and Tit-Coq meet in a park, where, to his surprise, she apologizes to him and intimates that she never stopped loving him. Again the cinematic outdoors clash with the theatrical dialogue to disclose a powerful tension between potential movement forward for the lovers and the strong hold that the static past exerts on them. The scenes in which the padre deploys his containing, theatrical rhetoric are never marked by the ascendency of the cinematic medium, for those moments serve to assert the perpetuation of the status quo and to foreground the dramatic past in which Tit-Coq, Marie-Ange, and the other characters find themselves trapped. It is only after the padre has left the train station at the end of the film that Tit-Coq is allowed to move towards the light in the cinematic space, while Marie-Ange and Jean-Paul remain fenced-in behind the latticed curtain. The tension between theatre and film in Tit-Coq is thus a tension between the past, the present, and the future, where the old art form, the original format of the piece, represents the preliminary

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conditions of the characters that the new medium seeks to challenge. In those scenes where cinema manages to displace theatre through camera movements, conspicuous editing, and outdoors scenes, we get a sense that the present is overtaking the past and opening up new possibilities. By emphasizing Tit-Coq’s cinematic freedom at the film’s conclusion, following the particularly static confrontation with the padre, Gélinas stresses the orphan’s positive rejection of his theatrical and confining past. Heinz Weinmann sees the film as tracing a process of tabula rasa (Weinmann, 51). Along with Tit-Coq, who leaves behind Marie-Ange and takes the train “qui le conduit vers son avenir,” that carries him to his future (italics in original), Quebec sheds its colonized past and moves towards the Quiet Revolution (ibid., 64–5). But Tit-Coq is a rare example of a character who manages to escape the confines of his conservative environment. The hopeful promises of the Quiet Revolution did not result in a utopian society, but rather culminated in a violent abortion of the utopian vision during the October Crisis. As we will see in the next chapters, both Anglophone and Francophone adaptations produced after 1970 feature characters who remain trapped in their predestined circumstances in spite of cinema’s challenge to theatrical enclosure.

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3 Theatrical Characters Trapped in Cinematic Spaces

After a hiatus of almost twenty years, plays started being adapted again in Canada in the early 1970s. Unlike in Tit-Coq, where film’s transcendence of theatrical limitations affords the main character an escape only indirectly hinted at in the dramatic text, adaptations from the 1970s and ’80s insist on the reassertion of theatrical containment. Only Vic Sarin’s Cold Comfort, which will be examined in the next chapter, allows a character to walk away like Tit-Coq from the confines of the locus dramaticus towards the wide-open spaces conferred by cinema. Even this instance of cinematic escape, however, is far from being fully realized. This is not to say that the stage-bound adaptations of the ’70s and ’80s are inferior to the few works that do transgress the theatrical space. In very many cases, the condition of entrapment of the dramatis personae is made even more palpable through the depiction of theatrical characters trapped in cinematic spaces. Their situation seems even more dreadful in the films than in the plays as the potential for escape made visible on screen is irrevocably ignored, rejected, forsaken. In this chapter, I propose to analyse in detail two works in which this predicament is most effectively represented. The patterns and structures elucidated here through close readings of the two original texts and their film versions will lay a foundation for the more concise interpretations offered in subsequent chapters. We shall begin our analysis with one of the most powerful works of the early 1970s, William Fruet’s Wedding in White.

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wedding in white: commanding the patriarchal stage Set in the Prairies near the end of World War II, Wedding in White takes place at roughly the same time as Tit-Coq and also features a son, Jimmy, who brings home a friend, Billy, who has nowhere else to go during his leave (Fruet, 249–50). Like Gélinas’s work, Fruet’s play depicts a world that is extremely constrictive for men and even more so for women. But, rather than Catholic dogma, the forces at work in Fruet’s text are those of a conservative Canadian culture epitomized by notions of military righteousness and unflinching respect for patriarchal convictions. The crux of the drama is Jim Dougal’s cruel response to his teenage daughter’s pregnancy after she is raped by Billy. Rather than seeking punishment for the rapist (Billy is never heard of again after the night of the rape), Jim first seeks to re-establish his patriarchal control over the situation by threatening to evict his daughter, Jeanie, from his house. He eventually elects to marry her off to his old friend Sandy, in an effort to redeem Jeanie’s “shameful” condition. Even more than Marie-Ange in Tit-Coq, Jeanie is manipulated by others throughout the play, without having any control over her circumstances. She is a passive character who is doubly victimized: first by the rape and second through her father’s oppressive behaviour. Certain reviewers saw Jeanie’s characterization as a weakness in both the theatrical version and the film, arguing that her passivity creates a void at the centre of the story. For instance, Peter Crossley, commenting on the production of the play at the Manitoba Theatre Centre in May 1973, claims that Jeanie, as portrayed by Nancy Beatty, “seemed unreal [...] she was shy, yes, but when she was approached by a young man, she showed no surprise or emotional response” (Crossley, 85). Piers Handling, in a concise analysis of the movie, also complains about Jeanie’s lack of intensity: “We never really come close to her. She is relatively without energy, almost apathetic in accepting her fate” (Handling, 45). But, while these reactions were undoubtedly influenced, in part, by performance factors external to Fruet’s text, Jeanie’s impassiveness is also clearly inscribed in the play script itself. For example, one of Fruet’s stage directions stipulates that Billy’s aggressive behaviour “has caught her completely by surprise, and she doesn’t respond in any way” (Fruet, 279). This passivity and inhibition actually form an

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integral part of Jeanie’s function on the stage set by her father. As we will see, the main theme of the drama is Jim’s attempt to maintain a watertight environment that he can fully master; he must command the patriarchal stage. Within this context of masculine dominance, Jeanie is irrelevant as long as she does not present a threat to the fatherly enclosure. From the beginning of the play, Fruet conveys Jim’s need to maintain absolute control over his self-contained milieu. The first information the reader gathers about any character in Wedding in White concerns Jim’s attachment to a specific area of his house. Early in his introductory set descriptions, Fruet details the extreme left of the stage in these terms: “Beneath the stairway another door opens to the cellar. This same corner of the room has become Jim’s personal little sanctuary consisting of a large black leather chair, an old gramophone, a small whisky cabinet, a display of shell casings and other war souvenirs. Several army group photos hang beside pictures of King George V and Queen Mary. A Union Jack is draped as a background” (ibid., 247). Even before encountering any of the personages, the reader already knows of Jim’s preferred site: an exiguous corner underneath the stairs where all of the old man’s universe is enclosed. This is one of the dominant scenic figures affixed to Jim, denoting his physical and mental huddling up in a recess of his house decorated with images of the past and symbols of Great Britain. Jim’s bond to his British roots, or, more precisely, to his imaginary (i.e., through images) reconstruction of British traditions, intimates his inward resistance against his actual environment. James Leach noted that “the claustrophobic world of Wedding in White, for example, stems from a rigid adherence to British traditions and an unwillingness to adapt to (or even create) a new environment” (Leach, 109). Although Leach’s comment is concerned with Fruet’s film, Jim’s impulse to shun his surroundings is equally present in the play. This essential aspect of Jim’s persona is reinforced throughout the drama by an accretion of actions and images that emphasize his propensity for secure enclosure, resistance to change, and apprehension of the outside world. Jim works as a prison guard at a nearby p. o . w. camp, an occupation devoted entirely to the upholding of the barriers that separate the inside from the outside. His claim that the prisoners are treated “like bloody royalty” attests to his favourable prejudice towards life in confinement (Fruet, 258, 289). He exercises his profession at home as well,

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prohibiting Jeanie from moving in and out of the house freely and training a dog to protect his abode against potential escapees. Jim’s inward tendency is evidenced, as well, by the fact that he retreats to the cellar when he wishes to carry on a drinking spree with Sandy (ibid., 292). Furthermore, the war souvenir of which Jim is proudest is a model ship built inside a whisky bottle, an ironic metaphor that translates Jim’s fascination with secluded objects while emphasizing the unequivocal metonymic implications of the container (ibid., 259). But perhaps the most significant symbol of Jim’s need to construct a private sanctuary is his son, Jimmie, whom the old man erects as a monument to patriarchal pride. The play opens with Jim boisterously welcoming home his son, who is on short leave from a remote military base. During the first scene, the dialogue revolves entirely around Jimmie, old Jim “hanging on every word his son says” (ibid., 251). Jeanie’s entrance occurs as the conversation is already well under way, and her position on stage, hidden at the top of the stairs from which she descends slowly and timidly, keeps her apart from the action transpiring downstairs. After a brief, albeit affectionate, encounter between brother and sister, Billy, Jim, and his wife, Mary, “all follow Jimmie into the living room leaving Jeanie forgotten” (ibid., 250–1). Were the play as a whole analogous to this preliminary scene, Jimmie would doubtlessly emerge as the central character of the drama. However, a few scenes after his conspicuous ingress, Jimmie vanishes from the stage never to be seen again, and the sporadic actions that he performs, although not irrelevant, are of little significance in the general economy of the play (ibid., 268–9). In retrospect, it appears that Jimmie’s prominent presence in the first moments of the play serves only to accentuate Jim’s need to establish his son as the solid core of his universe. But this core is eventually shown by Fruet to be completely hollow. That Billy elects to run away after having assaulted Jeanie is in keeping with his persona as a coward and a bully who “speciallizes in the sexual degradation of his womenfolk” (Fothergill, “Coward, Bully, or Clown,” 239). However, that Jimmie absconds with Billy seems to contradict the image of the valorous son fabricated by the father. Scrutiny of Jimmie’s character, from a perspective less biased than that of Jim, reveals that the young man is far from being a paragon of dignified masculinity.

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As we learn in act 1, scene 3, Jimmie has “asked for active duty a hundred times now. They won’t let him off” (Fruet, 266). His inability to become a fighting soldier generates resentment that translates into hostility towards friends and strangers alike. The embitterment is augmented by the fact that Jimmie perceives his “domestic” job in the army-supply stores as a potential object of ridicule (ibid., 266–7). This rather unmanly position, which makes of him “the only guy who knows where the hell anything is in this place” according to his military superiors (ibid., 266), draws a clear parallel between him and his mother, who, as the stereotypical woman of the home, is the only person to know where anything is in the household (ibid., 281). Yet, when Jimmie is called upon to defend his father against the assault of a belligerent soldier during a drinking spree at the Legion, and thereby is given a chance to prove his masculine potency, “he sits frozen in fear” (ibid., 269). Fruet concludes Jimmie’s involvement in the drama by having him try to compensate for his lack of courage at the Legion by threatening to fight old Sandy. But, before Jimmie can do any damage, he collapses under the weight of his intoxication and crawls up to his room, whence he will not reappear. Leaving aside Jimmie’s excuses (ibid., 266, 272), these scenes reveal his authentic persona: a coward and a loser incapable of assuming his role as the powerful son. Unable to rely on his son to command the patriarchal stage, Jim must thus fall back on despotically controlling the women around him: Jeanie and Mary. According to John Moss’s analysis in Sex and Violence in the Canadian Novel (1977), this behaviour is typical of weak Canadian male characters. In Canadian gothic novels, “some men are seen to assert themselves through sexual tyranny, mastering people where they can never be sure of mastering the land,” says Moss (187). “Nowhere, short of the great dramatic tragedies of antiquity,” he argues, “are families as driven upon themselves by circumstance towards spontaneous violence” (ibid., 185). Mary is the most frequent victim of Jim’s brutality. In act 3, Mary suffers a devastating blow when Jim elects to banish Jeanie from his house. Determined to protect her daughter, Mary defies her husband. “I’ll not let you send Jeanie away Jim […] I’ve thought about it. After she’s had the baby, she could find a job, and I could watch it through the day […] I’d look after and care for the baby real well” (Fruet, 311– 12). Jim violently dismisses her suggestion, and Mary must yield to

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her husband’s authority. In his stage directions, Fruet underscores Mary’s subservient position following this argument: “Mary rises, drained of any further fight. It’s probably the first time the old woman has stood up to Jim in all the years of their marriage, and she has lost” (ibid., 312). Although Jim goes back on his ruling, his decision to offer Jeanie in marriage to Sandy does not represent a gesture of solicitude towards Mary. In fact, this resolution leads to yet another bitter ordeal for the old woman, who finds herself compelled to forsake her best friend and Sandy’s longtime companion, Sarah. Angry at her boyfriend for marrying Jeanie, Sarah puts the blame on Mary. “Disgustin’ cheap people, that’s what ya are!!” Sarah tells Mary, who retorts: “Don’t ever come back here again, ya hear?! You don’t call us things like that!” (ibid., 322). This feud is equally painful for both women, as Mary loses her soul mate, and Sarah sees her longtime lover abandon her. Jim remains indifferent towards his wife’s distress, for as long as his uncompromising insistence on erecting barriers between his closed domain and the outside world is respected, he is satisfied. All that matters to Jim is to avoid being shamed or dishonoured. It is this dread of exposure before the opprobrious gaze of others that leads him to decree Jeanie’s eviction, to dismiss Mary’s offer to keep the girl’s baby, and to find a convenient cover-up by marrying her off to Sandy. I do not want to embark on a fastidious psychological inquiry into the origins of shame in Fruet’s characters. But in order to understand the link between Jim’s inclination towards enclosure and his anxiety concerning disgrace or shame, it will prove useful to look succinctly at the psychological mechanism that his conduct reproduces. Of particular interest for our purpose is that Jim’s admiration for his son, most ardently voiced at the beginning of the play, and the shame he later experiences as he witnesses Jimmie’s display of cowardice at the Legion reproduce a psychological structure common among shame-based families comprising alcoholic parents (Wegscheider, 104–15). The role of the Hero/Impostor assigned to Jimmie by his father is typical for the first-born child of parents in dire need of self-esteem enhancement. As psychologist Stanley D. Wilson suggests, the heroic achievements falsely attributed to the son seek “to provide a feeling of worth to parents who feel like failures [and] represent an attempt to cure the family of the shame sickness” (Wilson, 138–9).

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Consequently, it emerges that Jim’s attitude towards Jimmie stems from the former’s own embedded sense of shame. Although Fruet does not provide his audience with the characterological background necessary to unearth the roots of the family’s mortification, the depiction of Jim’s current behaviour leaves little doubt that he is a character gnawed by shame.1 His need for seclusion can be read as a response to feelings of shame, which is defined as an “experience of feeling exposed [which] results in a compelling need to hide [and] causes us to feel psychologically isolated, afraid of further contact, afraid of further exposure” (Wilson, 7–8, emphasis added). Therefore, Jim’s idealization of Jimmie as the honourable heroic son appears as yet another barrier, albeit an ineffective one, that the old man erects between himself and the world to avoid further exposure. Without getting into Lacanian speculations on the symbolic function of the Name of the Father, even Jimmie’s name attests to Jim’s negation of an independent existence for his son, beyond his role as a mask of strength and pride for his father to wear.2 Significantly, Jim establishes a figurative link between Jeanie’s shameful pregnancy and the world out there. “Aye she’s been about more than we imagined,” he tells Mary, “a regular little woman of the world […] I’ve travelled half the world and I know the kind of women that take up with men the way she did” (Fruet, 309). For Jim, the world looms as a wicked environment whose strident shaming attacks must be shut out. The segment of the play in which Jim’s views on the malevolence of the world are brought to bear on Mary begins with his vehement complaining about the “damn cold wind out there” and ends on his retreating to his cherished corner, where he seeks refuge in whisky and a bagpipe tune (ibid., 308–12). The dialectic between the forbidding exterior and the safe interior where one can hide from the world is rendered tangible, here, through the contrasting images of the bitter winter wind and the nook. This dichotomy is clearly in keeping with Northrop Frye’s interpretation of the Canadian imagination: the garrison mentality (Frye, The Bush Garden, 225). Incidentally, that Jim comes up with his opportune solution to the drama as he is ensconced in his alcove, where Sandy joins him in the next scene and convinces him that Jeanie can be redeemed, suggests an ironic reversal of the Shakespearean process of pastoral rejuvenation, labelled the “green

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world” by Frye (Anatomy of Criticism, 182–3). In Wedding in White, it is not a sojourn to the forest that resolves dilemmas but withdrawal into the penetralia of the house. Through most of his actions – from his warm welcome of Jimmie into his house to his marrying off of Jeanie to Sandy, which reasserts his control over her – Jim expresses his desire to preserve a garrison that contains all that he values and shuts out all that he fears and despises. While this behaviour might be typical of the Canadian ethos in general, it could also be argued that Jim’s unflinching attempts to command the closed patriarchal stage speak specifically to the resurgent authoritarianism of the early 1970s. This situation is equally evident in Les beaux dimanches, in which Victor Primeau imposes his patriarchal authority on his family. The early 1970s, it could be argued, were characterized by a return of the authoritative Father. The most influential cultural figure in Canada at the time of Wedding in White’s production was probably Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Though the sophisticated, intellectual, bourgeois leader of the country in the 1970s might seem to have little in common with Wedding in White’s Jim Dougal, Trudeau actually bears some uncanny resemblance to Fruet’s authoritative patriarch. Described by Richard Gwyn as a bully “with unresolved inner conflict projected onto others” (Gwyn, 28), Trudeau “grew up withdrawn almost to the point of neuroticism [… in] an extraordinarily close family, which made a very sharp distinction between itself and the rest of the world” (ibid., 26). And, if his former wife’s reports are to be trusted, he apparently told Margaret in the early years of their marriage that if she and their children were ever abducted, he would rather see them killed than be shamed into negotiating with kidnappers (ibid., 116). One would expect Jim Dougal to say pretty much the same thing. While he assumed the persona of a hip liberal, Trudeau eventually stood out as one of Canada’s most authoritative prime ministers. “Pierre Trudeau,” say James and Robert Laxer in The Liberal Idea of Canada (1977), “who appeared destined to be the nation’s most nonchalant and open-minded Prime Minister has turned out in retrospect to be its most doctrinaire” (Laxer, 15–16). Among Trudeau’s doctrinarian gestures, his invoking the War Measures Act on 16 October 1970 – and the subsequent arrest of almost 500 innocent people – certainly represents the most obvious mark of the return of repression after the libertarian effervescence of the 1960s. I have argued elsewhere that Michel Brault’s Les ordres (1974) fo-

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cuses on the events of October 1970 not so much to document historical incidents as to denounce the rise of authoritarianism in Canada (Loiselle, “Michel Brault’s Les ordres”). Wedding in White, of course, does not refer to October 1970. But Fruet’s work, in its emphasis on militarism, arbitrary punishment, and the victimization of the innocent, clearly articulates a criticism of authoritarianism as stringent as what is found in Brault’s piece. The purpose of this very brief foray into early-1970s politics is simply to suggest that the display of harshness, oppression, and inflexibility in Fruet’s play can be read as a reflection on contemporary issues. Fruet’s film might show even more sagacity than his play in terms of its diagnosis of early-1970s Canadian society in so far as it analogizes the impression of liberalism overlaying a state of oppression. This effect is achieved through the introduction of cinematic spaces that suggest openness and freedom but ultimately reassert bondage and subjugation. In one of the rare negative reviews that Fruet’s film suffered when it came out at the end of 1972, Nat Shuster writes: The trouble with Wedding in White is in its inability to get away from the conventions of the theatre where it found its original beginnings […] What Fruet has forgotten, in his effort to present a piece of realistic drama, is that the first rule of motion pictures is motion and action. Because of this oversight, the film remains, in spite of many good things, essentially a static record of a stage production nailed down to its immobile origins. Whereas a certain quality of the confined feeling, created by the proximity of the camera to its subject, works in achieving a mood of entrapment and hopelessness suffered by the heroine, Jeannie (Carol Kane), the continuing and unrelenting claustrophobia becomes, in the end, counter-productive. (Shuster, 43)

What is significant about Shuster’s remarks is that the reviewer is clearly aware of the failed struggle for freedom that the film incarnates. This struggle was never acknowledged by theatre critics as an integral part of the stage performance itself, as the play’s structure and style do not incorporate denied potential for escape. What makes the film appear stage-bound, is not so much that it strictly respects the unity of place – it doesn’t – but rather that it opens windows of cinematic opportunities only to close them immediately and thus alludes to a freedom that is at once negated.

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From the beginning of the film, the potential for freedom is at once introduced and rescinded. The film’s first images show the bottom steps of a stairway leading up from a completely dark locale to a slightly brighter space outside the frame. The camera then slowly tilts upwards, following, for an instant, the illuminated path of the staircase. The extremely narrow view that Fruet affords his spectators, paired with the ascending camera movement that ushers their gaze, encourages an interpretation of this twenty-second take as an invitation to leave the darkness that overwhelms the screen. Even at the basic level of the eye’s natural attraction towards the visible, the audience’s attention is inevitably drawn outside of the tenebrous area comprised in the frame. As soon as the viewers have registered this initial motion outwards, the camera pans away from the stairs and plunges us back into the obscurity of the setting, which we eventually recognize as a cellar in which a dog abides. Thus this opening visual statement introduces the notion of escape, or efferent movement away from the gravitational centre of the shot, only to negate it immediately. In so doing, the film discloses one of the main concerns of the drama without resorting to verbalization. The ensuing two-minute sequence reformulates the same denial of egression, once again through purely nonlinguistic methods. Following the prefacing shot, the dog is seen pulling on the chain that shackles it to the floor of the cellar. It barks aggressively at Jeannie3 (Carol Kane), whose face appears at one of the basement windows. This sight of the chained animal reinforces the connotation of frustrated outward drive that is insinuated in the previous images. In its syntagmatic connection with Jeannie’s emergence in the visual field, this view extends the connotation to the series of shots that follow. As the image switches from the dog’s barking in the basement to an outside view of Jeannie lurking around the house, the spectator instantly surmises that the girl is trying to get away from home. Her furtive look at her father, Jim (Donald Pleasence), heedlessly sitting on a sofa in the centre of the backyard, substantiates this impression. Although Jeannie’s intent in this scene remains somewhat equivocal, these visual hints, in combination with her despondent expression when she pitifully goes back inside and the melancholy nondiegetic music that accompanies the whole proceedings, convey the idea of her thwarted effort to leave the premises guarded by her father. The last portion of the preliminary sequence shows the culmination of Jeannie’s withdrawal, as she retreats to her bedroom

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and contemplates sadly the romantic photographs that cover the walls. To this point, the film still has not used any identifiable material from the play, yet it has already mapped out the central determinants of the dramatic conflict: namely, the unbreachable boundaries of the father’s enclosed stage. The film eventually cites the play when Jimmie’s (Paul Bradley) crude call, “Mom, where the hell are ya?,” breaks the silence of Jeannie’s sorrowful reverie. For the ten minutes succeeding Jimmie’s noisy entrance, the cinematic version adheres closely to the first two scenes of act 1. Though certain lines are cut or merged, most of the information about the characters is rendered through dialogue corresponding roughly to the original script. Here, the camera functions mainly as a support for the verbal exchanges with a minimum of intrusive effects, seamlessly alternating between medium shot and close-up to emphasize facial expressions while insuring the perspicuity of the characters’ placement in the single setting of Jim’s residence. Nevertheless, the cinematic apparatus’s limited involvement in this segment still offers eloquent cinematic imagery that expands the semiotic ramifications of the text. For instance, the closeups that show Billy’s (Doug McGrath) lascivious glances at Jeannie, as well as his impatient reactions to Jimmie’s hobnob with his family, effectively counterpoint the friendly attitude he adopts when addressing his hosts and obliquely presage his brutal behaviour. Another subdued but meaningful cinematic manoeuvre is Fruet’s introduction of Jeannie’s seductive friend, Dollie (Bonnie Carol Case), as an evident object of desire. By juxtaposing a shot in which Billy shows Jim pornographic pictures and a shot of Dollie’s foot in a red high-heel shoe, followed by a slow tilt revealing her body as the men’s lewd laughter segues over the two images, Fruet specifies, from the outset, her role as the focal point of the male gaze. The use of such film imagery for “indexing, bracketing and scaling”4 the pertinent visual information of the plot allows Fruet to convey the themes of his theatrical work with great verbal economy. There are several other instances throughout the movie when Fruet uses filmic devices with a comparable blend of restraint and efficacy. For example, the scene in which Billy and Dollie engage in some heavy petting in the kitchen is shot from a low-angle position focusing on the characters’ pelvic areas. This has the unmistakable effect of depersonalizing the intercourse and eliminating any hint of affection or complicity between the two participants. Conversely,

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the rape of Jeannie is depicted through a tight two-shot of the rapist’s and his victim’s faces, thus giving a visage to male brutality and personalizing the atrocity of the deed. In this manner, Fruet draws a sharp distinction between carelessly detached flirting and the very concrete repercussions of abusive sex. The alignment between the rape and Doug McGrath’s face is further exploited by Fruet in the next sequence, where Billy, having joined Jimmie, who is sleeping in Jeannie’s bedroom, is obviously eager to escape the scene of his crime. Hesitating before waking up his friend, Billy stands nervously in front of some romantic pictures on the wall. Fruet holds this shot long enough for the spectators to notice the discrepancy between McGrath’s guilt-ridden mask and the portraits of happily married couples behind him. One of these images even depicts lovers kissing in a position reminiscent of the rape shot. This visual rhyme ingeniously underscores the irony of the “wedding in white” announced in the title and evokes the dream-shattering consequences of the sexual violation. Billy is last seen through a dirty window pane as he absconds with Jimmie. Framed by the edges of the window, this blurred picture of the depraved coward magnifies Fruet’s ironic commentary by creating a visual analogy between the rapist and the virtuous soldiers portrayed in Jeannie’s photographs. Another arresting example of Fruet’s sober but effective use of the filmic medium is the cinematization of Jeannie’s beating by her father immediately after he learns of her pregnancy. Initially focusing on Jeannie’s romantic pictures as Jim threateningly calls his daughter downstairs, the scene proceeds through a series of low-angle and point-of-view shots that suture the spectators with the teenager as the object of the father’s infuriated blows. The most disturbing moments in the film are achieved by alternating close-ups of Jim’s fists, punching her stomach, with shots of her terrified point of view. Striking a balance between the brutal content of the image, the spasmodic rhythm of the editing, and the chaotic noises on the soundtrack, Fruet succeeds in creating a sense of oppression that is uniquely cinematic. Moreover, without having to resort to the gory excesses of a work like Denys Arcand’s contemporary La maudite galette (1971), Fruet manages to depict domestic violence in a manner that renders it as shocking as anything displayed in Canadian movies of the early 1970s.

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As these few instances attest, Fruet’s meticulous utilization of the cinematic apparatus affords an evocative perceptual expansion of his dramatic language. Elsewhere, however, the film medium simply illustrates the stage production without modifying in any consequential fashion the temporal and spatial continuity of the drama. This adherence to the closed universe of the theatre is responsible in great part for the impression of claustrophobia that Shuster voices in his review. Fruet himself was conscious of the claustrophobic effect that situating much of the film’s action in Jim’s shuttered house would create. “I’m sure people are going to get a very claustrophobic feeling as the picture goes on,” he stated in an interview published in the summer of 1972. “They’re going to start to feel this confinement, hopefully it won’t make them get up and leave” (Koller, 47). But, while the film undoubtedly exudes an atmosphere of entrapment, this mood does not result exclusively from the director’s choice to set most of the movie in the locations imposed by the play. In fact, Fruet situates several scenes in sites other than Jim’s house and the Legion hall, allowing his characters to move in streets, back alleys, restaurants, and so forth. These scenes, which challenge the dicta of the dramatic text, most evidently incarnate the tension inherent in the film-mediation process: that is, the conflict between static, afferent drama and mobile, efferent cinema. The first scene outside the theatrical territory transpires at the ballroom where Dollie and Jeannie go on their nightly outing. The initial shots of this nontheatrical sequence, which is inserted between scenes 2 and 3 of act 1, show couples slow-dancing to 1940s music in a colourful and warm decor. The situation is decidedly more appealing than those previously depicted and proposes a possible escape from the patriarchal stage. When we first see Dollie and Jeannie, however, they are explicitly separated from this liberating image, as they are making themselves up in the washroom. Even when they return to the ballroom, the two women do not mingle with the crowd. They remain to the side, withdrawn, instead of socializing with the men who approach them. Their detached behaviour insinuates a gap between the theatrical characters and their cinematic environment. It is a fissure that confines the characters to their theatrical capacity and hinders any consequential interaction with purely cinematic agencies, for such interactions would jeopardize the dynamic of the original drama.

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In the play, the main function of the girls’ night out is to justify Dollie’s presence at Dougal’s house late in the evening and thus to set the stage for Jeanie’s rape (Billy is “teased” by Dollie and, after she leaves, takes out his sexual frustration on Jeanie). The nightly escapade, in itself, has no semiotic content and does not partake in the dénouement of the drama. This explains why Fruet elects to show the world that attracts the girls without allowing them to actually partake in it, for any fruitful action in the exclusively cinematic ballroom episode might infringe on the preformulated articulation of the drama. For instance, for Fruet to have granted Jeannie any genuine contact with a man outside of her theatrical milieu would have provided her with a potential alternative to the eventual resolution of her plight, thus undermining the inevitable outcome of the play. Understandably, therefore, Jeannie and Dollie appear out of place in the ballroom, for they are stationed in a cinematic milieu in which they cannot perform any momentous gestures whatsoever since the circumstances related to the dance-hall anecdote must be absorbed in the semiotic vacuum allocated to this event in the dramatic source. The only comment that the young women make about their outing, in the play, concerns two soldiers who trailed them on their way home. Labelled “Mutt and Jeff in person” (Fruet, 274) by Dollie, the two anonymous soldiers serve no other purpose than to prompt the girls’ giggly chatter and their teasing of the lustful Billy. Fruet chooses to cinematize the soldiers in a scene set in a restaurant shortly after the ballroom chapter. Sitting in a booth with the girls, “Mutt and Jeff” indulge in juvenile imitations of radio celebrities, which slightly amuse Jeannie but annoy Dollie. Again, the filmmaker ensures that this supplementary material does not contribute any novel elements to the plot by avoiding concrete interaction between the two groups. Consequently, the soldiers’ intervention remains dramatically expendable, thus allowing the film to be true to the original script while affording an intimation of the world outside the theatrical setting. The addition of the ballroom and restaurant scenes represents an instructive instance of the tension at the core of the film-mediation process. This tension is doubtlessly magnified by the fact that Fruet himself plays the dual role of original play-script writer and film adaptor. On the one hand, the very existence of the cinematic tableaux testifies to the filmmaker’s attempt to open up the dramatic

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milieu by introducing a greater variety of locations. On the other hand, the dramatist’s insistence on denying the supplementary film material any transformative bearing on the dramatic structure reasserts the immutability of the original theatrical piece. While Fruet has much in common with Gélinas in terms of the control he exerts over the transpositional process, he has a different response to the potential of adaptation. Gélinas uses film to transform the meaning of the play, especially in the final scene. Conversely, Fruet resorts to the cinematic medium to magnify the dramatic theme. For Fruet, the possibility of escape proposed by the cinematic universe – the potential meeting of soldiers in the ballroom and at the restaurant – is always already denied by the structure of the pessimistic drama, which abides by a strict succession of episodes that proceed to seal Jeanie’s fate. What these additional scenes accomplish, therefore, is an injection of film images into the dramatic fabric; they define the external world around the characters without, however, exerting any influence on the confining structure of the action. This certainly contributes to the impression of claustrophobia emerging from the film, for although we are offered visions of the outside world, it remains effectively inaccessible to the characters. The dramatic conflict is thus sharpened through the means of adaptation since the signifying structure of the work now traverses its formal design. Indeed, while the cinematic enlargement of the text draws an efferent panorama of the external world, the film’s dramatic configuration reasserts Jim’s command of the patriarchal stage, as the female characters remain immured in their theatrical predicament. Fruet’s film does comprise a few scenes exhibiting momentous actions that are not included in the play. One of the best examples is a sequence inserted in the first scene of act 2 during which Jeannie, now aware of her pregnancy, meanders into a general store with Dollie. Coaxed by her friend to steal something, Jeannie runs away with a pair of baby socks. Unlike in the previous examples, this exclusively filmic action has an effect on the dramatic construction because Mary (Doris Petrie) eventually discovers her daughter’s condition by finding the socks in the kitchen garbage can where Jeannie threw them. Here, we seem to witness the complete meshing of the dramatic and the cinematic, as an element indigenous to the latter’s discourse determines the former’s climactic progression. This suggestion, however, necessitates some qualification. First, Mary’s discovery of the pregnancy does not rest only on the finding

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of the socks, but also on the way in which Jeannie looks at herself in the mirror, which replicates the circumstances of the revelation on stage. The socks, therefore, serve as a parallel plot device, rather than as the sole catalyst of action. Second, and more importantly, the appropriation of the socks as a component of the drama is actually performed to the detriment of the cinematic event that injects them into the story. Jeannie executes the theft in the clumsiest way, rushing to seize the socks on a shelf and running out in a panic under the surprised eye of another shopper. The incident should have created a certain commotion in the store and could have triggered a parallel drama involving the authorities. However, the implications of the deed are never even marginally considered. Rather, the myriad semiotic ingredients introduced cinematically in this scene – from the other shopper and the store employee walking by to the lipstick that Dollie snatches – are filtered out of the narrative, as the film retains only the single element that serves its dramatic purpose: the baby socks. The use of the socks, therefore, confirms the drama-vs.-film tension identified above, inasmuch as the filmic scenario that precipitates their emergence points outwards to a broader environment that is immediately erased. The narrowly focused dramatic structure co-opts the woollen objects and transforms them into a restrictively symbolic device. The notion of claustrophobia is thus associated not only with space, but also with the idea of semiotic deployment; the widely polysemous potential of the filmic discourse is constantly funnelled into the predetermined configuration of the theatrical piece. This process also characterizes the overarching structure of the work. The utilization of several locations in the film’s first twothirds subsides to virtually no exterior shots in the last third, after Jeannie has disclosed her situation to Mary. This shift in the geographical circulation of the camera is actually so apparent that it was noted by reviewer Jean-Pierre Tadros: “The psychological drama is intensified in the moment that Jeannie confides in her mother. Now the camera, like Jeannie herself, is confined to the house. One effect of this confinement is to accentuate the theatrical feeling of the film” (Tadros, “Wedding in White,” 31). Although, contrary to what Tadros claims, the camera is not strictly confined to the house after Jeannie’s disclosure – there are a few shots located elsewhere in the last half-hour of the film – there is, indeed, a remarkable parallel between Jeannie’s passage from relative freedom

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to imprisonment and the camera’s retreat from several locations to the limits of Jim’s house and the church. As such, the film proves an even more cogent medium than the theatre to demonstrate the confining force of the patriarchal stage by subjecting the cinematic apparatus to a radical dramatic coercion. The tension between theatre and film is also italicized at another level: namely, in the constant collision between the tightly framed content of the image and the expansiveness of the cinematic narrative achieved through camerawork and montage. This dialectic is most evident in the shoplifting scene and its aftermath, when Jeannie runs away into a back alley. The five-minute sequence – comprising fragments of dialogue from the end of act 2, scene 1, when Dollie talks of going away to live with her sister (Fruet, 285–7) – takes place entirely outside of the theatrical territory and partly outdoors. It features considerable movement, of both the camera and the actors, and counts an average of eight cuts per minute, which is about twice as many as in most other scenes. It also presents some of the rare long shots in the film and culminates in an aggressive altercation between the girls. This is less brutal than Jim’s beating of his daughter but assembles a greater variety of visual perspectives (close-up, two-shot, middle shot, dolly shot). Because of these numerous factors, the scene stands out as one of the most cinematic parts of the film, capitalizing on the diverse properties of the medium to display a heterogeneous natural milieu, ranging from the cosmetic section of a mart to the puddles of a muddy back lane. But, whereas the manipulation of the images manifestly explodes the constraints of the theatrical setting, the content and composition of the pictures themselves reinforce the sense of entrapment created in the movie. Much of the sequence is comprised of close-ups but avoids the mechanical shot-reverse-shot formula that manifests the plenitude of the cinematic space (Carroll, 183–5). For instance, when Dollie suggests in the store, “You should get a job here. Look at all these things you could pinch,” rather than showing “all these things” to give a sense of the environment, Fruet’s camera remains on Dollie’s and Jeannie’s tightly framed faces, which eclipse the commercial vista. Furthermore, although the sequence incorporates a few long shots of store aisles and back lanes, the composition always stresses the exiguity of the space by encumbering the visual field with shelves, walls, fences, and so forth. For instance, one of the most extreme long shots of

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the film, showing Jeannie and Dollie walking in the alley, literally encloses the girls in a cage of decrepit brick walls and metal panels. The effect is even more pronounced in the middle shots and closeups of the alley. In these cases, the proximity of the camera emphasizes the gray and humid texture of the cement blocks and wooden boards that overhang the characters, casting a particularly ironic shadow on Dollie’s boasting about her projected travel to the States and on Jeannie’s claim that she had sex with Billy because he likes her. Most exterior shots in the rest of the movie function similarly, emphasizing the constant struggle between film’s ability to map out wide-open spaces and the afferent quality of the image’s composition. Cars driving in the streets are always engulfed by the oppressive darkness of night. Sarah (Christine Thomas), one of the characters most often seen outdoors, always appears next to forbidding fences, between rows of bleak houses, and under overcast skies. And the shot that begins Jeannie’s virtual confinement to the house, corresponding to act 3, scene 1, looks over a foggy street through a window, before turning away from the outside with an inward pan. Robert Fothergill comments in the following terms on Fruet’s aesthetic choice to restrict film’s natural ability to depict physical locations: “[T]he exterior locations are so tightly framed that we never see more than a back alley, a couple of house-fronts, a dark roadway, and the inside of an old Kresge’s store. The resulting effect of claustrophobia and isolation is rather artificially expressionistic, conveying the unnatural impression that nobody in this little purgatory ever sees the sky or trees or any length of street. But within the home of the Dougal family, a sensation of physical confinement effectively matches the emotional pressures of the human milieu” (Fothergill, “A Place Like Home,” 359). In the context of the present study, Fruet’s choice to emphasize the conflict between film’s limitless spatial capacity and the confining frame of the individual shot is of primary importance, for it parallels, at least according to narratological theory, a duality at the core of the filmic enunciation. In his book, Du littéraire au filmique: Système du récit (1988), André Gaudreault argues that film creates its meaning through a combination of two broad techniques: monstration, the showing of images in a continuous shot; and narration, the juxtaposition of shots through editing. Monstration is the aspect of cinema that links

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it most directly to theatre. In fact, what Gaudreault calls profilmic monstration, “is the equivalent on film of the monstrative work performed on stage” (Gaudreaut, 121).5 Although certain types of filmographic monstration, like variable framing, differ from traditional theatrical staging, monstration on stage and in film share the common drawback of having to function within a certain unity of time and space. But, unlike the theatre, Gaudreault continues, film can escape the limits of monstration through narration or montage, which allows it to move freely across time and space. Gaudreault writes: “Although filmographic monstration […] can detach itself from profilmic monstration, although it can become autonomous and add a discursive layer to the profilmic, it is still nailed to the hic et nunc of the enunciation […] It is impossible for filmographic monstration to achieve what is so simple for the filmographic narrator: namely, to move instantaneously (time) from one place (space) to another” (ibid., 123, emphasis in original).6 Monstration, therefore, either profilmic or filmographic, confines cinema, as in the theatre, to a place and a time that it can escape only through narration. Although Fruet was certainly not concerned with narratological conjectures when he produced his adaptation of Wedding in White, his two-fold utilization of the cinematic medium corroborates Gaudreault’s theory. By employing film’s narrative ability to explode the limits of the theatrical setting, while using the individual shots to convey an impression of confinement, the filmmaker ingeniously exploits the dual discourse of monstration/narration inherent in narrative cinema. Of particular interest for our purpose, Fruet’s praxis not only illustrates the theory, but also gives a form to the dialectic at the centre of the original drama. The static proclivity of monstration – that is, its anchoring of the perceptual material in a fixed space/time continuum – works as an evocative metaphor for Jim’s attempt to sustain the patriarchal stronghold afforded to him by conservative Canadian values. Similarly, the efferent potential of the free-flowing filmographic narration gives a false impression of freedom for Jeannie, but, in the end, cinema relinquishes much of its narrative privilege and concedes victory to the original drama. The very last shot of the film, that of the stairway leading to the newlyweds’ bedroom, is held for such a long time, beyond the closing music and credits, that the sense of absolute spatial and temporal entrapment – pure monstration – becomes unbearable. Unlike

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Jeannie, however, the spectator is eventually released from Jim and Sandy’s patriarchal stage as the screen fades to black. While different in many ways, Les beaux dimanches similarly functions as a drama of patriarchal captivity whose sense of sequestration is emphasized through the process of adaptation.

les beaux dimanches: striptease and the dismantlement of the fortress Among the works analysed so far, Richard Martin’s 1974 adaptation of Marcel Dubé’s play is the film that relies most extensively on the cinematic medium’s ability to transcend the spatial and temporal confines usually attributed to the theatre. Although much of the action transpires in the comfortable house of a wealthy businessman, Victor Primeau (Jean Duceppe), a sizable portion of the film is relocated to other sites: the city, the country, a restaurant, a hospital, a motel room, etc. Furthermore, Martin also resorts to such “essentially” cinematic devices as freeze frames, bird’s-eye views, visualizations of mental images, and flashbacks to explode the limits of the stage. As a matter of fact, the content of Dubé’s original script, in its entirety, is constituted as a long flashback emanating from Victor’s memory as he receives a tribute from the Chamber of Commerce for his achievements in business and in his private life. Paradoxically, Martin’s earnest effort to cinematize, or detheatricalize, the play was perceived by several critics as one of the main irritants in the production. Jean-Pierre Tadros, for one, wrote in Variety: “In an effort to diminish the theatrical aspect of the drama, he moves the action around, but the all-over effect is a dilution of the psychological intensity” (Tadros, “Les beaux dimanches,” 42). And Séquences reviewer Janick Beaulieu deplored the director’s reliance on superficial movie effects at the expense of more subtle resources like expressive lighting and observant camerawork: “We constantly change locations to avoid theatricality. But lighting remains secondary; it is never used to translate states of mind. Rather than observing faces to discover what lies behind the masks, the camera only shows the details of the expensive house” (Beaulieu, “Les beaux dimanches,” 31).7 Indeed, Martin often seems to apply movie techniques less for the benefit of the text’s own logic than to meet some putative standards of filmmaking. An ostensive example of this is the number of shots depicting vehicles

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moving across urban and rural landscapes, from the very opening image of Victor’s friend, Paul (Gérard Poirier), driving to the Chamber of Commerce meeting to the closing shot of Victor’s daughter, Dominique (Louise Portal), in a bus on her way to New York to undergo an abortion. Perplexed by all these protracted car rides, Beaulieu sarcastically inquires if the point was merely to show “beaux paysages,” beautiful scenery (ibid., 30). As we shall see below, the extraneous depiction of “beaux paysages” is actually a determining facet of the transpositional strategy, their very extraneousness playing a crucial role in the film-mediation of the theatrical piece, for they enhance the alluring quality of the external world, while denying the characters access to it. A metaphor for the process of cinematization is the striptease that occurs late in the work, as it functions on the basis of a simultaneous attraction and negation. One is reminded of Barthes’s comments on this issue: “[Striptease’s] ritual signs have only to be announced to evoke at once the idea of sex and its conjuration […] [H]ere, as in any mystifying spectacle, the decor, the props and the stereotypes intervene to contradict the initially provocative intention and eventually bury it in insignificance […] [A] few particles of eroticism, highlighted by the very situation on which the show is based, are in fact absorbed in a reassuring ritual which negates the flesh” (Barthes, Mythologies, 84). Striptease thus functions as a means to evoke what it simultaneously denies. We will return later to the question of the significance of striptease in Les beaux dimanches. The setting of Dubé’s play is very different from Fruet’s. Rather than a small house lost in the middle of the Prairies, the action takes place in a sumptuous mansion in a suburb of Montreal on a beautiful summery Sunday in the mid-1960s as petit-bourgeois guests arrive for yet another party at Primeau’s. But very much like Jim, Victor has turned his house into a self-contained universe, a fortress in which his wife, Hélène, and daughter, Dominique, feel trapped. The milieu that he has manufactured for his family delimits, in his view, the sphere of experience and desire available to him and his entourage. Significantly, Victor visualizes his business, which allowed him to build and sustain his comfortable estate, precisely as a fortress comprising his entire existence: “When I wake up every day, I think of my business. My entire life depends on it. Our lives. It’s our fortress. Our rock of Gibraltar” (Dubé, 43).8 However, when Hélène carries the comparison a step further and transforms

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the fortress metaphor into the image of the Great Wall of China that keeps them apart from one another, Victor betrays his utter obliviousness to his wife’s unhappiness by retorting, “What do the Chinese have to do with this, Hélène?” (ibid., 43).9 Among the guests – Evelyn and her husband, Paul; Omer, Angéline, and their son, Rodolphe; Olivier and Muriel – some share Hélène’s dissatisfaction with the suffocating bourgeois milieu. But those who wish to mindlessly enjoy their wealth and indulge in yet another party, mainly Paul, Angéline, and Muriel, impose their will on the others. As day turns into night and the party progresses, Hélène becomes increasingly fed up with the boozing and philandering and decides to leave Victor’s house. She eventually returns, however, having failed to find an escape from her sterile environment. Upon her return, Victor brutally questions her as to her whereabouts. But Hélène ignores him and retreats to her bedroom. After having vainly sought comfort with Dominique, Victor withdraws pitifully to the basement. From this overview of Les beaux dimanches, we can detect, immediately, a difference between Jim and Victor. While they both represent forces of containment and are equally successful in imposing their limits on others, Victor, unlike Jim, comes to realize that his fortress is about to be dismantled. This translates into a greater presence of purely cinematic imagery in Martin’s film than in Fruet’s, precisely to signify the outside world that can be seen through the widening cracks in the stage. But the film’s challenge to the theatrical stronghold does not afford a greater degree of freedom for its characters; it only puts on a more ostentatious display of what cannot be attained. At the beginning of the play, Victor is fully satisfied with the environment he has constructed for himself. As far as he is concerned, the lavish lifestyle that they enjoy in their comfortable house should suffice to secure their happiness (ibid., 30–1). But, for Hélène, their suburban castle has become “un cimetière bien entretenu,” a wellmaintained graveyard (ibid., 42). Nevertheless, while Hélène repudiates her husband’s set of values, she is incapable of conceiving a viable alternative. When Victor inquires about what would actually make her happy, she can only reply, “If I knew! If only I knew!” (ibid., 46).10 Though Hélène is uncertain of her destination, she still ardently wishes to escape Victor’s house. As she tells Paul, she is willing to go anywhere, “pourvu que ce soit ailleurs,” as long as it’s somewhere else (ibid., 58). Her departure, later in the play, asserts

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her desire to alter her predicament. But her return, at the end, confirms her inability to imagine another life, her condemnation to confinement in Victor’s domain while she yearns for an “ailleurs,” an anywhere, that she cannot reach or even define. The starting point of the drama thus pits the husband, satisfied with his material comfort and circle of friends, against his wife, who suffocates in this environment and longs to escape, without knowing where to go. By the end of the drama, Victor and Hélène’s relationship has not improved, but Victor has drastically changed his disposition towards Hélène’s unfulfilled desire to flee. Whereas, in the first scene, Victor had impatiently enjoined Hélène to leave him – “Get out of here […] I can’t stand you anymore” – her actual disappearance, in the middle of the celebration, disturbs him deeply (ibid., 48).11 Initially downplaying her radical action, blaming it on her menstrual cycle (ibid., 139), he soon begins to worry, for he surmises that she has eloped with Manuel Lacroix, a young, attractive architect (ibid., 150). Hélène’s coquetry among friends never annoyed Victor. But her trespassing the boundaries of his domain breaches the rules of the socialite’s game (ibid., 138). Although Hélène’s absconding does not accomplish anything for herself, since the architect was not even home to receive her, it nonetheless signals to Victor that his wife is not one of his possessions and that she might, one day, leave him for good. It is doubtlessly tempting to construe Hélène’s indifference towards Victor, in her last appearance on stage, as the beginning of her liberation, “un début de libération,” as Paulette Collet phrases it (Collet, “La quarantaine,” 156). Any conjecture as to what Hélène will decide to do the morning after this dreadful Sunday, however, is foreign to the action of the play. All that the drama allows us to ascertain is that Hélène has declared, early in the piece, her intention to leave Victor forever but that, in the end, she fails to materialize her project (Dubé, 55). Her actions might point towards some eventual freedom, yet, within the limits of the drama, Hélène remains entrapped in Victor’s estate. Along with his recognition of the precariousness of his marriage, Victor also discovers, in the final scene of the play, that his teenage daughter has no faith in him. Abandoned by his friends, who decide to finish the party somewhere else, and ignored by his wife, Victor seeks to establish contact with Dominique. He beseeches her to stay with him and converse for a while, in vain. She brushes him aside, replying as she goes off to her bedroom that he will never

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understand her (ibid., 182). There is some truth in Edwin C. Hamblet’s critique that it is “difficult to accept the treatment that Victor receives from his daughter, Dominique, because an adequate explanation of her contempt for him has not been given earlier in the drama” (Hamblet, 68). But, as Alonzo Le Blanc implies in a brief analysis of the play, her impatient dismissal of her father might stem less from her actual relationship with him than from the fact that she has other things on her mind, as she is going to have an abortion the following day (Le Blanc, “Les beaux dimanches,” 89). Whatever the motivation behind Dominique’s behaviour, her rejection of Victor consummates his irreversible downfall. He is left alone, head in hands, crying “why do they hate me so much?” (Dubé, 182)12 as the play closes on what Dubé intended to be the tragic end of a man doomed to live with a mortal wound (Gaudet, 43–4). In the course of the play, therefore, Victor comes to understand gradually that his family is composed of women whom he has always misjudged and who have no affection for him. This new awareness, however, does not lead to a positive resolution, for Victor ends up like Hélène: dissatisfied with his life yet unable to effect any constructive change. The main male character in Les beaux dimanches, as in Wedding in White, displays a desire to maintain a sheltered coterie and resists other characters’ urges to escape this seclusive environment. Unlike Jim, however, Victor loses direction of the patriarchal stage and becomes the victim of his own seclusive propensity. The dynamic within Victor’s group of friends – Evelyn, Paul, Angéline, Omer, Muriel, and Olivier – parallels his struggle with Hélène: Aligned with Victor, Paul, Muriel, and Angéline are true roisterers, initiating the party, constantly seeking new forms of entertainment, and electing to continue the celebration elsewhere when the mood at Victor’s has become too gloomy following Hélène’s disappearance, whereas Olivier, Evelyn, and Omer, aligned with Hélène, are a malcontent trio wallowing in the futility of existence. Paul, the first guest to arrive, is a fine talker without any substance. Yet Paul usually gets what he wants. For instance, he manages to sweet-talk Hélène into joining the rest of the crowd when the party first begins, although she had previously refused to take part in another of Victor’s gatherings (Dubé, 65). This small victory deserves mention, for it epitomizes the movement that the play as a whole maps out: namely, the abnegating return of an outward character to the self-centred domain of the boisterous bourgeoisie. Like

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Paul, Muriel and Angélique refuse to let Hélène’s gloomy thoughts erode their mirth. In addition to wanting to party, Angéline also aims to provoke the others, particularly her ludicrous husband, Omer. From beginning to end, she continually puts down Omer and her obtuse twenty-two-year-old son, Rodolphe. Her provocative demeanour culminates at the end of act 2, when, as a means to prove that she is still young and attractive, and to humiliate Omer by the same token, she performs a striptease (ibid., 142–4). The striptease represents an important action in the play. At one level, the performance stands as the most spectacular assertion of Angéline’s and her cohorts’ resistance to any change in their social and physical condition – they will remain forever young and attractive, rich and comfortable. Ironically, displaying her body has the opposite effect by revealing the changes in her aging figure. Furthermore, the position of the striptease within the structure of the play actually denotes change, for, between the end of act 2 and the beginning of act 3, Victor’s mood has shifted completely from blissful mindlessness to bitter awareness. The striptease in a sense represents the first stage in the dismantling of Victor’s fortress. Angéline, however, does not change. In act 3 she still has the urge and the energy to party and happily follows Paul and Muriel to a neighbour’s house to carry on the fête, claiming that they are going to look for Hélène (ibid., 157–8). Alongside such a domineering figure as Angéline, her husband can only emerge as a loser. Throughout the play, Omer poses a futile resistance to his wife’s will to carouse, but he is constantly ignored. The most striking evidence of Omer’s weakness occurs, of course, when Angéline threatens to undress before Victor and his guests. Down on his knees, almost crying, Omer implores his wife not to go through with her performance. But, as usual, Angéline pays no heed to her spouse. The striptease abases Omer to such a grovelling level that in act 3 he comes across as little more than Angéline’s servant (ibid., 156–7). Obedient Omer is last seen carrying his wife’s dress, on his way to another series of humiliating experiences at another party. Like Omer and Hélène, Olivier and Evelyn resist the festive mood of the others and are even more cynical and more detached from the petty world that surrounds them. Olivier is a morbid nihilist who philosophizes on the decadent bourgeoisie to which he belongs (ibid., 68). A medical doctor, he is very well educated and insightful. But, to Muriel, her husband’s speeches are

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nothing more than drunken rambling. Maximilien Laroche, in his analysis of the play, gives more credit to Olivier’s reflections than Muriel does, but he also recognizes that Olivier’s articulation of the problem does not afford a solution: “Olivier’s monologues are selfcritical. But these long tirades do not translate into positive action” (Laroche, Marcel Dubé, 58).13 Evelyn is equally caustic and ineffectual. Early in the play, she formulates her cynical views on human ventures in these terms: “[W]e live in a world where nothing amounts to anything … everything is inconsequential” (Dubé, 54).14 In keeping with her ostensible lack of interest in earthly matters, she resists Olivier’s repeated advances for most of the play. Although her last action on stage is to kiss Olivier passionately (ibid., 164), she immediately runs away rather than facing the risks that are part and parcel of human relationships. Olivier’s surmise that Evelyn will run back home, “probablement chez elle,” aligns her, at least conjecturally, with Hélène, for both women, it seems, choose to return home after a momentary burst of courage (ibid., 165). In spite of his tendency to wallow in abstract conjectures, Olivier does articulate a speech worthy of mention, a speech in which he seeks to unearth “la racine du mal,” the root of evil, through a brief history of Quebec. This ostensible lecture on the vicissitudes of the French Canadian nation actually functions as a repository for the metaphors that mirror the dialectical opposition at the core of the drama. “Evil began” he proposes, “when they took away our right to live” (ibid., 97).15 This reference to the conquest of Nouvelle France by the British parallels Dominique’s forthcoming abortion. Similarly, Olivier’s subsequent account that, soon after the conquest, women started having children conceived without pleasure or love foreshadows Dominique’s bitter comment, near the end of the play, that there is no love between her and her boyfriend, Étienne (ibid., 98, 177). Olivier’s disquisition then leads him to relate “la racine du mal” to the affiliation of the church with the bourgeoisie in the early nineteenth century, which indirectly comments on the fact that Paul, Angélique, and Muriel, in spite of their hedonism, attend church regularly.16 Olivier then moves on to argue that the failed rebellion of 1837 was a direct reaction against the state of alienation in which the church and the bourgeoisie had kept the nation, thus analogizing Hélène’s aborted escape. Olivier then overlooks some 125 years, connecting the events of 1837 to the f l q terrorist activities of the 1960s. Identifying his companions as the

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target of this modern rebellion, he implicitly borrows Victor’s fortress allegory to warn his fellow bourgeois of the impending dismantlement of their comfortable dominion: “Your comfort and your safety won’t be enough to protect you” (ibid., 100).17 Violence is the only remedy against humiliation and exasperation, Olivier concludes, and death the only consequence. Olivier’s speech thus recapitulates, under the guise of a historical survey, the structure of the play, opposing, on the one side, “those who refuse progress and hide like ostriches” against the subversives, on the other side, who are willing to do anything, willing even to die in order to achieve freedom (ibid., 100–1).18 But in reality, no one in Olivier’s entourage goes as far as dying; no one dares to trespass the final border to afford the change of order that he predicts. This aligns Olivier and Dominique, for they are both idealists hoping for a revolution but do not perform any gesture to precipitate transformations. In almost all of her appearances on stage, Dominique constructs in her discourse an image of the young as free and undaunted revolutionaries. She informs her parents, early in the play, that no matter what they say, she will do as she pleases (ibid., 36). She pronounces phrases coloured by Marxist tenets (ibid., 32) and romantic notions of separatist martyrdom (ibid., 91). In her actions, however, Dominique proves to be far less heroic than her tirades would lead us to believe. As a matter of fact, the dilemma with which Dominique and her lover are engrossed has nothing to do with either the separation of Quebec or the proletarian struggle. Rather, it is a domestic drama that pits a pregnant woman against a selfish man who unflinchingly refuses to compromise his future for the sake of raising a child. Étienne, a student well on his way to joining the bourgeoisie, cannot conceive of any solution to Dominique’s pregnancy other than abortion (ibid., 32, 33). Besides, he finds Dominique’s burgeoning maternal filiation with the unborn baby to be “de mauvais goût,” in bad taste (ibid., 111). For Dominique, there could have been another, more idealistic, solution: She would have been willing to sacrifice her comfortable future for the sake of keeping the child (ibid., 176). But Dominique’s intention to sacrifice herself for the child is out of the question from the beginning. When they first appear on stage, Étienne has already been putting such pressure on the teenage girl that she has already contemplated suicide as an alternative (ibid., 33). This morbid inclination towards self-sacrifice communicates the despair

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that afflicts her from the moment she walks on stage. At the end of the play, despair has given way to grim cynicism. In one of her last remarks to Étienne, after having agreed to go along with the abortion, Dominique assesses her relationship with the young man and the circumstances surrounding her pregnancy in terms analogous to Olivier’s cynical history lecture: “It’s not a matter of love. It’s a matter of fate” (ibid., 177).19 Thus, notwithstanding the adolescent defiance that Dominique displays before her elders, her hopeless subjugation to the will of her self-indulgent boyfriend places her, from start to finish, in the same position as her mother. Les beaux dimanches thus focuses on the clash between one group of characters who only want to indulge in petty pleasures within their closed circle – Paul, Muriel, Angéline, and even Étienne – and another group who recognize the emptiness and prosaicism of this lifestyle but fail to escape it – Hélène, Dominique, Olivier, Evelyn, and Omer. Victor passes from the former pole to the latter as he relinquishes his hedonistic oblivion while gradually falling prey to impotent awareness. At curtain fall, that all the members of the Primeau family have moved inwards, submerged by the overwhelming suburban mansion, attests to the lasting strength of the fortress, however fissured it may be. There is an important connection between the main characters’ failures and their final retreat inside the house. Throughout the play, the dialectic of imagery deployed by Dubé pits signs of seclusive aspirations against images of frustrated outward attraction. Further, the bankruptcy of the main characters is symbolized by their implicit recognition that escape is associated with death. As we will see in chapter 5, death in general and the cadaver in particular can be read as a metaphor for the intersection of theatre and film. There are no actual corpses in Les beaux dimanches, but there is a strong sense among certain characters that they are little more than living dead. Victor’s first line of the play immediately brings to the fore his initial attempt to shut out the external world and withdraw inside his house, as he screams at birds that are singing too loudly. Conversely, Hélène initially associates the outside world with freedom and life. She describes with nostalgia the working-class neighbourhood in which they used to live as a place where one could live and move among people and streets and stores and parks (ibid., 41–2). Movement, space, and even a certain sense of chaos all surface as essential elements of life in Hélène’s discourse. However, images of

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the outside world soon merge with images of death. Approaching her forties and seeing little hope for improvement in her life, Hélène increasingly dreads the advent of actual death. “I am increasingly afraid of death,” she confesses to Victor, anticipating a comment by Olivier, who observes that “death continues to do its job. Slowly but surely” (ibid., 42, 68).20 At the end of the play, Hélène relates her aborted journey and return from her lover’s place to a state of living death: “I left his place with death in my heart” (ibid., 174).21 On a more abstract plane, the omnipresent dread of death transforms Hélène’s yearning to escape the closed universe that confines her into a desire to go outside of her own body, to break the epidermic boundary that disconnects her incarcerated self from the world of the living, out there: “All I need is to change my own skin” (ibid., 60).22 Initially, Victor, like Paul and the others, cannot understand Hélènes’s morbid tone, for in his mind if she needs to go outside all she has to do is go in the backyard (ibid., 31). Victor’s universe, as he envisions it in the first part of the play, is contained within the strictly delineated boundaries of his fortress. In the light of Victor’s preliminary housebound vision, that Hélène’s alleged lover, Manuel Lacroix,23 is an architect takes on an unequivocal meaning. As a man who can potentially design original and beautiful houses, the architect presents a serious threat, for he can provide Hélène with a refreshing alternative to Victor’s fortress. Significantly, the emergence of Manuel Lacroix’s name in Victor’s discourse corresponds to the inception of his decline, as it signifies Victor’s developing awareness of the dismantlement of his stronghold.24 Accordingly, from this point on, there is an increasing distance between the tone adopted by the host and that of his cavorting guests. His shift away from a playful attitude towards dissatisfaction, as he realizes the failings of his fortress, is evinced by the fact that, for the first time in Victor’s conversation, movement from one suburban residence to another is not treated lightly as just an internal permutation. Rather, it takes on a gravity unprecedented in the text. “If I find out that she went to Manuel Lacroix’s, I’ll kill her!” he warns his friends (ibid., 150).25 The appearance of the notion of killing in Victor’s language attests to his growing despair. Throughout the play, only the ineffectual cynics acknowledge the encroaching presence of death. Hélène, Olivier, Dominique, and even Evelyn, who displays a cadaverous coldness and predicts a slow death for

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herself, “je vais mourir paresseuse,” as well as Omer, who condemns the murderous activities of the f l q , all recognize the intrusion of death in their lives (ibid., 50, 53, 89). Conversely, the carousers refuse to acknowledge their mortality and play the game of eternal youth. This denial of death finds its most theatrical manifestation in Angéline’s striptease, which seeks to authenticate youth through a performance associated with the youthful body. In the first two acts of the play, Victor exhibits the same youthful exuberance as Angéline, Paul, and Muriel.26 By the end of the play, however, death has advanced to the forefront of Victor’s discourse and has become his primary concern; his very last line reads, “Why are they slowly killing me?” (ibid., 182).27 Like Hélène, Victor now senses the toll of death. The morbid imagery that suffuses Victor’s speech in the last part of the drama translates into extremely violent behaviour when Hélène eventually returns. He clutches her arm, shakes her aggressively, throws her to the ground, and hurls his glass of whisky in her face (ibid., 168–73). This physical brutality is accompanied by a vehement interrogation concerning her visit to Lacroix’s home, during which Victor calls her a whore (ibid., 169). For Victor, Hélène’s going to the architect’s house implies semiotically her having illicit sex with him; entering a man’s domain signifies becoming his. His violent questioning tones down to a pathetic attempt to patch things up only after he has learned that Hélène has been denied entry into the other man’s house (ibid., 174). In his frame of mind, this implies that she has not crossed the ultimate border that would mark her definitive passage from his domain to that of another man, hence his futile attempt to reclaim her. Victor’s final conversation with Dominique confirms that while he now perceives wide breaches in his stronghold, he is not ready to abandon entirely his hard-earned fortress. On the one hand, he now acknowledges the external world as a possible object of desire. In one of his last tirades, he asks his daughter what they wanted from him, “The world? The stars? The moon?” (ibid., 181),28 thus admitting the potential for attraction outside the limits of his circumscribed universe. But the very inaccessibility of these external aims also emphasizes his view that the two women have made irrational demands on him and, in the process, have destroyed the ersatz that he has strived to fabricate for them. “Every day you try to destroy me,” he accuses Dominique in the same exchange, “you try to

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demolish everything that I’ve built” (ibid., 180–1).29 This allegation illustrates that, even at this late point in the play, Victor still identifies with the milieu he has constructed and puts the blame for its disintegration on those who have insensitively, even spitefully, asked for more than he could provide. Some of Victor’s concluding charges against his daughter and, indirectly, against his wife attest to his morbid feeling of betrayal by taking on almost demonic proportions. He sees Dominique and Hélène as “deux vipères dans ma maison,” two vipers in my house, and calls them evil (ibid., 181). Dominique’s figurative affiliation with her mother is not limited, however, to the apocalyptic imagery that they share in Victor’s scenic discourse. Indeed, the young woman’s determinant condition, her pregnancy, offers a concrete parallel to Hélène’s abstract desire to escape her own body mentioned above. Dominique’s desire to sacrifice herself in order to give birth to the child – a being who is at once an extension of the mother’s body and a distinct entity – can be interpreted, quite literally in fact, as a desire to break the borders of her own morphology, to relocate herself in another body, exactly as Hélène wishes to do. Both mother and daughter seek to transcend their dreadful existence by trespassing the boundaries that are externally imposed upon them, either in the form of a constrictive suburban fortress or in the person of a selfish boyfriend who contests a woman’s sovereignty over her own body. Yet Dominique’s presence in the family calls into question the validity of the child as an agent of transcendence, for having a child obviously did not remedy her mother’s discontent. That Hélène always refers to Dominique as “ta fille,” your daughter, when talking to Victor and that Dominique orders her father “compare-moi pas à ma mère,” don’t compare me to my mother, manifests a resentful dissociation between mother and offspring (ibid., 27, 180). Hélène evidently does not consider her child an extension of herself through whom she may experience freedom vicariously. The bitter internecine argument between daughter and mother in the first act corroborates this irrevocable severance (ibid., 24, 27, 34–40). The connection between repressive boundaries and pregnancy, as well as the earlier comments on the antagonists’ references to death, brings to mind the notion of the “abject” as theorized by French essayist Julia Kristeva. The abject, for Kristeva, is that which breaks boundaries and disregards rules (Kristeva, 9–12). If, as Kristeva argues, childbirth is conceived as an abjection in the Judeo-Christian

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tradition for the very reason that it violates the boundary of the body, like leprosy (ibid., 118–20), it does not come as a surprise that Étienne would resist Dominique’s insistence on having the child and find it to be “de mauvais goût.” Furthermore, that the characters who attempt to break the boundaries of the suburban coterie are also those who acknowledge the encroachment of death upon their lives is germane to Kristeva’s notion that the cadaver is the epitome of abjection (ibid., 11–12). In addition to morbidity, other images of abjection are also ascribed to Hélène and the other malcontents. As mentioned above, Victor sees his wife and daughter as vile reptiles. Angéline finds her fat husband, Omer, abject, calling him “un infirme,” a cripple (Dubé, 139). Hélène recognizes in Victor a mirror of her own abjection, saying “You disgust me as much as I disgust myself” (ibid., 174).30 Olivier expresses a fascination for the horrific beauty of a “plaie béante,” an open wound (ibid., 95). Even Evelyn confesses to Olivier her attraction towards the abject, claiming “I sometimes think about disfiguring myself with acid” (ibid., 146).31 Breaking the boundary of the harmonious body correlates the cynics’ desires to break the boundaries of the insipid middle-class ghetto that confines them. Inversely, Angéline and the other bons vivants endeavour to assert the impregnability of the boundaries and thus obey the biblical commandment to maintain the “frontrières du corps propre,” the integrity of the clean body (Kristeva, 120). It now becomes clear why Martin’s adaptation would put such an emphasis on “beaux paysages,” for at the same time as these landscapes suggest cinematic freedom they also serve to reassert the “beautiful” as a negation of movement and change. This body of images serves to deny abjection by foregrounding an aseptic sense of the beautiful in opposition to the fluid, boundary-breaking abject. These images perform, to a certain extent, the same role as Angéline’s striptease: They are an “artistic” spectacle using beautiful movements that serve to arrest time and space and to deny organic change. Again Barthes’s remarks are evocative: “Not only does [the striptease dance] give the show the alibi of art [...] but above all it constitutes the last barrier, and the most efficient of all: the dance, consisting of ritual gestures which have been seen a thousand times, acts on movements as a cosmetic, it hides nudity and smothers the spectacle under a glaze of superfluous yet essential gestures” (Barthes, Mythologies, 85–6).

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As in the striptease, beautiful images of landscapes in Martin’s film are used to deny nature or “nudity” through an accretion of facile references that empty the spectacle of all its potentially subversive effects. Like the striptease, the process of adaptation conspicuously displays the cleavage between Victor’s closed fortress and the world that Hélène longs for, while simultaneously emptying the text of the abjection associated with that world. Along those lines, Olivier’s provocative soliloquy on the history of Quebec, which includes a number of references to pain, violence, and death, disappears almost entirely in the film. It is replaced by a few snarly remarks against the bourgeoisie and federalism that have little effect on Victor’s other guests and by a single reference to the October Crisis that is basically ignored. Olivier’s politics are thus exposed only for the sake of being sterilized. If one adopts Alicja Helman and Waclaw Osadnik’s “polysystem theory” (Helman and Osadnik, 652) for the analysis of film adaptation, one can offer a historical explanation for the “de-abjectification” of Olivier’s speeches. Helman and Osadnik propose to analyse the differences between the original and its adaptation in terms of “intersemiotic translation” (ibid., 654) – that is, not only through a synchronic aesthetic reading but also by taking into account “the diachronic dimension” (ibid., 657) of the adaptation process. This means that the analysis should apprehend the alterations made in the process of adaptation as an attempt to translate the original text into the contemporary idiom. Therefore, the source material is not transformed (exclusively) for aesthetic reasons but rather in order to appeal to the film’s contemporary audience. In the last decade or so, several adaptation theorists have focused on this diachronic dimension. John Collick, for instance, in his reading of Shakespearean films, seeks to “reincorporate each film into its historical moment” (Collick, 9), and Darlene J. Sadlier in her analysis of Pereira dos Santos’s cinematic versions of Brazilian literary works also “takes into account historical, cultural [and] political concerns” (Sadlier, 190). In the light of such an approach, Martin’s toning down of Olivier’s separatist stance as well as the general shift towards beautiful images can be interpreted as resulting from the October Crisis and Trudeau’s appearance on the federal scene between the premiere of the play in 1965 and the production of the film in 1974. The f l q ’s failed revolution caused violence to recede as a valid option in the cultural discourse; a kind

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of “self-censorship” emerged after October 1970 (Boismenu et al., 24). Futhermore, the presence of Trudeau and the deployment of liberal images that accompanied his governance produced a displacement towards the imaginary occulting the real. Not surprisingly, reflecting on Trudeau’s persona in the 1970s, c b c reporter Martin O’Malley noted: “[D]espite the impression of joyful and even reckless spontaneity, much of Trudeau’s image of playfulness was carefully staged [...] [I]t is no coincidence that Trudeau and media guru Marshall McLuhan became cohorts. Trudeau could have been what McLuhan was thinking of as the message of ‘the medium is the message.’ It wasn’t what he said, but how he said it, and he knew it. It was style over content” (O’Malley, “1968: Trudeaumania”). That Martin’s film relies on images of “beaux paysages” is no coincidence either since, by the early 1970s, image had replaced substance. Perhaps the best example of this shift towards the realm of the imaginary, in terms of Martin’s cinematic adaptation, occurs early in the film, when the audience is privy to one of Dominique’s daydreams. In a car with Étienne (Robert Maltais), while returning from a night in a motel room, Dominique looks lovingly at her companion. A dissolve marks the spectator’s insertion into her mental universe. There ensue three shots showing Dominique running and playing with children in an open field, with bucolic overtones accentuated by slow-motion photography and a gentle melody. It would be difficult to conceive of a more unequivocal depiction of “beauty” than this ethereal portrayal of youngsters moving freely in the meadow. This scene stands as a saccharine embodiment of Dominique’s desire to give birth to her child, which comes across as a false cover when its status as an unrealized reverie is reasserted by a cut back to Étienne’s small car. The naturalistic sobriety of the latter shot contrasts markedly with the contrived radiance of the phantasmic passage, a clash augmented by the jazzy cacophony that supplants the former pastoral music. Later in the film, Dominique daydreams again, this time about her relationship with Étienne. In this mirage, signalled by a dissolve followed by soft-focus photography and sentimental music, the two lovers are seen in the middle of a crowd, Étienne playfully kissing her hand and sharing an apple with her. What is most striking about the scene is the persona that Étienne projects. Holding a conspicuous red umbrella and wearing a shirt that makes him look like

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a 1970s inamorato, the Étienne of Dominique’s vision shares few character traits with her real boyfriend. His selfish personality and hypocrisy are exposed shortly thereafter when he is seen flirting with another woman and being jokingly warned by a friend: “Make sure not to knock her up too.”32 The impression of affected happiness conveyed in the daydream differs greatly from the inequitable relationship that the play and most of the film exhibit. There is thus a disparity between Dominique’s escapist reveries, which she later acknowledges as unfashionably romantic, and the actual circumstances brought to bear on her by Étienne’s stringent conduct. That the scenes epitomizing Dominique’s illusory efferent longing are pure cinematic fabrications is meaningful in the context of this study. The daydreams, as paradigmatic excursions in the syntagmatic chain, increase the sense of a dual discourse opposing a narrowly defined set of theatrical situations and an imaginary conception of a beautiful world filled with beautiful Sundays “ailleurs.” These episodes of reverie suggest that Martin uses the medium to certain ends: The “beaux paysages” and other beautiful images signify that transcendence is impossible within an environment steeped in materialist values and shallow definitions of freedom and beauty. Relatedly, Barthes argues that striptease has a “petit-bourgeois status,” for this social class “could not conceive eroticism except as a household property” (Barthes, Mythologies, 86, 87). It must be noted, however, that Martin’s film presents a number of inconsistencies. For instance, the filmmaker’s decision to present the entire drama as Victor’s flashback is at best questionable. The reenactment of prior incidents, framed by the prologue and epilogue in which Victor is awarded his “plaque annuelle de mérite,” is evidently designed to underline the ironic distinction between public success and personal failure evoked in the play script. In this respect, the flashback works rather convincingly. However, by explicitly indicating that the flashback illustrates the character’s recollection of the ensuing sequences, the filmmaker aligns the narrative with Victor’s individual perspective. This strategy breeds contradictions because many scenes within the flashback, including Dominique’s daydreams, adopt other personages’ subjective viewpoints. Martin’s attempt to elucidate one aspect of the drama, therefore, causes greater confusion in terms of narrative enunciation, for the film constantly contradicts its overarching internal focalization.33

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Moreover, the director ventured to open up the play in order to distinguish the young people from their elders on the basis of their positioning in the broad cinematic space. In an interview published while the film was being shot, Martin explained: “We had to leave the living room, leave the house, to create atmospheres […] We added a lot of scenes with the young characters, and I wanted those scenes to take place in the sun. The elders’ drama, on the other hand, unfolds inside, in the dark” (Tadros, “Sous la direction de Richard Martin,” V1).34 Martin’s description suggests an intriguing configuration for the play’s dialectic structure, one charted around the topography of the generational divide. But his proposed spatial repartition of the characters does not translate into a coherent pattern on film, as the adolescents often experience dramatic situations indoors (for instance, a restaurant scene) and the senior group regularly interact outdoors (partying in the garden). Martin’s film-mediation of Les beaux dimanches, unlike Wedding in White, suffers from a lack of cohesion stemming, at least in part, from his attempt to efface the theatrical origins of the work. However, as if the process of film-mediation itself insisted on imposing a certain design on the piece, the movie still stresses the duality between theatre and film, outside and inside. Early in the film, Martin’s attempt to create a spatial division between the old and the young is expressed through a juxtaposition of the teenage couple driving on a highway and their elders arguing in the house. While Martin’s intention is not consistently realized, this parallel montage is still quite instructive. First, by juxtaposing aerial views of a vast landscape and tightly framed close-ups of the young couple inside the car, the images further illustrate the disparity between the passion for romantic freedom that Dominique voices in her fantasies and the actual confining pressure that Étienne exerts upon her. The systematic absence of middle-shots integrating Dominique into her environment establishes Étienne’s car as a concrete enclosure that cuts her off from the space through which she is literally steered by her boyfriend. Again, the dissemination of efferent film imagery only attests to the characters’ severance (wilful or not) from the expansive territory before them. At another level, the interposition of the exclusively filmic sequence of the young people driving in the country among the transposed theatrical scenes involving angry Hélène (Catherine Bégin)

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and her hung-over husband also asserts the function of cinema as a producer of imaginary emancipation. The editing splices an image of the former, kissing as they speed along a highway, with a quick shot of glasses shattering on a floor followed by the appearance of Victor swearing at Hélène. The impact of this montage springs, chiefly, from the clash between the impression of freedom that emerges from the moving car in the cinematic landscape and the sense of entrapment created by the railing bars foregrounding the shot that introduces Victor into the dramatic scene. In the course of the sequence, the filmmaker resorts again to the railings to connote confinement, as in a long take in which Hélène, contained by the structure of the staircase, compares their house to a cemetery. The subsequent crosscutting reinforces the divergence between the two couples, with the sensation of freedom and love between Étienne and Dominique increasing while the animosity that characterizes Hélène and Victor’s relationship degenerates into utter contempt. In the course of this sequence, movement in the external world seems to emerge as a positive counterpart to the confining atmosphere visually and verbally conveyed in the first feud at the Primeau household. In the final analysis, however, this filmic dialectic of imagery still confirms the inaccessibility of the centrifugal alternative: The outward freedom associated with the young is itself undermined by a dual visual discourse that posits the dominance of the confining force. Fittingly, the car-ride sequence does not culminate in an affirmation of freedom. On the contrary, Dominique is driven back to her father’s house, where she is incorporated into the oppressive drama of the older generation. The scene that traces Dominique’s transition from her “freedom” with Étienne to her sequestration with her parents actually bears witness to the young man’s constrictive authority over his girlfriend. Under the guise of tenderness, he imposes his standpoint regarding their future on the still unsuspecting teenager. Clutching her throat in an ominous manner, he condescendingly declares: “We could live together. But you agreed with me that this would be sheer insanity before I have graduated. There is only one solution.”35 Like the padre in Tit-Coq, Étienne uses pseudo logic to influence others (that they should not live together does not logically imply that abortion is the only solution). At this early point in the film, it has already surfaced that Étienne is the direct heir of Paul and the other libertines, who are exclusively concerned with their own personal gratification.

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Appropriately, the introductory film-mediation of Paul, and the rest of the party crowd, echoes that of Étienne and Victor, as it sharpens their centripetal propensity by contrasting the open environment in which they are initially positioned with their urge to disconnect themselves from it. Paul is first depicted, in the opening images of the film, in the dark foreground of a chiaroscuro composition, setting the driver inside his car against the bright cityscape visible in the background through the vehicle’s windows. The circumscribed arrangement of this image, which presages the confining close-ups of Étienne and Dominique described above, clashes tonally with the next: A luminous long shot shows Paul’s automobile stopping in front of Hotel Windsor. Not surprisingly, as soon as Paul emerges from his wheeled cubicle, he literally runs inside the hotel, where he joins his Chamber of Commerce colleagues. His subsequent arrival at Victor’s house, with Evelyn (Andrée Lachapelle), reproduces the same hurried motion inside, as he gets out of his car only to trot towards the fortress-like residence, despite his wife’s reluctance. Angéline’s (Denise Filiatrault) initial depiction in the film similarly conveys her eagerness to retreat from open space. Following a series of shots displaying Hélène in restrictively composed pictures – in the narrow corridors of her house; through the tight visual field of a mirror or a door frame – a panoramic view of the grounds surrounding a church breaks with the claustrophobic mood of the previous scene. But, as soon as the emancipatory effect of the cut has been registered, we spot Angéline impatiently prodding Omer (Yvon Dufour) and Rodolphe (Serge Thériault) to follow her offscreen, away from this vista and towards a narrower site where their car awaits them. She then drives hectically to Victor’s and dismisses Omer’s objections as she dashes into the house, thus fulfilling her desire to gather with her friends in a circumscribed space and party. After the less boisterous arrival of Muriel (Luce Guilbeault) and Olivier (Yves Létourneau) to complete the petit bourgeois circle, Martin’s camera remains bound for some time to Victor’s estate, recording the activities of the clique. Once the passage of time between act 1 and act 2 has been evoked through a series of stills taken by Rodolphe, the party resumes around the interior pool, which is as empty as the characters’ lives, before moving downstairs, where Victor and his guests view a home movie of their holi-

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day at the beach. Significantly, these canned images are the only ones in the film that depict Angéline, Paul, and the others enjoying themselves in wide-open spaces, thus suggesting, again, films ability to evoke imaginary freedom and pleasure within a restricted frame. The camera eventually comes out of Victor’s house to show Dominique waiting for Étienne on the front lawn. This scene centres visually on a bunch of silver birches, whose vertical lines recall the railing bars and suggest that, although “outdoors,” Dominique remains trapped in Victor’s realm. Her constant moving around, but never away from, the birches as she tries to avoid Rodolphe’s annoying questions reinforces the symbol of the birches as cage. Used elsewhere in a similar fashion, when Dominique returns from her night out, and when Victor and Evelyn discuss her cynical frigidity, the birches stand out as a consistent visual metaphor for imprisonment. Again, near the end of the film, when Dominique hopelessly agrees to undergo the abortion, the sense of entrapment is conveyed by the trees looming in the background. Therefore, as in the sequences analysed previously, the cinematization of the exterior world, which presents an image of openness and freedom, is continually undermined by elements of the composition that negate the efferent potential of the motion picture. The filmmaker resorts to the same strategy in a sequence illustrating the garden party that succeeds the projection of the home movie. This scene is composed of eight shots of the characters as they enjoy a barbecue. Though all are exterior shots, every single one of them has a depth of field manifestly limited by the insertion, in the background, of concrete boundaries, either fences, parked cars, or, most frequently and oppressively, house walls. The garden party is thus entirely contained within the Primeau domain. Notably, as in the play, when the signs of uncontainable nature – mosquitos – start crossing the confines of Victor’s terrain, the gang regroups inside to resume the festivities. For the next eight minutes, the camera attends to the theatrical situation, faithfully transcribing the growing dramatic intensity that leads to Hélène’s climactic departure and Angéline’s drunken striptease. Besides the reduced dialogue, one aspect of this scene that diverges from the original text is Omer’s own exit from the party in reaction against his wife’s performance. Though the camera follows Omer outside the house, where a concerned Olivier joins him, film’s ability to flee the locus of Victor’s party is utilized, once again, only

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to record the impossibility of actualized escape. The outburst of anger that prompts Omer to desert Victor’s house is channelled into the abject output of vomiting. With his usual acumen, Olivier understands the nullifying function of the efferent heave: “It will do you good. You needed an outlet. Tomorrow you won’t think about it.”36 This physical discharge, a repulsive equivalent to Hélène’s earlier exit, voids Omer of his efferent drive, which will be completely dissipated by the next day. Consequently, far from affording Omer’s liberation, his outward gesture exhausts his élan and reaffirms his weakness. Rather than leaving his wife definitively, his response to her provocative behaviour is merely to return home, as Hélène, Dominique, and Evelyn will do later in the drama. The striptease, therefore, embodies in some ways the victory of the theatrical, as it provokes excessive urges while impeding them. Simultaneously, it emphasizes the grotesque in Angéline’s performance. Close-ups show her crying, grimacing, and ultimately begging Victor to tell her that she is still beautiful. The striptease, therefore, affirms the ascendancy of the theatrical at the same time as it shows the crack in Angéline’s own fortress.37 Another revealing cinematic transformation of the original material is the depiction of Hélène’s arrival at Manuel Lacroix’s house. Unlike in the play, Lacroix (Pierre Dufresne) is there to answer Hélène’s call. But his presence is even more devastating than his absence, for he is in the company of several other people, obviously partaking in an orgy akin to those conducted in Victor’s circle. This radically annihilates Hélène’s hope of ever finding the “ailleurs” that she so desires since Lacroix’s realm is a mere carbon of Victor’s. Once more the cinematic apparatus holds a dual discourse. On the one hand, it traces an area outside of Primeau’s circumscribed milieu by following Hélène on her journey. But, by the same stroke, it asserts the impossibility of escaping Victor’s universe by annexing all other locations to his fortress. A similar effect is reproduced twice later in the film: first, when the camera briefly trails Paul, Angéline, and Muriel in their pilgrimage from one station of their drinking spree to the next, thereby constructing the neighbourhood as an extension of Victor’s garden; and, second, and more importantly, when this impression of an inescapable territory dominated by hedonism and materialism also surfaces in the sequence in which Dominique finally realizes Étienne’s callousness. Beginning with the romantic atmosphere of a

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candle-light dinner in a rustic restaurant, the scene soon loses its aura of sentimental perfection as Étienne criticizes the cost of the meal. The equivocal mood then transforms into sombre drama when he presents Dominique with an envelope containing money for the abortion and impassively compares her fateful trip to New York to a pleasant “voyage organisé,” vacation. Visibly affected, Dominique exits the restaurant and goes to a nearby marina. Rendered through a long shot, the segment in which Étienne joins her by the calm river strikingly differs from the tight composition of the restaurant scene. But, whereas the image offers a liberating panoramic view, the soundtrack, saturated with the songs and rude jokes of roisterers on an adjacent yacht, reaffirms the boundaries of Victor’s universe – just as Lacroix’s party does in the earlier scene. The crude aural commentary on the visual allusion to freedom notifies the audience that Dominique’s escape from her oppressor is as futile as her mother’s and Omer’s. Against this background of drunken laughter, the teenager asks, in an act of abdication, to be driven back home. After this series of alternations between the cinematic environment and the dramatic situation, the last few minutes of the flashback comprising Dubé’s play are set inside Victor’s home, thus pronouncing, again in faithfulness to the dramatic source, the victory of the confining force. There, Victor and his daughter engage in a barren argument over the father’s crumbling right to do what he wishes in his house: “I can scream too if I want. I can think. This is my house!”38 As Victor, entrapped in his luxurious residence, acknowledges the extent of his loneliness, the applause from the progressiste tribute fades in, closing the ironic circle on Victor’s financial success. The irony is augmented by the final sequence of the film, which shows, along with flattering descriptions of Victor’s “vie exemplaire,” exemplary life, Dominique on her way to New York. The dark and cramped composition of the penultimate shot, showing Dominique squeezed between a fat, sweaty man and the bus window, epitomizes the figurative depiction of the unbridgeable cleavage that separates the theatrical characters from the cinematic zone in which they move. The screen version of Les beaux dimanches, like Wedding in White, thus delivers a dual discourse, concentrating on the interpersonal drama of Victor and his entourage while also depicting the broader territory that they either want to explore or from which they wish to retreat. This accounts for the two modes of composition

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involved in the process of film-mediation discussed in relation to Gaudreault’s narratological model: namely, the theatrical temporal and spatial convergence on the drama of a few characters and the filmic ability to paint a panoramic environment around them through montage. The duality of Martin’s film also echoes theoretical considerations on cinema and drama expressed by André Bazin. Bazin draws a distinction between theatre and film in terms of each art’s relation to the notion of decor. In his view, the presence of the actor on stage, at the centre of a finite decor, directs the attention of the theatre audience towards the human soul. “This is why,” says Bazin, “[theatrical] dramaturgy is in its essence human. Man is at once its cause and its subject” (Bazin, 106). Unlike the theatre, which has a human dramaturgy, the cinema has a “dramaturgy of Nature,” Bazin suggests. Because of film’s ability to convert the artificial decor into recorded reality, he adds, “there can be no cinema without the setting up of an open space in place of the universe rather than as part of it” (ibid., 110). The cleavage that Martin’s film wedges between the human drama and its milieu thus corresponds to the dramaturgical split at work in the film-mediation of Les beaux dimanches. In the next chapter, I will provide interpretations of a number of 1970s and ’80s adaptations that function the same way. While these readings will be much more succinct than the preceding ones, they will still bear witness to the recurrent patterns and structures that characterize stage-bound cinema.

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4 Stages of Liminality and Historical Intervals

As we saw in previous chapters, differences between original versions and adaptations can be explained in part by the historical occurrences that marked the interval between the initial stage productions and the film renditions. The events of October 1970 and the deployment of liberal images that accompanied Trudeau’s governance in his first term, for instance, might explain why Martin’s film increases the emphasis on the imaginary quality of Hélène’s efferent aspirations. Similarly, some of the differences between Aurore, l’enfant martyre and Tit-Coq as plays and their filmic counterparts can be understood in terms of the historical changes that occurred during the gap between the stage productions and the movie versions. The films briefly analysed in this chapter are also somewhat determined by historical intervals. But the historicity at work in these productions is the history of cinema itself. Situated between Les beaux dimanches in 1974 and Being at Home with Claude in 1992, these adaptations are representative of the liminal status of Canadian cinema after the early enthusiasm of the first five years of the 1970s and the resurgence of a critically and commercially successful practice starting in the late 1980s. Beginning in 1974, the Canadian Film Development Corporation (c f d c ) reoriented its policy to favour the production of Hollywood-style commercial films. As this change did not allow for a time of transition from the documentary-style art-cinema

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tradition that had established itself since the early 1960s (Lever, 287–93), the Canadian film industry entered a period of “in-betweeness” during which cinema in this country was searching for an identity. If, as Erica Sheen suggests in her introduction to The Classic Novel From Page to Screen (2000), “adaptation encapsulates the dilemma of institutional identity,” for it “articulates a range of competing disciplinary commitments even as it strives for the priority of one such commitment over another” (Giddings and Sheen, 2), then it is instructive to look at adaptations from an era when the main film-financing institution in Canada was very much suffering from an identity crisis predicated by cross-purposed commitments. In hindsight, Ted Kotcheff’s 1974 adaptation of Mordecai Richler’s novel The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959) might stand as the first probative instance of this situation. Presenting at once a familiar Canadian iconography – from Montreal’s cityscape to the colourful maples of the Laurentian mountains – and highly recognizable American actors, such as Richard Dreyfus, fresh from George Lucas’s successful American Graffiti (1973), this story of an ambitious young Jewish man stuck between capitalist greed and the desire to please his orthodox grandfather sits between two traditions that could hardly be reconciled. Duddy, like Canadian cinema at the time, is torn between the need to remain true to his culture and a desire to fulfil his mercantile aspirations. Many films of the late 1970s and early ’80s, with 1978–79 marking the lamentable pinnacle of the “International Film” trend (Pratley, 125), were characterized by similar narrative, stylistic, and cultural conflicts. Save for a few exceptions, these were neither Canadian nor American films, neither commercial nor arthouse, neither popular nor critically acclaimed, and increasingly situated between cinema and literature. Significantly, a number of wellknown adaptations of novels from that period deal precisely with the problem of liminality and in-betweeness. Richard Benner’s Outrageous (1977), based on Margaret Gibson Gilboord’s short story “Making It” (1976), about the friendship between a female impersonator and a pregnant schizophrenic girl, is all about not being who or where one wants to be. Daryl Duke’s The Silent Partner (1978), based on Anders Bodelsen’s book Think of a Number (1968), shows a generally honest bank clerk who finds himself between law and malfeasance when he gets involved in a cat-andmouse game with a bank robber. Silvio Narizzano’s Why Shoot the

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Teacher (1977), adapted from Max Braithwaite’s novel (1965), about a sensitive city slicker having to teach in a small school in the middle of 1930s Saskatchewan, examines the difficulties of being geographically displaced. For his part, Ovide Plouffe feels like an outsider in his own working-class family in Gilles Carle’s 1981 adaptation of Roger Lemelin’s Les Plouffe (1948). And Allan King’s Who Has Seen the Wind (1977), inspired by W.O. Mitchell’s 1947 novel about a boy coming to terms with his father’s death, focuses on the struggle to shed the past in order to move on. Although there are noteworthy exceptions – Anne Claire Poirier’s Mourir à tue-tête (1979), Francis Mankiewicz’s Les bons débarras (1980), and Philip Borsos’s The Grey Fox (1982) – most of the important films made between 1975 and ’85 were adaptations of novels or short stories whose exploration of issues like geographical displacement, moral ambivalence, social alienation, and psychological liminality reflects a film practice governed by paradoxical funding policies and contradictory cultural aspirations. The second half of the 1980s saw the re-emergence of auteur cinema in Canada, with films realized by writers-cum-directors who gave back to Canadian cinema the voice it had almost completely lost over the preceding decade. Arcand’s Déclin de l’empire américan in 1986, followed in 1987 by Jean-Claude Lauzon’s Un zoo la nuit, Atom Egoyan’s Family Viewing, and especially Patricia Rozema’s I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing, marked the rebirth of a type of cinema that could prove to be at once artistically satisfying, commercially viable, and clearly Canadian or Québécois in its geography, style, and tone. The return of David Cronenberg to “Canadian” cinema with Dead Ringers1 in 1988, the cult appeal of Bruce McDonald’s northern-Ontario road movie, Road Kill, in 1989, along with the popular success of Anne Wheeler’s Alberta musical, Bye Bye Blues (1989), and the commercial triumph of Robert Ménard’s satire of Quebec masculinity, Cruising Bar (1989), confirmed at the very end of the 1980s that Canadian cinema had entered an era that, with a few ups and downs, would consistently produce films of interest to both the critics and the public. Like their counterparts of the 1970s and early ’80s, the works discussed in this chapter also focus on the notion of in-betweenness: in between geographical spaces, in between social classes, in between movement and stasis, and, of course, in between theatre and film. This chapter does not comprise every single instance of

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film-mediated drama produced between Les beaux dimanches and Being at Home with Claude. However, an effort has been made to include every feature film based on a published play. This survey is broad enough, I believe, to give us a sense that, in spite of the various permutations that the process of adaptation can undergo, the fundamental patterns identified at length in the previous chapters are apparent throughout the corpus. All of these films challenge theatre to some extent without ever managing to fully transcend dramatic confines. The characters, like the films, are faced with a crisis of identity that requires change. But they remain within a liminal position that denies complete passage from one status to another. Sheen states that “adaptation makes it clear that what we are dealing with is something of a historical crisis. Transition from page to screen articulates a radical discontinuity” (Giddings and Sheen, 7). Not surprisingly, the condition of crisis suffered by the characters within these adaptations, which is produced by a potential but unfulfilled radical break with their previous circumstances, parallels Canadian cinema’s condition during this historical interval. Although produced a few years after the end of the most ambivalent period in recent Canadian film history, Norma Bailey’s 1991 adaptation of Kelly Rebar’s Bordertown Café is still profoundly rooted in the dilemma that Canadian movies faced in the 1970s and ’80s: namely, to remain Canadian or become American. Similarly, Francis Mankiewicz’s filmed rendition of Louise Roy and Louis Saïa’s Une amie d’enfance bears witness to the tension between artificial commercialism and unsophisticated creative authenticity that plagued cinema in the 1970s and ’80s. While very different in style, these two titles share a fundamental concern with liminality and aborted change.

exiguous suburban garden in une amie d’enfance and wide-open prairie road in bordertown café The extent to which film adaptations of Canadian and Québécois plays transfigure their sources ranges from the virtually nonexistent cinematic input of Mankiewicz’s Une amie d’enfance, which religiously complies with Roy and Saia’s original text, to the radical alterations that Bailey executed on Rebar’s Bordertown Café. But even the latter’s considerable broadening of the terrain covered by

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the characters, stretching from Alberta to Wyoming, does not manage to transform the theatre characters into purely cinematic figures who are incorporated into their landscape. As in Wedding in White and Les beaux dimanches, Rebar’s dramatis personae remain effectively segregated from the filmic environment concocted by Bailey. George K. Godwin remarked on this paradox in his review of the film: “Ostensibly, the cafe is a busy spot, yet the five primary characters have virtually no interaction with the people who patronize the place; these customers remain characterless ‘comic’ figures, an excuse for occasional visual and verbal jokes. There is no sense of a surrounding community. In fact, the border town is never provided with any visual connection to the cafe – the locations remain isolated from each other so that when the characters occasionally go into town, they seem to be entering a completely separate world” (Godwin, 37). Although Godwin obviously disliked the movie, his comments eloquently attest to the fundamental gap that separates the stage drama from the cinematic panorama. The return of all the main characters to the café, after their cross-border peregrinations, reasserts the theatrical structure that the cinematic appendages temporarily obscured. The differences between the transpositional choices made by Mankiewicz and by Bailey are dictated by the space evoked in the plays that they adapt. While Roy and Saïa’s comedy of manners calls for a closed domestic environment, Rebar’s text implies movement and limitless space. Both dramas, however, are fundamentally similar in their centripetal focus on a tightly knit group of characters interacting within the narrow parameters of the realist theatre. This is why, in the end, the characters of Bailey’s film remain as stage-bound as those of Mankiewicz’s, even if the former seem to explore a much more expansive geography than the latter. Both plays use the same structural device of an outsider who threatens to explode the limits of a closed setting. Even the most cursory reading of Kelly Rebar’s play is enough to identify this structure. Jimmy, a seventeen year old who lives with his mother (Marlene), grandfather (Jim), and grandmother (Maxine) in an isolated café on the Canadian side of the Alberta-Montana border, is offered the opportunity to move to Wyoming with his truck-driving father (Don) and his new wife. The conflict of the play is thus one of geonationalism, as Jimmy is torn between, on the one hand, the proximity of the American

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border, which exerts its formidable magnetism, and, on the other hand, his profound Albertan roots, which are unfortunately tied to a miserable café dwarfed by nothingness. In this regard, Rebar’s set description is evocative: “The closed, tight space of the café is contrasted by a sense of overwhelming prairie sky that surrounds the set” (Rebar, 11). Throughout the two-act play, Jimmy considers the two sides of the equation as he patiently waits for his father to come pick him up and take him away – but Don never shows up. When he eventually phones, Jimmy decides to turn down his proposition: “I bin waitin’, I had to – to miss hockey, I couldn’t do chores for fear of missin’ you, and it turns out you weren’t even gonna phone to let a guy know? When I got a crop to get off? That wasn’t fair, Dad, it just wasn’t and I’m thinkin’ maybe I’ll take a pass on movin’ down there actually” (ibid., 100). In the end, therefore, Jimmy renounces crossing the border and determines to stay at home with his family. Bailey’s choice to include in the film Jimmy’s trip south of the border is clearly motivated by film’s putative need for movement, but it essentially reasserts the theme of the play, for, while spending time with his father, the cinematic Jimmy comes to the very same realization as his theatrical counterpart. He belongs at the café, and the efforts of the (filmic) outsider to break the unity (of space) of the (dramatic) family ultimately fails. The play, like the characters, comes to recognize the benefits of cinematic travel but in the end strengthens the value of stasis. Functioning almost as a metaphor for the history of Canadian cinema in the two decades before its production, Bailey’s Bordertown Café in its narrative structure and its fundamental mediatic tension signifies the crisis that befell film in Canada when promises of American-style commercial success were made but ultimately broken. Two contemporary films, Bruce McDonald’s 1991 Highway 61 and George Mihalka’s 1993 La Florida, also trace a movement from Canada to the States – from Thunderbay to New Orleans in the former and from Montreal to Hollywood Beach, Florida, in the latter. Unlike in Bordertown Café, in both these films, and in a few others from the 1990s,2 the characters do not return to Canada, finding happiness in the deep American South. While it could be argued that McDonald’s and Mihalka’s films seem to contradict the hypothesis that Canadian cinema has rediscovered its own voice since the late 1980s, it must be stressed that although both produc-

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tions end without reasserting the Canadianness of their locations, the Canadian or Québécois identity of the characters remains evident throughout: Pokey’s (Don McKellar) northern-Ontario personality remains as obvious throughout Highway 61 as Léo’s (Rémy Girard) French Canadian roots in La Florida. This clearly distinguishes these two films from the Hollywood clones of the late 1970s and early ’80s that “managed to rob Canadian cinema of its most distinctive aspect which is its extremely dense sense of place” (Harkness, 23). Highway 61 and La Florida are therefore not entirely unlike Bordertown Café, as they suggest that Canadian and Québécois identities can be imagined regardless of geographical settings. Bordertown Café’s difference from the two other films is that, as an adaptation of a play, it anchors its origins in a specific tradition determined by strict cultural parameters. Following Walter Benjamin’s famous argument on the mechanical reproduction of the work of art, one can interpret theatre as a medium fully determined by the here-and-now of live performance that is thus entrenched in a unique historical context (Benjamin, 228–32). Film, on the contrary, as an infinitely reproducible technological commodity, obliterates this notion of stable historical positioning. Benjamin explains: [T]he technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind. Both processes are intimately connected with the contemporary mass movements. Their most powerful agent is the film. Its social significance, particularly in its most positive form, is inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic aspect, that is, the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage. (Ibid., 221)

It is therefore unsurprising that an adaptation of a play would root identity in a specific geographical context, while films that exist as originals would deal with the issue of identity on a more global scale. Bordertown Café, on the one hand, and Highway 61 and La Florida, on the other, make similar statements, but the former

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functions as a stage-bound adaptation and the latter as pure filmic texts. We will return briefly to Benjamin’s argument in the section on Me? and elaborate somewhat on the theme of geographical resistance against the lure of America in the last section of this chapter, which focuses on Vic Sarin’s 1989 version of Jim Garrad’s Cold Comfort. At this point, however, we shall look at a film whose use of cinematic techniques is in polar opposition to Bailey’s but still suggests a valid interpretation of the role of film adaptations in the interval. Without the benefit of hindsight, the 1978 adaptation of Une amie d’enfance offers a reading of the situation which is clearly less hopeful than that suggested by Bordertown Café but equally instructive. The tension in Une amie d’enfance is not between unreliable America and wholesome Canada, but rather between commercialism and free-spirited, if awkwardly ineffective, creativity. In the context of the late 1970s, the latter might have been profoundly appealing, but the former could only prove to be the predominant option. In Une amie d’enfance the unity of space is much less challenged than it is in Bordertown Café since Mankiewicz remains tied to the dramatic set. But, ironically, the outsider has a more significant impact on the closed family unit than in Bailey’s film, even if there is no physical movement at all, either in the original or in the cinematic version. Coco (short for Jacques) is the main outsider in Une amie d’enfance who enters a tightly circumscribed environment in which his alien perspective opens a window on an unknown world. Whereas the aura surrounding Don in Borderdown Café is explicitly connected to the outside world through the exotic American dream, the function of Coco is somewhat eclipsed by the abject humour that dominates the text. But his ability to explode the limits of the circumscribed dramatic set is still present. Une amie d’enfance takes place in Angèle and Gaston’s backyard on the outskirts of Montreal, where they are receiving Solange, the former’s childhood friend, and her lover, Coco. Both reluctant at first, especially Gaston who would much prefer to watch t v in bed than to entertain guests (Roy and Saïa, 38), the suburbanite hosts slowly develop an ambiguous fascination for their bohemian and free-thinking visitors. Coco, in particular, who has suffered from aphasia and paralysis in the right arm ever since a motorcycle accident, attracts both the amused pity and the admiration of Gaston and Angèle. But the

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presence of the comically inarticulate young man also disrupts the meticulously organized existence of the middle-class couple. As his level of inebriation escalates, Coco also becomes increasingly unruly, even bestial, in his interaction with the others. In his introduction to the play, Laurent Mailhot compares Coco to a threatening wildcat: “Who’s afraid of Coco? Everybody” (Mailhot, 9).3 Late in the play, Coco starts chasing Angèle around the house, in a grotesque sexual game (Roy and Saïa, 116), and resorts to actual violence when Gaston tries to convince him to go home and sleep (ibid., 117–18). After this outburst of sexual energy and rage, Coco eventually calms down and, almost in a state of infantile regression, leaves with Solange, while Gaston and Angèle try to erase the signs of the barbaric invasion that has just afflicted their orderly backyard. Coco is assigned traits that render him abject. This is significant for it links him to Hélène and the other characters from Les beaux dimanches who challenge the integrity of Victor’s fortress. Coco is handicapped and cannot articulate properly. He almost urinates in his pants (ibid., 56), and, to seduce Angèle, he employs a grotesque and bestial posture, getting down on all fours and showing her his behind (ibid., 106). His girlfriend, Solange, also deploys images related to the abject. While on a trip to New York, she acted in a pornographic film as a live steak tartar, to be “eaten” by another character (ibid., 69–70). The description of her experience is at once humorous and repulsive, as the image of fetid, raw meat covering her sweating body is manifestly abject. Conversely, the behaviour and discursive practices of Angèle and Gaston display a refusal of the abject. Angèle describes Gaston as the cleanest man in the world who hates all that is slimy (ibid., 85, 86). Angèle is also overly concerned with the proper body. Significantly, she refuses to have children because it would deform her figure (ibid., 67). The afferent tendency of Angèle and Gaston parallels the housebound inclinations of Jim in Wedding in White and Victor at the beginning of Les beaux dimanches, as the suburbanite couple also express a desire to encapsulate the whole world in their circumscribed environment. This is especially evident in the case of Gaston, who, although a travel agent, is incapable of going on trips, for he is afraid of flying. Interestingly enough, Gaston’s fear of actual planes has led him to collect model planes, which he piles up in his basement – an obvious strategy to control that which

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he dreads (ibid., 89). When Gaston wants to travel, he stays at home and plays with his model planes (ibid., 92, 93). Angèle also wishes to contain the world in her house by transforming the various rooms into small countries, with Greek or Spanish styles being used in various parts of their home (ibid., 50). The tropical plants that she puts on the patio to give a Kon-Tiki flair to the dinner party and Gaston’s home-made bar, which looks like a hut from a southern island (ibid., 43, 48), substantiate their desire to enclose the world in their backyard. Moreover, such kitschy paraphernalia betrays the philistinism of the suburban couple. The encroaching presence of the transgressive Coco and Solange in Angèle and Gaston’s small realm is not without a certain influence on the hosts. For instance, Gaston, in an intimate conversation with Solange late in the evening, confides: “If I decided to let loose, I’d destroy my whole house (ibid., 115).4 He thus discloses, perhaps for the only time in the play, a deeply repressed potential for explosive escape that could translate into the violent destruction of his house. But, as soon as Coco, exhausted by his eruption of aggression, agrees to leave the premises with Solange, Angèle and Gaston proceed to reassert the predominance of the seclusive force. Angèle finalizes the process of erasing Solange and Coco’s passage by ordering her husband, “Give me a hand. Let’s at least get things back in order” as the lights go down (ibid., 125).5 While Coco does not hold the obvious appeal of the wide-open prairie road, he certainly presents a threat to Gaston and Angèle’s own little suburban fortress. In the end, however, after having considered momentarily the potential for escape, the central characters resume their theatrical stasis. In terms of Canadian film history, 1978 represents the triumph of middle-class commercialism à la Gaston over the kind of artistic excess that Coco incarnates. While 1977 and ’79 saw a few films (from Outrageous! and Mourir à tue-tête to Cronenberg’s The Brood) that were as innovative and provocative as anything produced in the early 1970s, one would be hard-pressed to find any signs of innovation in the 1978 crop of feature films. Duke’s The Silent Partner is a clever and well-made thriller that is doubtlessly entertaining and does not hide its Canadian origins. But it remains very much a mainstream film without any hint of stylistic or narrative inventiveness. That Mankiewicz’s version of Roy and Saïa’s play denies cinematic input seems to suggest that, in the mind of the

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director, film itself was dead in 1978. In 1979, Mankiewicz directed Les bons débarras (released in 1980), a film recognized by other directors like Denys Arcand (Loiselle and McIlroy, 146) as marking an early sign of the renaissance of Quebec cinema. The subversive underclass that is denied agency in Une amie d’enfance is given centre stage in Les bons débarras, where the values of the middle class are overthrown. Similarly, film itself is reasserted in Les bons débarras through Michel Brault’s resonant cinematography, in clear contrast to the minimal process of cinematization involved in Une amie d’enfance. Adaptation as a practice that thrives on tension between antithetical options can be interpreted as an analogy for a state of crisis in history, where commercialism and cultural encroachment are seen either as forces of social stagnation or as pulverizing attacks on our national heritage. Between the théâtre-filmé style of Une amie d’enfance and the hypercinematic mobility of Bordertown Café, which in the end lead to the same state of motionlessness, other plays and films of the corpus offer noteworthy variations on the patterns identified thus far.

me?: a rock garden Like Wedding in White and Les beaux dimanches, Me? also focuses on a male figure, Terry, who longs to isolate himself from the outside world, for, as he declares, “people are very threatening” (Kinch, act 1, 35). One could argue that unlike Jim and Victor, Terry has a rather logical reason for wishing to isolate himself: A bright young author unable to finish his second novel because of the incessant intrusions of his friends and lovers, he wishes to reject all external influences so as to create a solipsistic universe in which he could evolve freely. He aspires to convert his apartment, where the entire action of the play occurs, into “a Japanese rock garden. Cool, clear space. Nothing to hinder my growth. The perfect space to retreat to” (act 2, 4). Act 1 introduces successively the three outer forces that exert pressure on Terry. The first one is Chloe, Terry’s sexually aggressive mistress whom, as the curtain rises, we encounter extorting a fourth orgasm from her exhausted partner (act 1, 1–2). Shortly after this preliminary scene, Terry’s gay friend, Oliver, arrives on the premises requesting the novelist’s moral and physical support after receiving devastating reviews for a musical score he wrote for a movie

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(act 1, 8). Near the end of the first half of the play, Terry’s estranged wife, Kathy, invades the apartment to reclaim her husband’s undivided attention (act 1, 30). This accumulation of strains, tearing him apart, ultimately causes Terry to oust them all from his apartment, at the end of the second act, and to withdraw into his closed quarters. Left to himself in the last beat of the play, the novelist signals his complete retreat into his narcissistic shell by typing the letters “M. E.” on his typewriter. Yet the question mark that he adds as the lights fade to black underscores the uncertain consequence of this radical withdrawal into his self-contained garden (act 2, 39). Perusal of the play reveals that Terry’s need for the absolute clarity and balance of the rock garden has less to do with the desire for a peaceful work environment than with his need to assert his masculine identity, which realigns him with Jim and Victor. Although Terry’s respective relationships with the three other characters operate at different levels, they all pose a similar challenge to his unified male ego. Chloe personifies the most obvious menace, for she constantly defies Terry’s potency with her insatiable sexual appetite. From the very opening tableau of the play, Terry already manifests, indirectly, his desire to expel Chloe from his life through playful avoidance of her relentless libidinous advances (act 1, 4). By the end of the play, however, his oblique resistance has transformed into a straightforward eviction order. When she asks him, “do you want me to come back?” he simply replies, “No,” and she exits (act 2, 38). An even greater threat to Terry’s masculine identity is incarnated by Oliver, who bursts into his friend’s place with the ostensible purpose of reprimanding Terry for not attending the premiere of the film featuring his music and to wail about the negative critical response that his work suffered (act 1, 15, 24–7). But it eventually surfaces that Oliver yearns for more than a mere platonic rapport with Terry. From his appeal for a gesture of consolation from his friend, Oliver gradually moves to a more aggressive approach, even exceeding Chloe’s lustful advances. After having stated, “I want to make love to you” (act 2, 8), Oliver wrestles “Terry to the ground without too much effort [and] sits on top of Terry, pinning his arms with his knees […] He runs one hand up Terry’s leg, into his crotch. Feeling Terry’s crotch” (act 2, 15). Although this hardly qualifies as a rape, Terry perceives it as such, for, more than a mere invasion of privacy, Oliver’s action constitutes an onslaught against the fortress

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of Terry’s heterosexual identity (act 2, 18). It does not come as a surprise, therefore, that to realize his “attempt at recovery” (act 2, 8), Terry also rejects Oliver in the end (act 2, 38). The harshest attack on Terry, at least in terms of bodily damage, is performed by Kathy in the last section of act 1. Although cordial, at first, the spouses’ reunion rapidly degenerates into a scene of chaotic violence. “She springs on him in utter fury,” reads the last stage direction of the act, “pummeling him with her fists, as she falls backwards on the floor. Terry’s fighting is purely defensive […] Kathy manages to get up again and deliver a few well-placed kicks” (act 1, 42–3). The act closes on the image of Kathy “furiously destroying anything that is recognizably Chloe’s.” In none of the works analysed to this point has the threat that the outside world embodies been depicted in more violent terms. And, in fact, Jim’s violence against Jeanie is of quite a different order. While more shocking than Kathy’s destructive attack, Jim’s aggression against his daughter is very much inward, as he punches in the teenager’s stomach to counteract her opprobrious pregnancy. Kathy on the other hand, literally tears apart Terry’s apartment. Appropriately, the imagery used to describe the representatives of the external menace emphasizes the bestiality, and even the monstrosity, of the antagonists. Oliver’s description of his own fits of rage following artistic failures could not be more emblematic of the efferent abjection observed in several outward figures from previous texts. “You’re fueling me up for the big explosion,” says the infuriated Oliver to his unresponsive friend. “The moment always comes when I splatter myself against the wall, piss out my venom and return to the fray” (act 1, 26). The discharging rhetoric, explicitly intertwined with the abject image of the viper spitting its venom, recalls not only some of the semiotic material attached to Hélène and Dominique in Les beaux dimanches, but even the spiteful words and violent actions of Tit-Coq under the influence of alcohol. As we will see in the next chapter, the eponymous character in Being at Home with Claude also shares this association with the outward movement of the abject body. While Oliver is associated with his “bloody monstrous music” (act 2, 11), images of bestiality and monstrosity are ascribed as well to Chloe, who is renamed “Vampira” (act 1, 12) or “the whore of Babylon” (act 2, 21) by Oliver and accused of being a “promiscuous little bitch” (act 1, 26) by Terry. Similar figurative designations are

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attributed to Kathy, who is seen by Chloe as one of the “witches” (act 2, 16) striving to kill her and who is constantly envisioned by Terry as “that particular monster” (act 1, 36) of the vindictive wife. To all these monsters encroaching on his life, Terry retorts: “You can’t treat me like this. Goddamit this is my house” (act 2, 18). His insistence on the fact that he is being harassed in his own house is significant, of course, for his attempt to regain some personal stability is expressed through the cleansing of his apartment not only of the objects that clutter it, but also of the friends who invade it. “Hiding in an empty apartment, striving for simplicity, and cutting off all [his] relationships” will allow him, or so he believes, to grow into a full-fledged human being (act 2, 5–6). Kinch’s Me? thus revolves as much as the previous plays around the struggle of a male character who, like Jim in Wedding in White, Victor in Les beaux dimanches, and Gaston in Une amie d’enfance, seeks to concentrate his whole existence within a strictly circumscribed environment in protection against the forces that threaten to shatter boundaries and undermine his perceived integrity. Also as in the previous plays, the seclusive principle occupies the entire scene at the end of the drama, having literally rid the stage of all efferent agents. John Palmer’s film version of Martin Kinch’s Me?, while keeping the climactic scenes inside the theatrical setting, features a few sequences located outside the limits of the drama’s original domain. Actions unfolding in streets, pubs, parks, and even in a theatre, where Oliver (William Webster) – a dramatist in the film, rather than a musician – seems to reside, break the unity of place strictly observed in the play and, in this manner, accentuate the efferent angle of the dialectic. Palmer thus reproduces Fruet’s and Martin’s practices. At first sight, however, it seems that Palmer, unlike his peers, lacks a systematic strategy in his distribution of the characters over the cinematized site of dramatic struggle. Although most of the exterior scenes showing the central static figure of the play, Terry (Stephen Markle), retain the feeling of enclosure experienced in his apartment, with walls or fences usually circumscribing the locations, his last presence outdoors transpires in a park unobstructed by emblems of confinement. Conversely, Kathy (Chapelle Jaffe), perhaps the most explosive force in the text, never moves in such wide-open spaces. The characters, therefore, seem to manoeuvre indiscriminately between the closed area of the play and its cinematic surroundings, regardless of their respective functions.

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But a more attentive look at the personages’ behaviour in their various spheres of activity divulges a significant difference between the two sides of the dialectic. Whereas Oliver, Kathy, and Chloe (Brenda Donohue) actively interact with the cinematic environment, Terry, like Jeannie and Dolly in Wedding in White, never establishes any actual connection with the world outside his suite, either via effective action upon his broader environment or through contact with cinematic characters. The first exclusively cinematic scene in the film shows Oliver bursting out of the St Lawrence Centre for the Arts, after the failure of his play, and tearing down the posters that remind him of his flawed oeuvre, Strange Lady. Admittedly minimal, Oliver’s deed in the purely filmic realm, in addition to being visibly efferent, has a more significant impact on the external environment than any gesture executed by Terry. Terry’s only transformative interaction with the cinematic universe consists of kicking a can in a parking lot. But, significantly, he is not actually seen performing this action, as he enters the frame only after the can has already settled back on the ground. Elsewhere in the film, as Terry and Oliver are enjoying a drink in a pub, the latter whines bitterly to a stranger while the former never addresses the third man directly; nowhere in the movie, as a matter of fact, does Terry communicate with any extraneous characters. Kathy, on the other hand, extends a giving hand to a fellow passenger on a train, offering him a cigarette and even lighting it up, and Chloe does not hesitate to hug and chat with a passer-by on the sidewalk. The efferent antagonists, therefore, are portrayed as (relatively) integral parts of the cinematic universe, whereas Terry remains severed from this environment that is essentially extrinsic to the immured zone in which he wishes to isolate himself. The most telling sequence in Me6 – the fight involving Terry and Kathy – has nothing to do, however, with the depiction of the outside world. Rather it concerns the brutal infringement of the centrifugal impulse onto the protected abode. The play script describes only briefly the struggle between the former lovers before a fade marks the end of act 1. Conversely, the film indulges in the depiction of the violent blows that they inflict on one another. In this scene, the use of the cinematic medium succeeds in shattering the cohesion of the closed architecture not only through the physical destruction of the set, but also and mainly through a succession of rapidly edited images that break the rules of spatial continuity.7

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This rejection of traditional narrative film techniques provokes disorientation in the spectator, who becomes incapable of situating one section of the room in relation to the others. As a result, Kathy’s attack on Terry is much more effective in the screen adaptation than on stage, for such geographical confusion, within the apparently solid boundaries of the box set, is unachievable in the theatre because of the fixity of the audience’s perspective. The film undermines its own catastrophic potential by breaking other illusionist rules of mainstream cinema and emphasizing the artificiality of the altercation. At one point, for instance, Kathy throws ketchup on Terry, hence casting doubt on the provenance of the red liquid that covers their faces at the conclusion of the brawl. Furthermore, some of the movements seem exceedingly contrived for comical effect – for instance, a pirouette that Terry helps Kathy to perform and the duel of slaps in the bath, which is so evidently parodic that the cinematic quality of the confrontation evaporates behind the theatricality of its execution. In the end, as in all the films analysed above, the addition of ostentatious cinematic strategies, while hinting at the prospect of pulverizing the theatrical decor, eventually concedes victory to the original structure and reasserts the dominance of the afferent pull. In the last scene of the film, as in the play, Terry thus achieves the cloistered existence for which he strived, without managing, however, to channel his energies towards the production of his belated second novel. Terry’s desire to isolate himself in order to be creative and his failure to do so can again be linked to the condition of Canadian cinema in 1974, when the financial failure of critically acclaimed films led the c f d c to shift its policy towards commercialism. Trying to produce a film “that will really have some meaning for Canadian audiences” (McCaughna, 1974), Palmer clearly tried to resist pressures to move towards formulaic Hollywood cinema by making a movie that not only is theatrical, but even goes out of its way to ignore the rules of narrative cinema. Like Terry, Palmer’s film sought to resist external influences. But, also as in the case of Terry, this self-sufficient approach failed, as the film never reached a large portion of its intended audience. That the play was successful within the closed circles of Toronto Free Theatre regulars (Denis W. Johnston, 185) but was a failure as a film that resists external influences is noteworthy, for it bears witness both to the situation of Canada as a small film market and to the difference between theatre and film.

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As Benjamin suggests, theatre and film are essentially distinct at the level of their involvement with technology. “Any thorough study,” he contends, “proves that there is indeed no greater contrast than that of the stage play to a work of art that is completely subject to or, like film, founded in, mechanical reproduction” (Benjamin, 229–30). “In the case of films,” says Benjamin in a lengthy endnote, “mechanical reproduction is not, as with literature and painting, an external condition for mass distribution. Mechanical reproduction is inherent in the very technique of film production. This technique not only permits in the most direct way but virtually causes mass distribution. It enforces distribution because the production of a film is so expensive that […] a major film, in order to pay its way, [has] to reach an audience of nine million” (ibid., 244). That a theatre production can be successful even if it reaches only a very small audience is contingent on the fact that it is (potentially) free from technological involvement and thus (potentially) rooted in cultural tradition and (potentially) economical. Narrative feature films, on the other hand, are constituted by technology and therefore transcultural and highly subject to the rules of the global, efferent capitalist system that deploys technology. The tension between the successful play Me? and the failed film Me draws our attention to the difficulty that Canadian cinema experienced in 1974 (and still experiences today) in trying to do like Terry and evolve in a vase clos. The very production of Me can thus be read as an analogy for a distinctive film industry trying but failing to find its place in a small market already saturated by foreign products. The ironically assertive Me of the film title, without the question mark of the play’s more tentative title, stands as a rock in the middle of a garden: Its very self-centred solidity stands in desolate contrast to the organic growth that is bound to overwhelm it. The other adaptations analysed in this chapter present a similar paradox: a resistence to change, movement, passage that is at once compelling and ineffectual, not unlike, perhaps, the nationalist urges of Canadians.

l e s c é l é b ra t i o n s : r e c o i l i n g b e f o r e t h a n a t o s Like Me?, Michel Garneau’s 1976 drama Les célébrations was made into an obscure film that depicts the struggle to ensure the preservation of confining space. But, whereas the former puts

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Terry’s desire to retreat within his exiguous apartment at the forefront of the debate, Les célébrations offers a more diffused articulation of its dialectical concerns. Garneau’s work adopts a looser structure than Kinch’s, showing a number of days in the rather uneventful existences of Margo and Paul-Émile, an unmarried couple who have been living together for seven years. Much of the play, which takes place entirely in Margo’s and Paul-Émile’s house, is composed of the kind of ordinary occurrences that make up the life of an average middle-class couple in their thirties. These mundane incidents culminate in the most significant episode of the play: the penultimate scene, in which Margo leaves for a trip on her own to free herself, at least momentarily, from Paul-Émile’s domineering masculine presence (Garneau, 59). Her five-day absence has a devastating effect on Paul-Émile. So much so, indeed, that upon her return he immediately proposes marriage in an attempt to ensure that she will not leave again (ibid., 64). But, while Margo is ready to resume their relationship, she rejects his offer outright, vindicating the freedom of their unmarried partnership against sequestration in wedlock (ibid., 64–5). I will leave it to the reader to speculate on the connection between Margo’s promotion of an unmarried partnership and the sovereignty-association project of the Parti Québécois, brought to power the same year as the premiere of Garneau’s play. What matters to me here is that this structure recalls the circular movement of Hélène in Les beaux dimanches. Although the conflict in Les célébrations results in a happy compromise between Margo and Paul-Émile – the celebration of their seventh anniversary with the hope of many more years together – rather than in the ultimate failure that afflicts the Primeaus, the male-female conflicts in both plays present a basic similarity inasmuch as both women need to escape the limits of the house in which the men, more or less authoritatively, seek to confine them. Furthermore, Paul-Émile’s first mention of marriage comes only after he has suffered from Margo’s absence, thus paralleling, in a way, Victor’s appeal to his wife at the end of Dubé’s play. Like Hélène, Margo refuses to make a longterm commitment because, in her view, “marriage is like domestic fascism” (ibid., 65).8 But, also as in Hélène’s case, her return home in the end attests that, within the framework of the play, the desire for escape is eventually annulled by the prevailing centripetal patriarchal force.

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Margo’s resolution to go away for a while is not as clearly motivated as Hélène’s departure in Les beaux dimanches, however. Whereas we can sense Hélène’s frustration building up in the first two acts of Dubé’s work until she elects to exit Victor’s house, Margo’s decision to leave on a trip comes as something of a surprise, for hardly anything in her discourse or behaviour announces it explicitly in the previous scenes. On only one prior occasion, early in the play, does she voice her intention to desert her companion when, in response to his agitation resulting from his attempt to quit smoking, Margo declares: “Paul-Émile. Either you smoke or I’m moving back to my mother’s” (ibid., 20).9 Though seemingly irrelevant, Margo’s threat is pregnant with meaning, for, while it refers ostensibly to Paul-Émile’s bad habit, it actually points towards a far more profound dissension between the lovers: namely, their opposite thanatopsis, or outlook on death. As we have seen in Les beaux dimanches, the characters’ attitudes towards death mirror their attitudes towards space. A desire for enclosure reflects an attempt to ignore or deny death. The same is true of Les célébrations. But, contrary to in Les beaux dimanches, where the distinction between the clashing perspectives is articulated in terms of a conflict between acknowledgment of and obliviousness to death, both personages in Garneau’s drama are very much aware of the ultimate limit of their lives. The difference in the case of Margo and Paul-Émile is situated at the level of their contradictory definition of death. Margo envisions death as a process of nature: “For me, death is like trees, and nature, and the ocean” (ibid., 19).10 For Paul-Émile, on the other hand, death is like a dark, bottomless pit into which he sees himself falling every night (ibid., 20). At the level of imagery, one can perceive a clear contrast between Margo’s outward, and paradoxically life-affirming, conception of death as part of the natural world and Paul-Émile’s withdrawal in fear before Thanatos. Paul-Émile experiences an unbearable fear vis-à-vis his mortal condition: “I’m afraid. I’m really afraid. Not a night goes by that I don’t think about death” (ibid., 18).11 And his endless complaints about the danger of death, rather than his not smoking, are what actually lead Margo to threaten him with her departure (ibid., 20). In the light of this early wish to escape from Paul-Émile’s obsessive apprehension of death, Margo’s eventual departure acquires

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meaning when read in continuity with the scene that immediately precedes it, in which the couple learns that one of their friends, Marcel, has committed suicide. Profoundly distressed by the news, Paul-Émile feels remorse and guilt for not having spent more time with his friend, while Margo simply says that you can’t entrap someone who wants to leave and that death is just another dimension (ibid., 54). These responses translate not only Paul-Émile’s attitude towards death and his impulse to keep his entourage close to his centre in order to combat the mortal threat, but also Margo’s perception of death as only another type of departure that should not be hindered. Whereas the catalyst for Margo’s departure remains conjectural, Paul-Émile’s dread of death undoubtedly motivates most of his actions throughout the play, from his attempt to give up smoking to his embarking on a health-food trip (ibid., 30). But, most importantly, his phobia of death translates into his fear of being alone before the world, hence his desire to secure Margo’s presence through marriage. During Margo’s absence, Paul-Émile whines that he has no one who loves him. Outside of her, he says, he is all alone in the world (ibid., 60). This conveys emphatically his conception of his relationship with Margo as a fortress that protects him against a world of loneliness and death. Conversely, the death that Margo apprehends is precisely the inhouse fascism of marriage. When Paul-Émile proposes, “We could get married,” she replies, “Marriage is like death” (ibid., 64–5).12 Comparison of this response with Margo’s previous statement that physical death is like trees and nature bears witness to the basic conflict between the centripetal withdrawal impulse of Paul-Émile and Margo’s wish for efferent escape. Margo feels much more aversion towards the existential death caused by confinement than towards the death of the body that Paul-Émile dreads above all. But, as in all the other plays, the outward potential, after having been explored briefly, is dismissed, and inward recoil occupies the whole stage. In the last scene, Margo returns to the fold, where a contented Paul-Émile toasts to their reunion (ibid., 67). Yves Simoneau’s 1979 version of Garneau’s play, like Mankiewicz’s film, adopts a most minimalist style, with as little cinematic input as possible. The camera faithfully relays the conversations of Paul-Émile (Normand Lévesque) and Margo (Léo Munger), elimi-

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nating only some of the “Brechtian” third-person narrations of the original. There is not a single image external to the theatrical set for forty minutes; and when the camera finally goes out of the house, it is only for a few seconds to show Paul-Émile entering a restaurant through an extreme wide-angle shot. Although merely three seconds long, this insert is nevertheless pithy, for its use of a fish-eye lens – the first unorthodox effect in the film – invests the outside with destabilizing potential, as it distorts the previously conventional visualization of space. This initial designation of the outward cinematic environment as the realm of uncanny perception is amplified by the next exterior shot, more than twenty minutes later, which briefly displays, in double-framing slow motion, Paul-Émile and his friend Marcel (J. Yves Dussault) walking on a sidewalk. During the first sixty minutes of Simoneau’s film, there are thus only two cutaways illustrating sites other than the dramatic locale, and both cutaways shatter the uniform fabrication of the circumscribed arena in which Paul-Émile and Margo play out their verbal games. Furthermore, in the second insert, the exterior sphere is not only depicted in an eccentric fashion, but also directly connected to death – Paul-Émile’s paramount phobia – as the image of Marcel in open space coincides with the announcement of his suicide (ibid., 52). Consequently, Marcel’s abject departure from the cloistered existence for which Paul-Émile strives finds a visual equivalent in the camera’s departure from both the confines of the house and the cohesive construction of space and time that characterizes it. With a most economical and cogent technique, Simoneau conveys the predicament at the core of the drama, drawing a parallel between the outdoors, death, and the disturbing effect that these two efferent symbols have on Paul-Émile’s perception of himself and his entourage. The scene immediately following the macabre revelation takes place entirely in a park on a sunny day, and, unlike the two previous outdoor inserts, this sequence of shots conforms to the generally understated style of the film. This visual orthodoxy might appear inconsistent with the foregoing interpretation. But one central element differentiates this passage from the two others: namely, Margo’s presence. Indeed, for the first time in the film, she is seen outside the domestic milieu, in a context germane to her divulgence

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to Paul-Émile of her intention to go on holiday by herself. Far from being inconsistent, the portrayal of Margo in a rather benign exterior setting imparts her desire to explore new territories, as opposed to Paul-Émile’s wish for secluded stability. But, while avoiding the discomfort generated cinematically in the two earlier exterior shots, the scene still creates disturbance through Paul-Émile’s physical and verbal anxiety. He fidgets, raises his voice, and deduces fatalistically, “tu m’aimes pus,” you don’t love me anymore, construing her efferent design as a lethal assault on their relationship. Thus the sequence in the park exposes simultaneously the two sides of the dialectic: that is, Margo’s drive towards an alluring elsewhere, stressed cinematically by the natural background, and Paul-Émile’s resistance against such centrifugal movement, conveyed theatrically through Normand Lévesque’s performance. Not surprisingly, the subsequent montage displays the lovers, now separated, in antithetical relation to their external environment. Whereas Paul-Émile is perceived as a lonely figure on a barren expanse, depressed and saddened by his companion’s absence, Margo is espied walking nonchalantly in a bucolic autumnal forest. Their divergent portrayals in the cinematic landscape speak volumes about their opposite poles of attraction. Yet, despite Margo’s serene interaction with the natural setting, she does not reject the seclusive comfort of the inside either, as she is seen, in the same series of shots, enjoying her solitude in a motel room, while PaulÉmile cuddles up with the cat at home. Margo’s concurrent allegiance to the outside and the inside foreshadows both her return to Paul-Émile at the end of the film and her last monologue, in which she utterly refuses his marriage proposal but agrees to remain at home with him. As in the previous cases, the few cinematic additions in Les célébrations open up the play, albeit minimally, to reveal an external vista that is as alluring as it is repulsive, only to annul its influence in the end and to reaffirm the ascendency of the inward pull.

dune-bound gapi The same dialectical arrangement surfaces in another 1976 play, Antonine Maillet’s Gapi. As a matter of fact, this duality is perhaps more evident in this text than in any other work appraised in this

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chapter, for the entire drama revolves exclusively around the issue of staying or leaving. As critic Zénon Chiasson remarks in his short comment on the first version of the text, Gapi et Sullivan (1973), which was never produced: “To leave or to stay? This is Gapi’s internal struggle” (Chiasson, 365).13 Maillet’s piece examines the plight of Gapi, a sedentary lighthouse keeper, who spends most of his time talking to his only mates, the seagulls. Throughout act 1, the old man soliloquizes on his past with his late wife, la Sagouine, and on his lonely present on a dune where no one ever visits him. The companion that Gapi misses the most is Sullivan, the globetrotting sailor, whom he has not seen in years and expects never to encounter again (Maillet, 54). As Gapi resigns himself to withdraw into everlasting solitude, Sullivan suddenly arrives on the dune for a short stay between two trips on the exotic seas of the world. With Sullivan’s entrance, the dramatist discontinues the monologic format and resorts, in act 2, to a dialectical composition that sets the sailor, who boasts about all the things he has seen in the course of his travels, against the lighthouse keeper, who tries to defend the virtues of staying on the ancestral land, while nevertheless envying the exciting lifestyle of his friend. Sexually allured by Sullivan’s descriptions of the steatopygous women he has met during his voyages, Gapi eventually decides to leave his lighthouse behind and join his buddy on his ship (ibid., 76–7). But, as if it were refusing to let its keeper go, the lighthouse breaks down just as Gapi is envisioning the prospect of a new life abroad (ibid., 78). Thus reminded that he has to remain on his dune and attend to his sempiternal duty, Gapi must ultimately forego his short-lived desire to leave. After Sullivan has returned to his ship, Gapi resumes his lonely life on his dune, without any alternative other than to reassert his seclusive values in the face of his only audience, the seagulls (ibid., 100). As straightforwardly as any other play analysed in this study, Maillet’s drama exposes the predicament of a character, Gapi, who wishes to escape from the confines that restrict his horizons but who irrevocably fails in his endeavour, tied as he is to a lighthouse that anchors him to the dune. Sullivan’s intervention, in the second act, only magnifies this tension by emphasizing the charismatic power of the outside world through his colourful narrative, without offering Gapi any effective support in his attempt to flee his lonely dune. Gapi’s internal conflict is most ingeniously symbolized through the concrete allegory of a lame seagull that the old man particularly

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likes. As a bird whose physical circumstances hinder its ability to fly away, the lame seagull incarnates evocatively Gapi’s drama. At the end of the play, when his hopes to sail away with Sullivan are definitively shattered by the demands of the lighthouse, Gapi rejects the crippled bird (ibid.), as if the contradiction inscribed in the body of a grounded seagull were no longer representative of the lighthouse keeper’s situation now that he has accepted his dune-bound condition as the only conceivable position for him. This acceptance of his condition of solitary confinement on his small dune, affixed to a lighthouse that possesses him more than he possesses it, doubtlessly aligns Gapi with the other central characters encountered to this point, all of whom yield to the afferent impulse. Unlike Les célébrations, Paul Blouin’s 1981 adaptation of Gapi comprises much more than merely a few exterior scenes. There is no shortage, here, of panoramic tableaux picturing the dune whose every square inch the old lighthouse keeper, Gapi (Gilles Pelletier), has explored. It may thus seem astounding that reviewers have criticized Blouin’s movie for being “stage-bound” (Klady, 19). But the fact remains that in spite of the impressive landscapes and ocean views that abound in this production, the unity of place constituted by Gapi’s dune, in Maillet’s original text, is never contested by the film-mediation process since the camera never leaves the vicinity of the island. Moreover, Gapi’s and Sullivan’s (Guy Provost) numerous accounts of past incidents are never supplemented by flashbacks; the filmmaker prefers to scrutinize the facial expressions of the actors rather than to embody their remembrances on screen. Although the walls and ceilings that comprise the dramatic setting in other works are substituted in Gapi by sand, water, and blue skies, the impression of enclosure persists. This does not imply, however, that Blouin’s use of the cinematic apparatus serves absolutely no semiotic purpose. On the contrary, the discreet, but eloquent, visual rhetoric that the cineaste deploys conveys, cumulatively, the primary dialectical structure of the drama. Throughout the film, the camera punctuates Gapi’s monologic beats – often in accordance with Maillet’s own paragraphic divisions – as well as his exchanges with Sullivan, by means of a dichotomic procedure that consists in beginning the discursive unit with an establishing shot, which situates the character in his broader environment, and subsequently reframing the actor into a mediumclose-up composition for the main part of the tirade. This consistent

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movement from an outward perspective to an adjacent angle and back out again for the following passage duplicates visually Gapi’s psychological fluctuation between the efferent attraction personified by Sullivan and his attachment to his lighthouse and dune. This technique is evident in the last section of Gapi’s monologue, corresponding to the end of act 1, in which he deplores the threeyear absence of his friend. The scene begins with a medium shot of Gapi walking on the beach, with the sea and the sky occupying a prominent portion of the frame. As Gapi gradually comes to accept his state of lonely entrapment on the dune, the camera moves increasingly close to its subject, until his head and shoulder fill the frame almost entirely. Then, when Sullivan’s salutation – “Câlisse de tabarnacle de Gapi!” – is heard, the camera quickly moves back, resuming its distanced position and reintroducing the sea and sky as the sailor arrives to reinject fantasies of travel and exotic women into Gapi’s imagination. Similarly, the scene in which Sullivan suggests that Gapi should travel with him begins with a panorama of the dune and the wide-open sea in the background. But, as Gapi attempts to convince his friend that they should both stay on the dune, the camera moves in to capture the two men in a narrow twoshot that conceals the ocean completely. The most significant use of the technique is probably the last montage sequence, in which long shots of Sullivan leaving on his rowboat are juxtaposed with shoulder shots of Gapi shouting at him, begging him to stay. Fittingly, this series of images, rather than closing with a vista of Sullivan disappearing in the distance, concludes with a negation of escape, with a downward tilt from the sea to a decrepit embankment, succeeded by a close-up on Gapi’s face, thus closing the circle initiated with the very first picture of the film: a close-up on a lonesome Gapi lying in bed. This last sequence effectively denotes both the impossibility of departure, through the concealing of the horizon, and the lightkeeper’s solitary seclusion on his dune, signified by his grave attitude. Although Blouin’s Gapi exhibits more expansive landscapes than any other work in our corpus, the utilization of the filmic medium still achieves a result similar to that recognized throughout the study: the cursory illustration of the object of efferent desire and its ultimate refutation in favour of the drama’s afferent resolution. Interestingly, the theatrical career of the film somewhat reflects this movement. Produced for Radio Canada television, and thus

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meant to be viewed on the small screen in a closed domestic setting, the film had a public screening (hence its inclusion in this study) in the highly internationalist context of Montreal’s Festival des Films du Monde in 1982. On the one hand, the inclusion of this t v movie as the only Canadian entry in the Festival’s official competition bears witness to the dearth of noteworthy feature films being released in this country at the time (save for The Grey Fox). Incidently, the same year, another obscure film adaptation, David Acomba’s Hank Williams: “The Show He Never Gave,” was also championed by at least one critic as a positive low-budget alternative to the “counterproductive excesses” made possible under the tax-shelter or capital-cost-allowance policy (Costabile, 27). On the other hand, this one public screening of Gapi also parallels Gapi’s own exposure to the world before resuming his confined existence. As a t v drama that is not distributed even on video, Gapi briefly saw the glamour of a world premiere but is now as cut off from the global community as Gapi himself. One Night Stand, analysed below, presents another instance of exposure to the “glamourous” world of theatrically released movies, but this exposure functions at quite a different level.

one night stand and the risks of sleeping w i t h a h o l ly w o o d m ov i e s t a r In terms of the chronology of stage performances, the next play on our list is Carol Bolt’s One Night Stand, which was first produced in 1977. Like Kinch’s Me? it was a respectable success among Toronto’s regular theatre crowd, and it was almost immediately optioned for a film adaptation by Allan King. Like Palmer’s Me, King’s movie had less success than its original (albeit more than the former) and stands as yet another example of a seemingly forgettable attempt to bridge the gap between theatre and cinema. Regardless of its success (or lack thereof), One Night Stand is still representative of the recurrent structure that foregrounds a character at once attracted and repulsed by the outside world. In this case, however, the outside world does present a very real threat, that of a serial killer in search of another victim. Abandoned on her birthday – by her married lover, Nick, by her best friend, Sharon, and by the latter’s boyfriend, Eddie – Daisy, a timid bank clerk, picks up a stranger in a bar, Rafe, and brings him

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home for the night. Rather than engaging immediately in casual sex, as Daisy ostensibly wishes, Rafe decides to organize an intimate birthday party for his hostess. He sings for Daisy and performs somewhat bizarre, but generally entertaining, actions, such as decorating a Christmas tree in the middle of March and assuming the personae of movie stars. The cheerful mood vanishes completely, however, when Rafe “confesses” to having been in prison for killing a woman. Daisy orders him out of her apartment and calls Sharon to her rescue. But, as Rafe agrees to leave, Daisy has a change of heart and invites him to stay with her. The romantic atmosphere is then re-established, and they start making love. After sex, Daisy has a shower while Rafe plays guitar for her and plans their elopement to Peru. When Daisy tries to come out of the washroom, she realizes that Rafe has locked her in, although he pretends that she did it herself. This is the first in a series of troubling actions that Rafe performs throughout the second act of the play, such as keeping Daisy from using the phone and forcefully forbidding her from answering when police officers knock at the door. Eventually, Daisy discovers that Sharon, who arrived at the apartment while she was in the shower, has been slain by Rafe. Terrified, Daisy seeks help from her neighbour, Riva, who ignores her appeal. She then grabs a knife and threatens to use it to protect herself. Playing a tape recording of Sharon’s murder, Rafe goads Daisy into stabbing him to death. It could be argued that One Night Stand is in fact a conservative cautionary tale for the liberated women of the 1970s who might have been tempted to invite strange men to their bachelor suites. While this might be the case, I would argue that the play is a symptom of the late 1970s not only in terms of resurgent sexual conservatism, but also in terms of a concern about the encroachment of American culture in its exposure of the risks of associating with a stranger who constantly refers to Hollywood. The play might in fact represent an appeal on the part of a nationalist playwright, Bolt, to her peers asking them to resist the temptation of eagerly welcoming American culture when we feel that our culture has betrayed us. In that sense, One Night Stand might be closer to Bordertown Café than to the other plays. But, while Rebar’s play ends in reconciliation, Bolt’s ends in blood and death. Throughout the play, Rafe comes across as an embodiment of the Canadian who imagines himself to be an American hero. He

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perceives himself as an adventurer very much within the discourse of Hollywood. For instance, when Daisy goes to the bathroom, to slip into something more comfortable, he feels compelled to “save” her, even calling Eddie and Sharon at four in the morning to proclaim his intention: “Hello, Eddie … Listen my name is Tyrone Power and I’m trying to rescue a friend of yours […] she locked herself in the bathroom and the last girl I know did that was taking sleeping pills” (Bolt, 31). Elsewhere, Rafe becomes Tony Curtis in The Son of Ali Baba (1952), who needs to “ride to the rescue” (ibid., 19), or Warren Beatty in Bonnie and Clyde (1967), and Daisy becomes Faye Dunaway (ibid., 47). He even thinks they could make a film about him titled “The Three Faces of Rafe and Joanne Woodward could be in the movie” (ibid., 43). Rafe’s identification with Hollywood movie stars is not only verbal, but also physical. As act 1 comes to an end, the closing stage direction reads: “Rafe carries her to bed like Clark Gable carried Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind” (ibid., 33). In a much more macabre scene, near the end of act 2, when Rafe reveals Sharon’s dead body, he puts a knife in the dead woman’s hand, calling her “Tony Perkins’s mother” (ibid., 51), significantly attesting to his inability to distinguish between the real (Anthony Perkins the actor) and the imaginary (the character from Hitchcock’s Psycho [1960]). Even at the moment when Daisy, having grabbed the knife, threatens to kill him, he still plays a role dictated by Hollywood as he dares her to stab him. “You won’t gut me,” he says, impersonating Alan Ladd. “You won’t have the guts” (ibid., 51). A moment later, he throws himself onto Daisy’s knife. “She stabs him. Once. Twice. Three times. She tries to stop the blood. He is dying” (ibid., 52). Even when he does not literally associate himself with specific movie stars, Rafe’s lines are still filled with clichés from American popular mythology. From the very beginning of the play, one can perceive the conflict between Daisy’s desire to incorporate Rafe into her closed space and the negative effect of his American persona. The very first stage direction reads that Daisy enters her bachelor’s suite, “turns on the light, pulls [Rafe] into the apartment, closes the door behind them and bolts it” (ibid., 1). The focus quickly shifts to Rafe, who takes out his guitar and starts playing. Immediately, tension arises between the two characters, for Rafe plays country and

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western music, and “even if he were good, Daisy would hate it. She isn’t comfortable west of Bathurst Street” (ibid.). Thus Bolt, in a stage direction admittedly problematic to transpose into concrete theatrical language, explicitly signifies the latent conflict of the drama in terms opposing Daisy’s geographical confinement to Rafe’s imaginary persona as a wandering cowboy. Rafe, in his third spoken line of the text, picks up on this dichotomy and foretells the outcome of the play with a strong dose of cultural irony: “And you’ll be trapped here with a fugitive from Grand Ole Opry” (ibid., 2). Through the rest of the play, much of the figurative material attached to Rafe builds on this notion of the fugitive carrying with him the mythic images of the roaming American hero. As a matter of fact, halfway through the first act, Rafe actually states explicitly that he is from the u s . “I was born in Detroit. That’s why you think I am weird. I am an American” (ibid., 22). This statement is significant not only because it connects Rafe to American culture explicitly, but also because it is one of the first statements that suggests Rafe’s mental instability. First, he claims his American citizenship just minutes after having said that he is actually from Kapuskasing (ibid., 21). But, more importantly, his alleged American origin is declared as part of the first monologue in which he exhibits his dangerously erratic persona: [Y]ou can cry all you want to about getting back to the land, but the land is very nutsy when you come right down to it. I don’t know if you have ever come right down to it, but you know, you can be out in the bush and the nutsy thing is there is nothing going on out there. Nothing. There are a lot of people who will try to tell you that nothing is peaceful, but don’t let them kid you because it’s noisy. I mean there is the wind in the trees all the time […] Kachunga. Kachunga. Kachunga. The water rushing over pebbles. Dzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. The wind in the grass. Of course, there is no wonder that the noise in the country is so omnipresent because of all the stuff going on. Nature. Nature is very busy, of course. There are so many things growing and eating and changing into chlorophyll that it makes the Yonge Street Strip look like the core of downtown Detroit. Have you ever been to Detroit? It can be very quiet there. Just as quiet sometimes as the middle of the northern woods, but you always know the next sound you hear is going to tear your guts out. (Ibid., 22)

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This passage is worth quoting at length because it foregrounds Rafe’s idiosyncratic logic and also because his description of nature contrasts markedly with his perception of Daisy’s closed universe. His impression of Daisy’s bathroom, for instance, speaks volumes on his apprehension of closed spaces. “It’s safe in there, isn’t it?” he comments ironically about the bathroom, “it’s secure. It’s a minimal sort of environment but a space you can understand. Thoroughly. It’s like a bank job” (ibid., 37). In a few words, Rafe thus summarizes Daisy’s whole perspective on her existence, her desire for security, and her need to maintain a firm grasp on her minimal environment. Conversely, he rejects confined locations. “I go crazy,” he adds later on, “when I think of you locked up in the bathroom. When I think you might have killed yourself” (ibid., 45). For Rafe, therefore, the safeness of a closed space, or a stable job for that matter, is linked to death, which is not unlike Margo’s perspective on marriage. Beyond the binary distinction that Rafe establishes between the bathroom and nature, what is perhaps most intriguing about this passage is the connection that he draws between contradictory notions. Nothingness harbouring the frantic activity of nature, downtown Detroit being as quiet as the northern woods, sounds that tear your guts out – all these elements, which in logical argument would be kept separate, are linked to one another in Rafe’s demented oration. The very irrationalism that Rafe exhibits from beginning to end constitutes an evident sign of his refusal to accept the limitations of Daisy’s understandable space. Rafe’s contradictory discourse and his constant lies are verbal attempts to explode the limits of logical rhetoric. Even his insane fascination with the movies partakes of this endeavour to tear down the walls that separate reality and fiction, truth and lie, the inside and the outside. Paradoxically, while Rafe has a very fertile imagination and grandiose filmic aspirations, Allan King’s film version of One Night Stand, like Mankiewicz’s adaptation, barely resorts at all to the cinematic practice of opening up the original text, confining the drama almost exclusively to Daisy’s (Chapelle Jaffe) apartment and depicting only marginally the broader environment in which the characters move. Nevertheless, King’s unobtrusive handling of the medium still intensifies the drama through an orchestration of subtle filmic components that define and qualify the personages’ relations to their respective spheres of activity, either theatrical or

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cinematic. While the film remains rather theatrical, Rafe (Brent Carver) is made cinematic through the development of a connection between him and the space manufactured by the filming process. Both Daisy and Rafe cross, at one point or another, the boundary that separates the theatrical interior from the cinematic exterior. But, whereas Rafe’s explosive impulse translates into frequent motions towards the purely filmic domain, Daisy, even when she is positioned in public, open spaces, remains separated, withdrawn from the territory originated in the film-mediation process. She commands full authority over her surroundings only when film submits to the narrow perimeter dictated by drama. The first sequence, which relates the events preceding the action of the play proper, most emphatically illustrates this pattern. The film opens with a short series of shots juxtaposing Rafe, playing guitar on the sidewalk, and Daisy, working “in the completely impersonal confines of a t v bank,” as David McCaughna phrases it (McCaughna, “Mr Goodbar rides again,” 66). During this prologue, while Rafe sings directly to the passers-by who give him money, Daisy communicates with other characters only obliquely, either via the mediation of a television system or through distant sign language when Nick (Robert Silverman) shrugs at her as he enters his mezzanine office with his wife. From the outset, Daisy is portrayed as a character effectively segregated from her entourage. This condition of isolation is especially meaningful from our perspective, for this segment introduces her as an alien in a scenography cinematically imagined through the transpositional operation. Later in the film, King will reverse the procedure, showing Rafe as a stranger in the theatrically conceived space. The next scene corroborates Daisy’s estrangement from her filmic environs. As couples dance in a disco, Daisy stands on the sidelines, not only distancing herself from the whirling animation on the dance floor, but even refusing to respond to a patron who buys her a drink. In this manner, Daisy’s filmic persona echoes those of Dollie and Jeanie in Wedding in White, insinuating a fissure between the dramatic persona and her cinematic context. The first direct human contact that Daisy establishes with anyone in the film is with Rafe, whom she sees as he is trying to make his way past the disco’s doorman. Leaving the nightclub together, Daisy and Rafe behave according to their divergent impulses. As Daisy suggests, expectedly, “let’s get a taxi and go back to my place,” Rafe hails some

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friends driving by and starts singing with them in the middle of the street, visibly on his turf in the hustle and bustle of downtown Toronto on a Friday night. Undeterred, Daisy jumps into a cab and hauls Rafe in with her. This brief episode bears witness to the contrast between Rafe’s outward attraction and Daisy’s withdrawing inclination by granting the former contact with the diegetic figures cinematically engendered and keeping the latter divorced from the extra-theatrical field. The rest of the movie builds upon this pattern of dissension, maintaining much of the dramatic integrity of Daisy, while infusing Rafe with filmic circumstances that partially explode the limits of his stage embodiment at the same time as they reflect his discursive use of movie references. Accordingly, at the moment the film coalesces with the playscript – that is, when Daisy and Rafe arrive at her apartment – the libidinous young woman takes charge of the secluded space in a manner completely at odds with her earlier restraint, physically asserting her possession of the dramatic zone by manoeuvring around the narrow area, prancing provocatively. In addition to Daisy’s actual return home, this scene, in its dramatic decor, re-theatricalizes the character through the amalgamation of a sensual dance and the routine gestures that she accomplishes as she traverses her territory (putting Rafe’s coat in the closet, shutting the window, turning on a light, etc.). The stylized movements that she performs (cavorting lasciviously, flaunting her diminutive chest before Rafe) invests the scene with the purport of a love ritual, while the mundane actions that she executes anchor the ritual in a realistic context. As a result, the scene aligns itself with anthropological definitions of theatre. Victor Turner, for one, sees drama as a phenomenon of liminality – i.e., as a performative genre “dissolv[ing] all factual and commonsense systems into their components and ‘play[ing]’ with them in ways never found in nature or in custom […]” – that “tends to become a way of scrutinizing the quotidian world”(Victor Turner, 25, 27). In other words, theatre as ritual playfully formalizes the raw material of “real life” to examine the operations of ordinary existence. Daisy’s acting out the part of arch-seductress in front of Rafe thus supplements the quasi-documentary literality of her filmic depiction14 in the cinematic prologue with notions of spectacle and performance, hence theatricalizing the situation and even mirroring the complexion of

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much modern theatre, from Strindberg’s Miss Julie (1888) to Tremblay’s Les belles-soeurs (1968), in its exhibition of ritualistic enactments in a kitchen-sink setting. Appropriately, during Daisy’s ceremonial, Rafe remains an immobile spectator. Their relation to the acting field has evidently been inverted. In the first instants of her dance, he is manifestly out of place in the enclosed, theatrical confines, his sense of performance having been associated, to this point, with the informal practice of playing guitar on the sidewalk. In time, he does make himself at home, taking out his guitar, starting to sing, and engaging in the petty conversation that comprises roughly the first nine pages of the play script. However, Rafe’s initial compliance with the one-nightstand scenario does not signal his acceptance of Daisy’s confining demands for safe intimacy. In the film, as in the play, the disturbed young man soon discloses his explosive temperament when he begins shouting at Sharon (Susan Hogan) on the phone, hence triggering the slow but inexorable shattering of Daisy’s sense of sheltered safety. In both works, this preliminary indication of Rafe’s impetuosity is succeeded by a further gesture of transgression when he exits the restricted locale of the drama “to ask [Daisy’s] neighbours to [her] party,” disregarding her claim that she hates the neighbours. In the source, Rafe’s departure is limited to the visual impact of his outward movement. In King’s version, on the other hand, the transgressive quality of his action is magnified by one of the few clusters of original imagery created by the filmmaker: namely, the depiction of Riva’s (Dinah Christie) apartment, which Rafe visits on a few occasions. Not only is the presentation of the neighbour’s domicile in itself a cinematic transgression of the closed dramatic space, but the representation of the room as a haven for sadomasochists (albeit of the benign sort), complete with racy red lighting, whip, peculiar mechanical toys, and death’s-head and Frankenstein masks, constructs this site as an emblem of the evil sensuality that challenges Daisy’s delineation of proper sex. No need to recall, here, the widespread psychoanalytical film theories that have long regarded cinema as a gratifier of sadomasochistic impulses15 to deduce that Rafe’s interaction with Riva and her companion (Mina E. Mina) in this obstreperous, exclusively filmic milieu inserts into the otherwise centripetal design of Daisy’s dramatic script (her body being the

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centre towards which the various vectors of the drama should converge) the outside possibility of unbounded sexual conduct. Not surprisingly, when Rafe returns from his brief escapade in the realm of the purely cinematic, Daisy reasserts the afferent theatrical frame by performing her ritualistic dance as she moves in on him and resumes the seduction protocols.16 Rafe’s next effusion of craziness is related, again, to outward motion, but this time it hints at the negative side of efferent excess. Having suddenly realized his vocation as a Hollywood-style rescuer of captive ladies, he throws Daisy over his shoulder and shouts, “I’m going to rescue you. I’m going to tear these sheets in strips […] and climb down over the balcony just like in the movies,” as he wields her over the balustrade above a seventeen-floor drop. The sight of the pavement below provokes in Daisy – as well as in the spectator, who is presented with an unsettling point-of-view shot of the abyssal vista – a nauseous reaction to the petrifying apparition of the external threat. Although the peril dissipates and the dialogue resumes as soon as Rafe brings Daisy back inside, this instant of trepidation, explicitly connected to the former’s efferent leap, anticipates the horrific exposure of Sharon’s dead body near the end of the film, which concretizes the abjection of mortality intimated here and more humorously via the death mask worn by Riva’s lover. By inserting some exclusively filmic imagery into the chain of dramatic events, King manages to connote both the liberating force and ominous excess of Rafe’s efferent challenge to Daisy’s afferent inclination. Besides these few cinematic addenda that hint at the external menace from which Daisy wishes to retreat, King generally refrains from depicting the outward impulse alluded to in Rafe’s speech and actions. This underusage of film’s ability to move across time and space is most obvious in the passage shortly after the balcony incident, during which Rafe comments on the northern woods of Kapuskasing and the core of downtown Detroit. While the content of this monologue clearly invites imagery picturing the countryside and urban scene described verbally, King’s camera refuses to leave the site of the theatrical tirade and remains fixed on Carver’s face as he says his lines. Such insistence on the character’s visage, interspersed with infrequent reaction shots of Daisy, puzzled by her companion’s speech, naturally draws the viewer into his psyche. But the absence of reverse shots showing the cityscape at which Rafe is ostensibly staring through the window denies the process of suture

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that would have prompted the audience to identify with him (Stam, Burgoyne, and Flitterman-Lewis, 168–70). This creates a sense of estrangement vis-à-vis Rafe, whose facial mask, although expressive, paradoxically interdicts empathy and elicits a feeling of uncanny distance between the young man and his audience (Daisy and us). King’s minimal use of the filmic apparatus to convey Rafe’s strangeness in this scene is not inconsequential, of course. By fabricating him as alien through a primarily theatrical rendition, the filmmaker effectively counterpoints the precursory cinematization of Daisy as a foreigner in the outside world, where Rafe, conversely, felt totally comfortable. Admittedly, the close-ups of Rafe and the reaction shots of Daisy are, strictly speaking, cinematic and not theatrical devices. But their tight syntagmatic arrangement, which prohibits the interference of outdoor images, nevertheless manufactures a space that is as enclosed as a stage box set, eschewing reverse shots of the cityscape that would immediately project the spectator outside the apartment. Significantly, this predominantly theatrical section in the film culminates in the first acutely dramatic crisis of the text, as Rafe reveals, shortly after his monologue, that he has murdered a girl, a statement that triggers Daisy’s first panic attack and prompts her to call Sharon. As in the play, this crisis is soon resolved, and Daisy and Rafe eventually end up in bed together. To express the passage of time approximating the entr’acte, during which the couple are presumed to be making love, the filmmaker employs another of his understated but effective cinematic stratagems, displaying to his audience a long shot of the slumbering city. This panoramic view of skyscrapers, the first in the film, might conjure up romantic connotations ensuing from both the intrinsic quality of the image – shimmering lights in the night – and the extrinsic reference to the intimate intercourse that it shrouds. The subsequent close-up of Daisy sleeping potentially strengthens this impression of peace and harmony. However, King’s next use of the external urban tableau subverts these positive implications. The second long shot of downtown Toronto, perhaps even more attractive visually than the previous one because of the nascent sunlight, is understood initially in terms comparable to those attached to its predecessor, for it seems to shield the sexual games of Rafe and Sharon, who has returned to the apartment while Daisy is having a shower. But, in retrospect, it

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emerges that this peaceful vista of the urban skyline, far from affording a discreet veil concealing romantic intercourse, serves in fact to hide the violent crime of a deranged murderer. King’s figuration of the city, therefore, endows the broad environment that surrounds the dramatic scene with both surface beauty and undertones of cold indifference towards the suffering of those who inhabit it. Hence, with great economy, King expresses the contradictory impact that the outside world has on the characters in its dialectical operation as the object of Rafe’s efferent motivation and the cause of Daisy’s inward recoil. Moreover, the third and last depiction of the cityscape backgrounded by the early morning sky is followed by a shot of Daisy looking down at the police car that ominously portends the tragic dénouement of the drama. The juxtaposition of these shots emphasizing the clash between the two perceptions of the outside world – as an alluring panorama of promises and as a threateningly repressive agent – epitomizes in a few seconds the dichotomy at the core of the text. From this point on, with the exception of a few brief shots of the police officers in the corridor and Riva on her balcony, the camera exclusively depicts Daisy’s apartment, as though, following the murder of Sharon, which manifests the ultimate infringement of the frigid external body into the circumscribed interior, King no longer had to portray the outside world. Notably, one of the only cinematic additions in the last quarter of the movie is the actual killing of Sharon. Superimposed on a diegetic sound recording of the violent event taped by Rafe, pictures of the gruesome murder show the actions that the stage version never discloses. This does not mean that brutal deeds cannot be exhibited on stage; the stabbing of Rafe at the end of the play attests to the contrary. But the origination by the filmic discourse of a scene of explosive violence authenticates the pattern recognized hitherto: that is, the use of the cinematic medium to emphasize the confrontation between Rafe’s transgressive role and the contained script of Daisy’s drama. The film-transgression nexus is all the more striking in that it is not counterpointed by cinematically originated spectacles of lovemaking. Indeed, the cinemediation process only generates material that shatters boundaries and confinement, and never deploys imagery of protective embrace other than what is already dictated by the theatrical source. Like most filmmakers discussed in this study, King employs cinematic devices to stress the centrifugal angle of the original drama

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while retaining, in all faithfulness to the source, the dominance of theatrical closure. King aptly concludes his production with an image that suggests the film’s re-establishment of the theatrical situation. Following Daisy’s stabbing of Rafe, the camera slowly dollies out of the apartment until it shows the two characters through the window. The proscenium arch formed by the window – complete with a curtain closing on the scene – re-theatricalizes the representation and professes, I would argue, that regardless of its ability to transcend space and time, film-mediated drama remains bound to its theatrical origins. The only film examined in this chapter that seems to challenge the ultimate re-establishment of closed dramatic space is Victor Sarin’s 1989 version of Jim Garrard’s Cold Comfort.

c ol d c om f o r t : s tag e b on dag e Sarin’s film ends on images that evoke freedom and space. This is in clear contrast to the ending of Garrard’s original, which emphasizes entrapment. Entrapment is so central to Garrard’s text that he, himself, labels the tetralogy of dramas to which Cold Comfort belongs “Bondage Plays for My Country” (Garrard, 5). Even a cursory reading of this black comedy, which premiered at Saskatoon’s 25th Street Theatre in January 1981, suffices to convey that the dialectical structure of the piece, like that of the previous works, is based on an opposition between a confining force and a desire to escape entrapment. Cold Comfort offers a macabre version of the old joke about the travelling salesman who is compelled because of a Saskatchewan blizzard to spend the night in a remote house with a strange man and his attractive daughter. Floyd, the father, found Stephen Miller unconscious in his ditched car and elected to bring him home as a birthday gift for his daughter, Dolores (ibid., 15). Throughout act 1, Floyd encourages Stephen to sleep with his daughter, even leaving them alone for lengthy periods of time to facilitate the process. By the time Stephen and Dolores eventually become intimate, the travelling salesman has discovered that Floyd’s inviting him to sleep with the teenage girl is but a mild expression of the old man’s bizarre personality. From Dolores’s matter-of-fact account, Stephen learns that Floyd once abandoned his wife on an empty road at night because she had reprimanded him for his drinking (ibid., 41–2). Moreover, the father used to shackle his daughter inside the house to keep her from running away (ibid., 60). And,

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most frighteningly, Dolores asserts that Floyd performed an operation on her when she was eight to remove her reproductive organs, a tyrannical means for the father to control his daughter by obliterating any possibility of her having a normal sexual life. The cruel misogyny of this action is exacerbated by the fact that he performed the operation on Dolores because “he was mad at [her] mother about something” (ibid., 57). Understandably, Stephen tries to persuade Dolores to leave with him the following morning (ibid., 63). Delighted at the prospect of travelling around the world, Dolores tenders Stephen her sexual favours in exchange for an enumeration of all the cities he has visited and where he will take her (ibid., 69– 71). At the beginning of act 2, however, Stephen’s plan to abscond with Dolores is brutally shattered when he wakes up with a chain around his ankle fastening him to the floor. Floyd explains that he resorted to this radical means to prevent the salesman from taking Dolores away: “It wasn’t my idea you should take Dolores out of here. I didn’t mind somebody coming in here and, maybe, giving her a little poke. But nobody’s fucking well going to take her any place” (ibid., 76). To convince his daughter to forsake Stephen, Floyd suggests: “My idea, Dolores, is that if you really want to leave here so bad, I’ll take you” (ibid., 81). Seduced by her father’s proposition, Dolores turns her back on Stephen and starts packing her bags. “What can I do? My Daddy’s made up his mind,” she tells Stephen before deserting him (ibid., 92). In the end, Dolores departs with Floyd, leaving Stephen chained inside the house with nothing but the television and a Swede saw that “won’t cut chain but it might cut bone” (ibid., 92). It could be argued that whether Dolores flees with Stephen or with Floyd, at the end of the play, she still manages to escape the confines of the isolated prairie house and thus succeeds where characters like Hélène Primeau have failed. Her confinement, however, has less to do with the actual prison in which she is sequestrated than with the jailer who controls her every move. In fact, Dolores herself unwittingly recognizes that Floyd does not need to use chains to enslave her. “When I was younger,” she tells Stephen, “Daddy used to put a chain on my leg when he was away, but now he knows he doesn’t have to. He never did. I wouldn’t run away from him […] I can’t leave Daddy. I don’t want him to be disappointed” (ibid., 60, 61). Indeed, Floyd’s abusive treatment of his

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daughter has had such an impact on her mental state that now she literally “can’t leave Daddy.” When Stephen, shackled to the floor, charges, “You must be crazy too. Like him. I don’t understand how you can go anywhere with him, after all he’s done to you,” she retorts: “I’m sorry, Stephen. Especially after all the nice things you’ve done for me. But he’s my Dad, and I want to go places” (ibid., 84). That he is her “Dad” gives Floyd absolute control over his daughter, who remains metaphorically chained to him whether they stay at home or travel to Vancouver and the United States (ibid., 86, 89). Floyd’s attitude, like Jim’s in Wedding in White, is highly representative of male characters in what John Moss labels the “Canadian Gothic” tradition, which focuses on powerless men who compensate for their impotence by being despotic towards their families (Moss, 185–7). Hiding in garrisons protecting them against unforgiving landscapes that they cannot hope to conquer, Canadian men it seems turn against their families as a means to declare their dominance through unspeakable acts of violence and sexual perversity. As such, Floyd would be a paragon of Canadian masculinity, trapped as he is in his prairie house and compelled by the environment to vent his frustration on his daughter. It might not be a coincidence that Garrard set his play in Saskatchewan; after all, it was when he was a minister in Saskatchewan in the early 1930s that Northrop Frye first experienced the “deep terror in regard to nature” (Frye, The Bush Garden, 225) that he would later associate with the Canadian’s garrison mentality (Denham, 240–5). Of course, as terrifying as a prairie blizzard can be, the Saskatchewan landscape can also be strikingly beautiful. Those of us who have had the chance to live in Saskatchewan know that the Qu’Appelle Valley near Regina, for instance, is as beautiful in its own way as any other part of the country. This might explain why, while the natural settings that Sarin shows in his adaptation are sometimes harsh, they are also often peaceful and bucolic.17 The blizzard that rages on throughout the play occupies only a part of the cinematic narrative and is counterpointed by much more clement weather in the latter half of the film. The improved weather conditions are but one of the many changes that Garrard’s original underwent in the hands of scenarists Richard Beattie and Elliot L. Sims. The most significant change is the ending, as Dolores (Margaret Langrick) jumps off of Floyd’s (Maury Chaykin) tow truck while he recklessly drives away from the dilapidated house-cum-

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garage in which Stephen (Paul Gross) is chained, speeding towards an approaching train. This penultimate scene, which culminates in the destruction of the vehicle by the train and the probable death of Floyd, both corroborates and contradicts the original finale. Floyd’s suicidal gesture in the film is in keeping with the interpretation of the play’s ending as a false deliverance for Dolores, since she remains a captive of her father’s madness. But Dolores’s actual escape from the truck, in the nick of time, marks a significant break from dramatic entrapment, effecting the only gesture of actual liberation in either the play or the movie. Furthermore, in the film’s very last shot, the teenage girl is seen walking in the direction of the garage, visibly on her way to free Stephen. Yet his release remains purely conjectural, for the image fades to black before Dolores reaches the isolated building. In the end, Sarin’s version still does not dispose of the central agent of confinement: that is, the chain that holds the travelling salesman inside the house, as it did Dolores in the past. As a matter of fact, the closing panorama, with its prairie landscape overwhelming the small shack towards which Dolores is walking, somewhat reaffirms Floyd’s dominance over the scene, for, throughout the film, the landscape and its mood swings are associated with the eccentric tow-truck driver as the temperamental force that impounds the salesman. Like the other works of the corpus, Cold Comfort employs the boundless medium of cinema to expose the external environment that contours the closed arena of the theatrical conflict. As mentioned above, through the lense of cinematographer Sarin, the natural surroundings fluctuate from the howling blizzard that causes Stephen to drive his car into the ditch to the peaceful emptiness of an icy prairie morning in the dead of winter. Floyd’s cyclothymic behaviour parallels this range of climatic manifestations. There are segments in the film where Floyd appears as serene as the sunrises affectionately photographed by Sarin. For instance, after a first evening of rather pleasant conversation between Stephen and his hosts, there follows a pastoral picture of early morning radiance, with Dolores playing with the dogs and hugging her father before he leaves for work. Everything in this scene, from Floyd’s loving gestures to the sentimental melody that accompanies the images, emits an aura of harmony among the elements and the individuals that interact within them.

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Shortly after this sequence, however, the blizzard resurges, and, as Stephen is compelled to prolong his sojourn for a second night18 under the pretext of celebrating Dolores’s birthday, he is confronted with Floyd’s darker side. While the prairie wind blows outside, the salesman first discerns his elder’s serious psychological disequilibrium as they are competing in an arm-wrestling match that exasperates Floyd beyond reason. Later, a striptease performed by the teenage girl exposes the incestuous overtones of her relationship with her father and climaxes in an unprecedented show of anger on Floyd’s part as he threatens to shoot Stephen but eventually collapses under the weight of his intoxication, praising Dolores’s breasts. Following this incident, Stephen seeks to escape the madhouse on foot, via the backwoods. However, the environment again conspires with Floyd to contain Stephen’s efferent effort; a few hours after his attempted escape, Stephen is found comatose in the snow, his foot caught in a wolf trap. The seemingly inoffensive white carpet that circumscribes the garage thus reveals itself to be as treacherous as Floyd and the erratic climate from which he earns his living. It does not come as a surprise, therefore, that before attaining Stephen’s prison, which she never does within the limits of the film, Dolores is forced to cross a field of snow that seriously hinders her mobility, as an insert of her feet sinking into the frozen substance attests. Although ostensibly freed from the oppression of her seclusive father, the cinematic Dolores is still not entirely emancipated from her theatrical antecedents, which structurally resist the liberation of Stephen. Séquences critic Martin Girard remarks in his review of Sarin’s movie, “in the end, the film suffers from being merely an adaptation of a stage play. The filmmaker’s efforts to ‘open up’ the closed theatrical space only diminish suspense and foreground the artificiality of the scenario” (Girard, 53).19 Whereas Girard sees this situation as a flaw in the production, I would reiterate the argument proposed above that the film’s inability to escape its theatrical source is in fact a constitutive aspect of the corpus. Indeed, as the foregoing survey of cinematic works demonstrates, film-mediated drama constantly struggles, but irrevocably fails, to tear itself away from the stage, thus replicating, at a formal level, the dialectic central to the dramatic texts. In terms of the historical interval between the original and the film version, the cinematic Dolores’s attempted, if unfulfilled,

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return to the house is telling. In the 1981 play, she gladly joins her father on his trip to the United States (Garrard, 89). This Americabound enthusiasm is reflexive of an attitude shared by a number of Canadian filmmakers at the time. In the 1989 film, the situation has changed. Not only does Dolores ultimately return home, like Jimmy in Bordertown Café, but her father’s intended destination is actually less clearly defined (British Columbia, Mexico, Panama City). Floyd in his last few lines seems to have lost his mind entirely, rambling meaninglessly as he drives his tow truck into a speeding freight train. The option of going to the States has thus partially lost its appeal. While the film closes on an ambiguous note, at least Dolores, perhaps like cinema itself in 1989, is taking the first few steps towards a return to the Canadian setting – the small house in the middle of the snow-covered landscape. My intention in this overview of a half-dozen adaptations has been to highlight the particular composition of the corpus of feature film adaptations from the 1970s and ’80s. These works are characterized by a recursive symmetry that aligns the liminal structure of the plays and the tension at the core of film-mediated drama with a larger historical context also typified by a struggle within Canadian cinema between stasis and movement, commercialism and art, nationalism and globalization. This is not to say that Norma Bailey, Francis Mankiewicz, Allan King, or Vic Sarin determined to adapt play scripts in full awareness of the symmetry between the plays’ structures, film-mediated drama’s paradoxical make-up, and the situation of cinema under the tax-shelter policy. I would submit, however, that the notion of film-mediated drama as an amalgamation of an afferent theatrical source and the efferent cinematic medium is so widely accepted in the theoretical discourses of the last fifty years that any filmmaker even remotely familiar with the stage/screen dichotomy would be conscious, at some level, of the dialectic immanent in the cinematic treatment of drama and could thus be drawn “naturally” towards certain texts that seem especially topical at a certain juncture. Since 1992, the increase in the number of adaptations of plays has created a diversity that renders the elucidation of recursive patterns more difficult to achieve. But, while the tension between centripetal theatre and centrifugal cinema has become less obvious over the last decade, it nonetheless appears under the guise of various elusive metaphors. One of these is the dead body, which was dis-

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cussed briefly in previous sections along with other death imagery. Julia Kristeva proposes that the cadaver epitomizes abjection, for it achieves a radical breaking of boundaries (Kristeva, 11–12). As a result, the cadaver is very much a metaphor for efferent cinema. However, when the cadaver is performed on stage or in a film – that is, when an actor plays dead – the boundary-breaking potential of the corpse is counteracted by the self-controlled live body of the actor. I would argue that the notion of the cadaver represented on stage or on screen by a performer thus typifies the afferent drama/ efferent cinema dichotomy analysed in this study insofar as the appearance of the cadaver in a film or play implies cinematic exosmosis – the dead body’s disintegration, dispersion, and merger with the environment – at the same time as the actor’s very regulation of the live body to recreate the signs of death performs the centripetal concentration typical of drama. Next, we will examine five of the most important adaptations realized over the last decade to suggest that at the juncture of theatre and film lies a corpse.

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5 At the Juncture of Theatre and Film There Lies a Corpse

In previous chapters, we have seen that the tension between centripetal theatre and centrifugal film parallels the structure of the dramas themselves, as we see characters torn by conflicting forces that push them out and pull them in simultaneously. In this chapter, I wish to focus on a particular embodiment of this tension that reappears in a number of adaptations produced over the past ten years. This literal embodiment of the theatre-film dialectic is the corpse, or, more precisely, the actor “playing dead” who both signifies cinema and incarnates drama. Alenka Zupancic argues with respect to Hitchcock’s adaptations of plays that “Every time cinematic and theatre realities coincide, every time cinematic and theatre narratives overlap, there is a corpse” (Zupancic, 80, italics in original). This statement does not imply that there are always corpses in film adaptations of plays. While many of the plays and films studied in previous chapters do rely on morbid imagery, the majority do not display anything that looks even remotely like a corpse. Conversely, very many original movies are peppered with dead bodies. What Zupancic means, I believe, is that the cadaver, whether or not it actually appears in the adaptation, stands as a metaphor for the overlapping of efferent film (Kristeva’s boundary-breaking cadaver) and afferent theatre (the concentrated, still body of the actor focused on playing dead). In the following pages, this argument will be further developed on the basis of the theories of Maurice Blanchot, who ^^

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sees the corpse as pure image, and Thérèse Malachy, who reads death on stage as being always embodied by a “cadavre vivant” (Malachy, 31). This argument proposes that the appearance of the cadaver in a fictional film always brings onto the screen the theatrical ambiguity of the living dead. While a corpse on film can be an actual corpse (as in documentaries showing war victims, for instance), a corpse in a stage performance is always a living cadaver. Death on stage – if one excludes from this discussion the argument that public executions are a form of theatrical entertainment – is a “situation lived by a live character,” says Malachy (34),1 as the actor “plays dead.” While the fallacy of death on stage has long been discussed – both John Dryden in “An Essay of Dramatic Poesy” (1668) and Denis Diderot in “Paradoxe sur le comédien” (written in 1773) refer to the fiction of theatrical death (Dryden, 63; Diderot, 62) – it is only since World War II that theatre has emphasized in its own dramatic situations this condition of “living death.” In the plays of Beckett and Ionesco and in the stage creations of Tadeus Kantor, the corpse is presented as very much a part of the live cast. The presence of the actor still very much alive while appearing to be dead has become, Malachy argues, a central theme in existential dramas concerned with the question of meaningless life as a more deadly option than death itself. As we will see below, the issue of living death on stage is central to a play like Michel-Marc Bouchard’s Les feluettes. Interestingly, in Kantor’s staging of Wielopole, Wielopole (1980), living corpses are literally resurrected by the stage director as he magically brings them back to life through his demand for live performance. Here the existential action that infuses life with existence is contrasted with the immobile emptiness of the photographic state in which the characters are initially trapped (Malachy, 38, 47–8). Kantor’s association of the photographic image with death, which he counteracts with the live performance of the theatre, recalls at once Barthes’s comments in Camera Lucida (1981) on photography as eliciting “the return of the dead” (Barthes, Camera Lucida, 9) and Blanchot’s idea that the image is like a corpse and the corpse is like an image. “The image does not, at first glance, resemble the corpse,” says Blanchot, but the cadaver’s strangeness is perhaps also that of the image. What we call mortal remains escapes common categories. Something is there

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before us which is not really the living person, nor is it any reality at all. It is neither the same as the person who was alive, nor is it another person, nor is it anything else … Where is it? It is not here, and yet it is not anywhere else. Nowhere? But then nowhere is here. The cadaverous presence establishes a relation between here and nowhere […] The cadaver is its own image. It no longer entertains any relation with this world, where it still appears, except that of an image, an obscure possibility, a shadow ever present behind the living form which now, far from separating itself from this form, transforms it entirely into shadow. (Blanchot, 256, 258)

This description of the cadaver as image stands in contrast to the notion of the living cadaver of the theatre, for, while the stage cadaver is characterized by its living presence, the real cadaver and the image both function as visible absence. This is precisely what differentiates theatre and film according to Christian Metz. As has already been discussed in chapter 2, for Metz the distinction between live performances and film is that the former “are inscribed in a true space,” while the latter, “by definition, combines within it a certain presence and a certain absence” (Metz, 248, 249). While the actor playing dead reasserts the essential liveness of theatre, the actual corpse can be read as a metaphor for cinema as an absence made present. What then of the appearance of an actor playing the corpse in a fiction film? If all of cinema is like a corpse, then what is the effect of the depiction of a fictional corpse within the cinematic cadaver? This effect, I would argue, is to bring back into the cinema the notion of the theatrical corpse as a “cadavre vivant” introduced through the performance of the actor. Whether a film is based on a play or on an original script, the appearance of the performed cadaver on screen contradicts Blanchot’s point that the cadaver “is neither the same as the person who was alive, nor is it another person, nor is it anything else,” for we recognize the corpse as being very much the living body of the person playing dead. Fictional death in a film is theatrical death; it is never the same as the recording of real death, which remains the province of pure cinema, outside of theatrical performance. A case in point is found in Charlotte Zwerin and the Mayles brothers’ documentary on a Rolling Stones concert in 1969, Gimme Shelter (1971). In their book on death in film, Killing for Culture (1995), David Kerekes and David

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Slater discuss in detail the moment in the film when Hell’s Angels “security guards” stab and kick to death a spectator. As much as the unruly crowd disrupts Mick Jagger’s performance on stage, the killing has little impact on him as it happens, for the reality of death is severed from the universe of the singer’s theatrical histrionics. However, when the band members later see the killing on film, it takes on all its meaning. Describing a specific moment in Gimme Shelter, when the Stones watch the footage of the killing, Kerekes and Slater write, “Can you roll back on that, David?” Jagger asks one of the film directors. Stunned and disbelieving, he and drummer Charlie Watts watch rushes of Altamont [Speedway arena] and the fracas which lead to onscreen murder. Though the incident is over in a matter of seconds and was picked up almost by accident at the time, in slow-motion in the audience a gun is seen brandished by a black man wearing a green suit. An Angel brings a knife down twice before the man tumbles out of shot. “Don’t let him die!” a girl screams. “Street Fighting Man” plays. Jagger’s detachment on stage to that of the concern here, when faced with the film, has the curious implication that it is the film which is at “fault”, that it is the Mayeles brothers and Charlotte Zwerin who are responsible because they have committed the action to celluloid. Their film may be totally objective, but at the very least, in filming it they have made the action exist more. (Kerekes and Slater, 182–3, emphasis added)

Film, through its ability not only to record death but to present it to an audience with impunity and without losing its potential status as art (while a theatrical performance showing actual death would cease to be theatre), thus has a relationship to death that does seem to corroborate Blanchot’s hypothesis. Theatrical death on film and audio-visual recordings of actual death are ontologically different. In his book La mort à voir, Gérard Lenne comments on how the actual death of animals in fiction films like Jean Renoir’s La règle du jeu (1938) affect the spectator much more profoundly than the theatrical deaths presented on screen (Lenne, 20–1). As Bill Nichols argues in the context of his study on knowledge and the body in documentary, we can ultimately differentiate between actual death on screen and an actor playing dead in a fiction film: “The sight of brutal violence, or its extreme

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manifestation, brutal death, engages us quite differently in documentary. This is not a simulation. There is no getting up, dusting off, and going on as if nothing had happened. The imprint of history registers on the flesh. (The corpse or wounded body is what simulation models – like the media coverage of the Golf War – proved determined to avoid) […] Moments like the beating of Rodney King … bring us face to face with the fragility and mortality of the body […] Such moments cut through the narrative frames and explanatory nets cast around them” (Nichols, 189–90). What separates the actual corpse in a documentary film from the fictional corpse that we recognize as not being “really dead” is precisely the living quality of the theatrical performance. In the fiction film, explains Lenne, “Death is subjected to representational codes that are based on the very notion of spectacle” (Lenne, 34).2 There are very rare cases where acted death might be mistaken for real death. Kerekes and Slater spend several pages analysing so-called “snuff films” to distinguish between those that show real death and those that show acted death. Some tricks are easily identifiable while in other cases “so convincing are the players that one could easily be forgiven for thinking that the whole thing was ‘real’. The closing shot of the girl staring beyond the lens, for example, [in Teenage Babylon, 1989] must stand as one of the most effective assimilations [sic] of death put on film” (Kerekes and Slater, 198). However, in the overwhelming majority of films, the theatrical codes of death are immediately perceivable. They have been repeated so often, notes Lenne, that they almost belong to folklore (Lenne, 35). Even if the codes were subtle, details such as catching a glimpse of the cadaver breathing or blinking ever so slightly, or the simple extracinematic knowledge that the dead body in this film appeared very much alive in subsequent movies or on t v, is all it takes to recognize theatrical death in fiction film. This is how the corpse stands as an emblem of theatre’s intersection with cinema, for it reminds us that live-action fiction films are essentially documentary recordings of actors in performance. The difference between most fiction films and the adaptations examined in this chapter is that, while the former seek to erase their performative component, the latter revolve around cadavers whose depiction in the narrative clearly evokes the tension between the stage and the screen. In the film version of Being at Home with Claude, the very appearance of the body of the murdered lover, Claude, bears witness to the process of adaptation itself.

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b e i n g a t h o m e w i t h t h e b o dy o f c l a u d e Jean Beaudin’s 1992 film adaptation of René-Daniel Dubois’s Being at Home with Claude, about a male prostitute who has killed his lover and surrendered to the police but refuses to divulge his motive, begins with a startling nine-minute prologue shot in black and white in which rapidly edited images and a feverishly mobile camera trace the events that precede the play proper. None of the material shown in this introductory segment actually appears in Dubois’s original, which strictly respects the unities of time, space, and action, and surely the most momentous addition in this prologue is the depiction of the murder of Claude, who is constantly referred to in the play but never appears on stage. As a result, Beaudin’s prologue effects a significant change in the main objective of the dramatized police interrogation that constitutes the bulk of the film and all of the play. While Dubois’s text offers a queer criticism of the police’s positivistic project to determine empirically what actually happened between the prostitute and his lover, the film answers from the outset the question of what happened and shifts its focus towards the question of why it happened. By showing the murder at the beginning and flashing back to it with police photos of the dead body, Beaudin puts much more emphasis on cause/effect relations than Dubois ever does and, consequently, facilitates the spectator’s understanding of the character’s motivations. Beaudin himself has stated that the opening sequence is central to the audience’s comprehension of the film, as it abstracts all the main episodes of the drama to follow and offers a visual key to the enciphered verbal discourse that ensues. “The camera is searching for the characters,” he explained in an interview published at the time of the film’s release: “It goes through the whole city of Montreal, from [west to east], through the buildings, the streets, the jazz festival, St-Laurent boulevard with its hookers, until it arrives at [Claude’s] place in total exhaustion. All these places form the synthesis of the play. Someone who could decipher these nine minutes would find all the elements of the play. Everything is there. The rest of the film only explains in more words these actions” (Bonneville, “Interview: Jean Beaudin,” 20).3 From the prologue, the audience can, indeed, infer the source of the drama and anticipate its resolution. But a perusal of the nineminute introductory segment actually enables the viewer to do more

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than merely figure out the killer’s motives. In fact, one can discern from this first sequence the basic structure of the drama and recognize, through the introduction of Claude’s body, the cineaste’s metaphorical rendition of the transformations effected upon the original through the process of film-mediation. From the opening shot of the film, a black-and-white panorama of downtown Montreal counterpointed on the soundtrack by orgasmic breathing, the filmmaker establishes a clear dichotomy between two opposite yet complementary realities: namely, the city riotously vibrating under the intoxicating sounds and sights of a jazz festival and the intimate intercourse of two men, the prostitute, Yves (Roy Dupuis), and his lover, Claude (Jean-François Pichette). The rest of the pre-credit montage intensifies this dichotomy, pitting the brutal chaos pervading the city, with its loud punks, threatening bikers, and seedy drunks, against the affectionate lovemaking taking place in Claude’s home. In the first half of the prologue, the two antithetical worlds are displayed both synchronically and diachronically, as tightly framed shots of Claude’s and Yves’s naked bodies, moving harmoniously, are inserted into the chain of images that mark the progression of the camera away from the boisterous downtown crowds and towards an increasingly marginalized district of illicit sexuality culminating in Claude’s apartment. These first few minutes imply a causality between the two terrains, gradually defining the lovers’ intimacy not only as an alternative sphere of activity (through the initial parallel montage), but also as a reaction against the external environment (with Claude’s home as the syntagmatic destination of the camera’s journey away from the mob). Accordingly, the pictures of urban frenzy, which dominate the first half of the prologue, vanish when the camera, having reached its goal, enters Claude’s abode through a window and reveals in lyrical, slow-motion photography the copulating men in the homely milieu that had only been glimpsed previously. This manoeuvre away from public, explosive chaos and into private, self-centred lovemaking is reversed in the second portion of the opening sequence. As the two lovers reach orgasm, Yves grabs a knife and slashes Claude’s throat. Claude’s efferent blood, the first coloured object in the film, gushing onto the walls, furniture, and appliances precipitates a series of shots showing Yves running away from the scene of the crime and into the disorderly urban setting. Soon after, a fade-out terminates this precursory filmic assemblage

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and raises the curtain on the play proper, which focuses on the police interrogation as an inspector (Jacques Godin) seeks to understand why Yves killed his lover. Through this initial arrangement of sounds and images, Beaudin manages to summarize the main contention at the core of the subsequent dramatic discourse: that is, a dialectical opposition between a threatening open space peopled with brutal or, at best, indifferent individuals and a closed, comfortable realm where lovers can enjoy intimacy. This dialectical structure is not readily perceivable in the play, for Dubois’s work harbours an uncommon complexity that parallels the intricate psychology of its central character, whose voluntary surrender to the police seems to contradict his absolute refusal to explain why he murdered Claude. A close reading of the text, however, reveals that the basic motivation for Yves’s behaviour emerges directly from this diametrical opposition between home and the world “out there.” Bill Marshall in Québec National Cinema argues in response to my reading of the prologue that “the tour de force of the prologue fails to demonize the city ‘out there,’ precisely because the rapidity and heterogeneity of the montage generate ‘pleasure’ and quote the style of rock video” (Marshall, 127). Marshall is correct in claiming that the prologue generates pleasure. Where his disagreement with me is less convincing is in his implication that something demonized cannot be pleasurable. Aren’t there demonic pleasures? The city presents a threat that may or may not be demonic but that can at once be a source of pleasure and fear, exactly as the relationship between Yves and Claude is at once a source of pleasure and fear – fear that it may not last. And this fear is at the core of the play. Throughout Dubois’s one-act play, the inspector tries to reconstruct the events surrounding the crime from the snatches of information wrung from Yves, without ever managing to disentangle the web of paradoxes with which he is presented. Only at the very end of the play does Yves finally reveal the impetus behind the slaying of Claude. He slit his throat as they were enjoying mutual orgasm to preserve this instant of pure ecstasy from the corruption of the outside world. At the climactic point of this perfect communion with Claude, Yves saw troubling images of the sordid universe that defines his existence, a universe populated by ingrate clients and impersonal coition on the dark trails of Mont-Royal, and realized that this ruthless environment would never permit their loving relationship to

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survive: “I knew we’d never be able to walk outta that apartment like nothing happened. We couldn’t, shouldn’t. We shouldn’t even try to act like nothin’ happened. The only thing that’s real is him, screaming. Crying for joy, in my arms […] And there was the rest of the world. The opposite of what was happening to us […] But we couldn’t stay locked up, like monks, with the blinds down, living the love of our lives. And we couldn’t relive what was happening then, just a few minutes a month, and spend the rest of the time dealing with everyone else. So all I remember is, suddenly I had the steak knife in my hand […] And he died of pleasure. Without seeing his life go to ratshit” (Dubois, 431, 432). Following his confession, Yves is taken into police custody, leaving the inspector baffled by such a revelation. Yves’s long testimony at the end of the drama vindicates Claude’s murder as the only means to protect their amorous relationship from the atrocities of the exterior world – the antithesis of their beautiful love. At the apex of sexual excitement, it dawned upon Yves that he had to take action to preserve this rare moment of intimacy with Claude. To save Claude from having to face the outside world, from having to see “his life go to ratshit,” Yves killed him. In addition to this basic paradox – killing one’s lover to remain with him forever – other seemingly contradictory actions performed by Yves prior to the commencement of the play add to the intricacy of the plot. After having killed Claude, Yves isolated himself completely in his apartment for two days, ripping the phone off the wall because he “didn’t want anyone to get in touch with [him],” he tells the inspector, “Just wanted to disappear” (ibid., 414). Subsequently, Yves chose to surrender to the authorities rather than flee. He then arranged to obtain the keys of a judge’s office, to which he summoned the police to meet him and whence he refuses to move until the end of the play. Finally, he secured the assistance of a journalist who agreed to expose the judge’s involvement with the male prostitute if Yves is forced out of the office by the police (ibid., 404). These precursory actions, although paradoxical on the surface, all evince a similar wish for enclosure and retreat from the outside world. To protect Claude from the outside world, Yves killed him. And to protect himself from the outside world, he not only elected to surrender to the authorities, but also found shelter in the judge’s office, from which, thanks to the journalist, he would not be expelled. All these actions, which Yves admits having com-

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mitted, confirm the interpretation of the play provided by Maximilien Laroche in a brief but insightful study on Being at Home with Claude and Marcel Dubé’s Florence (1960), in which the critic explains Yves’s behaviour in terms of his wish to withdraw from the world: “There is no solution other than the illusory rejection of the external world and its replacement with an internal world” (Laroche, “De Dubé à Dubois,” 210, emphasis added).4 As a result, Yves is very much like Jim from Wedding in White, Terry from Me?, and a number of other characters encountered in this study: He seeks to build protective walls around himself in resistance against the outside world. Of course, there is always the possibility that Yves’s account of the actions that transpired before the play is sheer prevarication; if this were the case, the foregoing analysis would be groundless. However, the principal action that Yves performs during the play itself –that is, his adamant refusal to disclose certain details about himself and Claude – confirms Yves’s recourse to the illusory solution of a self-centred withdrawal into an internal world. Throughout the interrogation, Yves adopts a cryptic attitude, constantly evading the inspector’s queries and giving only perfunctory replies, which results in a seemingly endless reiteration of the same questions and answers – a circular structure punctuated by the inspector’s chronic directive: “Start over again” (Dubois, 394, 402, 416). Yves’s unwillingness to respond directly to the inspector echoes a common practice in modern plays of the type of Being at Home with Claude, in which characters use silence, or oblique phraseology, to manifest their withdrawal from the external environment. The following quote from Leslie Kane’s The Language of Silence (1984), which describes dramatic conditions akin to those deployed in Dubois’s text, indicates the connection between retreat from language and retreat from the world: “In plays of inaction, when nonprogression in language and nonprogression in time, combined with confined settings, underscore the sensation of entrapment, silent response and muteness reinforce the portrait of a man as not merely estranged from his world, but entrapped in the hell of the self. As a metaphor of solitary confinement, silence confirms man’s inability or unwillingness to relate to others and his concomitant torture by exclusion” (Kane, 24). The term “silence” is understood, here, as denoting “not only nonverbal symbolism, but also many forms of connotative, indirect dramatic expression such as innuendo,

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intimation, hesitation, reticence, and bivalent speech” (ibid., 15). Consequently, Yves’s laconic behaviour, his active short-circuiting of the communication mechanism between himself and the inspector, can certainly be read, in the light of Kane’s description, as a retreat from the wor(l)d. Furthermore, it is important to note that the information that Yves most contentiously refuses to release pertains to his and Claude’s names. From the opening exchange, Yves refuses to say his name (Dubois, 394), and shortly afterwards he also refuses to tell Claude’s name (ibid., 397). Without embarking on a psychoanalytical investigation of Yves’s pathological need to silence proper names, it is worth pointing out that such a reticence to speak certain words can stem, as Gregory L. Ulmer observes, from “the refusal to mourn a lost love object [,which] causes the object to be preserved like a mummy (mom) in a crypt” (Ulmer, 61). Using the Freudian case of the Wolf Man to examine the “metaphorology” of the Name of the Father as formulated by Jacques Derrida, Ulmer explains how proper names can become unspeakable when they are incorporated as literal equivalents for a love object whose disappearance is unacceptable. The “word-things” are then sealed in a “psychic vault” in a vain attempt to retain the love object (ibid., 62). As Ulmer puts it, “the symptomatic words, linked to memories of high libidinal value (the shared secret of a desire fulfilled), cannot be uttered, are locked away in a crypt” (ibid., 84, emphasis in original). Yves’s refusal to speak his and Claude’s names, the two words most directly associated with his libidinal memory of a desire fulfilled (the perfect fusion of two bodies into one, the undistinguishable symbiosis of primary narcissism),5 reproduces precisely the pathological wish to confine the love object in a crypt. Yves’s “cryptophoric” propensity corresponds to the impetus behind all of his actions, whether narrated or performed during the play, from the slaying of Claude to protect him from the outside world to his own retreat into the judge’s office and his reticence to disclose his purpose. Clearly, the first half of the prologue in Beaudin’s adaptation signifies Yves’s desire – namely, withdrawal from the external world towards a self-contained internal universe – as the camera literally evades public spaces and finds refuge at home with Claude. The second half of the prologue, from the very moment of the slaying onwards, throws Yves outside, into the world, hence seemingly

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contradicting his inward desires. But, rather than contradicting the points made above, the second half of the prologue actually points towards two other important facets of Being at Home with Claude: first, Claude’s own desire; and, second, the transformations effected upon the play through the very process of cinematographic transposition. One of the most notable semiotic additions introduced by Beaudin in his cinematic preamble to the original text, and further developed during the remainder of the film, is the use of black-and-white photography throughout the whole overture, with the sole exception of Claude’s red blood, seen splashing around the kitchen where the two are having sex. Conversely, the scenes in the judge’s office are all in colour except for Yves’s black-and-white flashbacks, which punctuate his narration of the story to the inspector. At first sight, the way in which black-and-white scenes alternate with colour sequences seems to suggest a rudimentary nexus between black-and-white imagery and the past, as is commonly witnessed in mainstream movies. This interpretation, however, is not consistent with Beaudin’s actual utilization of the chromatic signifier. If we postulate that the introductory segment is in black and white simply because it occurs before the present tense of the interrogation, then how can we account for the vivid red of Claude’s gushing blood? Moreover, there is one flashback, later in the film, that is not in black and white. As the inspector relates the facts – “Saturday night, 11: 30 p. m . , someone phoned the headquarters to say that there is a dead man at 85746 Casgrain” – we are presented with a colour re-enactment of the police officer’s description of the discovery of Claude’s dead body. Beaudin’s insertion of this colour flashback into the film contradicts any straightforward equation between black-and-white renditions and the narrative past tense. Within this colour flashback, however, there are a number of blackand-white pictures representing photographs of the corpse taken by the inspector’s assistant, Guy (Gaston Lepage). The incorporation of these snapshots in the flashback, rather than operating as a syntagmatic shift between present and past, actually culls paradigmatic moments arrested in time from the natural unfolding of action in colour, correlating black-and-white imagery with the notion of events being captured as in still photography. The hermeneutic cue afforded by this utilization of black-andwhite permits a retroactive interpretation of the prolegomenon not

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merely as Yves’s remembrance, but more precisely as what can be contained in, or captured by, his cryptophoric memory. This explains why the dichotomy between the chaotic exterior and the harmonious interior is enunciated in such explicit terms in the preface, for this section represents Yves’s own articulation of his relationship with Claude, in which he felt safely cloistered from the menacing external surroundings. The prefatory sequence is in fact a literal visualization of Yves’s final explication of the incident: “I was drowning with him, in him. And there was the rest of the world. The opposite of what was happening to us” (Dubois, 431). Only the blood flowing from Claude’s dying body is in colour because that vision is precisely what refuses to fit into Yves’s recollection of his own desire for withdrawal, symbolizing, as it does, Claude’s outward yearning. For, indeed, while Yves seeks to shut himself in permanently with Claude, certain hints about the latter’s personality revealed throughout the film and the play allow the audience to perceive that Claude did not entirely share Yves’s aspiration. Claude’s behaviour, described not only by the prostitute but also in Claude’s diary, suggests that he knew how to negotiate between outward demands and inward drives. Rather than resorting to Yves’s radical gesture of killing his love object to conserve their cloistered relationship, Claude had opted for the compromise solution of compartmentalization to come to terms with these conflicting pressures. This attitude is reflected in several aspects of Claude’s characterization, such as the fact that he kept both an intimate journal in which “the name Yves [appears] in every line almost” and a financial record in which mention is made of everyone who owes him money, except Yves (ibid., 405). This translates a distinct delineation between the domain of public transactions and the realm of private emotions. Moreover, for weeks, Claude maintained two relationships, one with a woman involved in the separatist movement, in which Claude was also involved, and the other with Yves, never alluding to one in front of the other (ibid., 403). To disconnect his sexual life from his political career, Claude also evicted his roommate so as to convert his apartment into an apolitical territory for his encounters with Yves. He did not stop attending his partisan assemblies, however (ibid., 428). Finally, on the night of his death, he turned down his separatist friends’ invitation to go manifest against Expo (the play is set in 1967),7 saying that he had something more

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important to do, but specified as well that he would contact them on the following day, thus asserting that this rejection was not categorical (ibid.). From what the audience can make out of Claude’s actions through Yves’s descriptions and the inspector’s references to the diary and other “facts” about the victim, it surfaces that he could function positively in both the interior and the exterior worlds. He could even tolerate Yves’s “public” life. Not only did he never castigate his lover for his nightly activities, but, when Yves would demand to be killed to avoid having to face Montreal’s demimonde, Claude would simply hug him and console him by telling him stories (ibid., 426). When the roles were suddenly reversed and Yves perceived a gleam of anxiety in Claude’s eyes, as they were making love, the prostitute could not reciprocate the comforting rhetoric that his lover had tendered to him. Not nearly as articulate as Claude, Yves’s only option was to terminate Claude’s life, as he sometimes wished his own existence would be terminated, to prevent further agony. Able to speak beautifully (unlike Yves), genuinely altruistic (he used to visit and bring food to an elderly neighbour [ibid., 404]), and involved in politics, Claude was as much of an “outward” figure as Yves is inwardly focused. Yves’s comments on the last few seconds of Claude’s life and his description of the young man’s dead body demonstrate the antithetical attitudes of the lovers. “He was smiling. Lying there with his arms spread wide open … he died of pleasure,” says Yves near the end of his confession (ibid., 432). This passage suggests that Claude died fulfilled – that Yves’s fatal gesture accomplished Claude’s ultimate desire. Always on the basis of Yves’s report, it is apparent that Claude’s desire, far from seeking inward recoil, was actually oriented towards a complete outward, efferent movement. As Yves states, Claude experienced pleasure in having his throat cut open and never tried to stop the gush of blood “spurting all over the place. On the windows. The fridge. The stove. The table” (ibid.). Moreover, the torrent of blood discharging from Claude’s ecstatic body was augmented by his ejaculation, as Yves claims: “I could feel his sex, like a tree, exploding” (ibid.). Thus Claude’s (altruistic) desire, fulfilled by both sexual intercourse and the slashing of his throat, entailed propelling himself outside of his own body and towards the other.

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It is not surprising that Claude is closely associated with the Christian imagery of death, his wide-open arms (“bras en croix” in French) serving as a metaphor for openness and selflessness. Interestingly, in a commentary on a screenplay of Being at Home with Claude that was written by Dubois himself but never filmed, Pierre Véronneau writes: “It is Claude’s character who is most astonishing. On the one hand, he is now the one who demands to be killed, he is the instigator of Yves’s action […] On the other hand, Dubois states that the body of Claude will never be seen in its entirety; different actors should incarnate various parts of his anatomy: one actor for the hand, another for the throat, another for the back, another for the torso, and yet another for the voice. This ‘virtual’ character is supposed to become a sort of god” (Véronneau, “Du scénique au filmique,” 75–6).8 Although Dubois’s screenplay is very different from Beaudin’s version, the idea that Claude demands to be killed and is thus transformed into a god whose body is fragmented and polymorphous parallels the aforementioned concept of an efferent, altruistic character who defies self-absorbed boundaries. Conversely, Yves’s inward impulse is manifested precisely in his gesture of absorbing inside his own body Claude’s discharging fluids: “I was drinking his blood. I had it all over me” (Dubois, 432). Yves’s narrative of this moment of unparalleled passion with his lover bears witness to the contradictory, yet complementary, impulses of the two men, one seeking to absorb the other’s erupting body. Yves’s homosexual Eucharist, his eating the body of Claude, testifies again to his reaction against the demonic outside. But the blood that is not absorbed by Yves challenges this inward, centripetal, theatrical drive and cannot be assimilated in his narrative. Significantly, in his last monologue, Yves never actually says that he slashed Claude’s throat, and, as Yves recounts these events late in the film, the shot of red gushing blood is not shown again, for this moment of pure outward eruption negates Yves’s afferent desire. Blood splashing all over the place is unequivocally outside the realm of the ritualistic mass that Yves is performing before the inspector. Here, Marshall is right in arguing that “Being at Home with Claude is yet another example of a Québécois cultural artefact seeking to break with Catholicism and yet retaining its logic” (Marshall, 126). For the mass to be significant, the Messiah and his death must be absent and made present only through sym-

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bols. In the play these symbols are exclusively verbal, for, as I have argued above, the reality of death is foreign to the stage (either secular or religious). Only the exclusively cinematic prologue, which precedes the play proper, could present this discharging image of the “real” body dying. Beaudin’s depiction of excessive blood during the killing, as well as the very presence of Claude’s corpse, evades Yves’s narration by allowing cinema to undermine the centripetal, ritualistic (I have already noted the repetitive nature of the text), theatrical roots of the play script. As pointed out in the introduction, Egil Törnqvist has associated the self-contained world of the stage with its religious nature: “Thematically, this means that, whereas stage drama traditionally emphasises the conflict between (i) man and man, or (ii) man and God, screen drama will emphasize the conflict between (iii) man and his environment, since the environment is precisely what the film camera can superbly and almost limitlessly describe” (Törnqvist, 19). While the stage version of Being at Home with Claude is precisely a dialogue between men about a Messiah (Yves sees Claude has having given him life [Dubois, 430]), the film version transforms the symbolic “body of Claude” into an “actual” body (a corpse) that is, for Blanchot, an image. The image through which Claude’s death is witnessed in all its eruptive abjection embodies film’s overlap with theatre, as Pichette’s theatrical performance as a dead man serves precisely to bring to the fore the cinematic (according to Metz) quality of the character in the drama who is absent from the scene but made present through verbal signifiers, even in the very title of the work. One is reminded of Julia Kristeva’s comment that “the corpse – outside of God and science – is the epitome of abjection. Death infesting life. Abject” (Kristeva, 11–12).9 The film “deconsecrates” Claude’s death by showing it. This “deconsecration” is common to all cinema according to Steven Shaviro. “The cinematic image,” writes Shaviro in The Cinematic Body (1993), “in its violent morethan-presence, is at the same time immediately an absence: a distance too great to allow for any sort of possession. In its disruptive play of immediacy and distance, film is not just an art without an aura; it is an art that enacts, again and again, what [Georges] Bataille calls the sacrifice of the sacred (auratic) object, or what Benjamin calls the disintegration of the aura in the experience of

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shock” (Shaviro, 46). Film brings the object outside of God, outside of the theatre. Film, therefore, is an incarnation of abjection, is the dead body. The dead body of Claude is cinema presented through a theatrical performance. That Beaudin added to the original text a purely cinematic segment emphasizing the element of free-flowing eruption that Dubois’s closed drama implies but never actually represents on stage bears witness to the filmmaker’s understanding of a key distinction between theatre and film: namely, the latter’s ability, because of its imaginary constitution, to magnify the texture, pressure, and “redness” of human blood. One could rightfully argue that the tragic, even religious, power of Dubois’s work lies precisely in its purely linguistic narration of the actions performed prior to the drama. Death may be the main subject of the play, but it is never an object on stage, for death denies live theatre (i.e., the moment someone actually dies on stage, theatre ceases to be and becomes either reality or religious sacrifice). It is not a coincidence, as Hélène Laliberté notes in her analysis of space and territoriality in Dubois’s drama, that the penultimate word that Yves pronounces in his final monologue is “pourrir” – rotting. It is this fear of the body rotting away, disintegrating in the surrounding environment, that led Yves to kill his boyfriend (Laliberté, 128–9). Fear of the disintegrating body is literally the source of the stage play. By absorbing Claude’s blood and semen, Yves sought to prevent the exosmosis of the rotting body. Like the theatre actor who must be absorbed in the regulation of his body to incarnate the abject cadaver, Yves’s performance of Claude’s death is characterized by absorbing into his centre the flow of fluids emanating from his lover. And his inability to absorb all of the slain lover’s efferent blood transforms theatre into film. Beaudin’s choice to introduce his subject through a syndoche that not only encapsulates the antecedents of the play but also analogizes the transpositional process, far from diminishing the impact of the original, embodies the dramatic text in a way that affords a viewing experience which is ultimately closer to that of the central character than what drama could provide. For, following the film’s graphic prologue, the spectator remains, like Yves, haunted until the end by the abject, uncontainable vision of Claude’s dying body.

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the corpse lies in lilies The theme of Michel Marc Bouchard’s Les feluettes is very close to that of Being at Home with Claude: namely, that one can choose to kill one’s beloved when the outside world proves too dreadful to bear. But the representation of the one death fully shown in Lilies, John Greyson’s adaptation of Les feluettes, is significantly less gory than in Beaudin’s film. In fact, it is a bloodless death, as Vallier (Danny Gilmore), a displaced French aristocrat who now lives in poverty in Roberval, assists his mother, the Comtesse (Brent Carver), in her suicide by strangling her. Vallier’s own death in a fire is not represented fully in the film, as he may or may not be dead when we last see him lying amongst the flames. I will return to this point later. The presence of the Comtesse’s corpse plays a role similar to Claude’s body, for it brings to the fore the juxtaposition of theatre and film. But, while Claude’s body embodies the cinematic process, the Comtesse’s body draws our attention to the function of theatrical artifice in the naturalist filmic environment. Resting on a bed of moss and dirt in a dark forest, the body of the Comtesse is doubly theatrical. Not only is it just an actor, Brent Carver, playing dead, but it is also a male actor playing a male actor playing a dead woman, for every role in the film, male or female, is played by a man, as is also the case in the original drama. The most often discussed aspect of Les feluettes is its metatheatricality – its emphasis on actors playing actors playing actors playing roles. While Shawn Huffman rightly argues that such metatheatrical strategies have become increasingly commonplace in Quebec drama since the 1980s, often as a means to actualize the sexual identity of the actors acting (Huffman, “Les nouvelles écritures théâtrales,” 83, 85–6), it is still rare to be presented with as many levels of imbricated dramas as what is found in Les feluettes. In their study of the mise-en-abyme structure of the play, Piet Defraeye and Marylea MacDonald identify no less than six co-centric universes that overlap during the performance of the play, ranging from Les feluettes itself, set in 1952, to Gabriel D’Annunzio’s Le martyre de Saint Sébastien (1911), a drama performed by college boys in 1912 (Defraeye and MacDonald, 131). A great part of the action of the play and the film is set in Roberval in 1912, where the a tragic love affair between two teenage boys, Simon and Vallier,

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unfolds. The “present tense” of the story occurs forty years later, when Simon seeks revenge on the man responsible for Vallier’s death, Bilodeau. The actual setting of the play is simply “Spring of 1952, a proscenium stage,” upon which old Simon, recently out of prison, presents scenes from his adolescence acted by male exconvicts to a bewildered Bilodeau, now a respected clergyman. In the film, the setting is the prison where Simon (Aubert Pallascio) is wrongly incarcerated for Vallier’s murder and where he organized a stage rendition of their troubled relationship performed by inmates to incriminate their sole spectator, Bishop Bilodeau (Marcel Sabourin). While the play strictly respects the classical unities as old Simon and Bilodeau watch the performance – the analeptic play-within-aplay shows the past but never escapes the present – the film does leave the prison setting and brings the spectator into the world represented through mise-en-abyme: namely, Roberval in 1912. Although the setting of the 1912 reconstruction becomes realistic in the film rather than remaining theatrical, Greyson continues to use the male-only cast of the play throughout the flashbacks, thus creating a peculiar tension between, on the one hand, the theatricality of the male actors and, on the other hand, the naturalness of the filmic setting. The death of the Comtesse is perhaps the most intriguing instance of this tension. At the same time as the natural setting and the realistic acting style of the performers create a typically cinematic experience of emotional identification with the characters, the melodrama of a boy having to strangle his mother because she has lost the will to live remains highly theatrical through the device of cross-dressing and through ritualistic actions such as closing the Comtesse’s eyes and covering her body with earth. Even the last words of the Comtesse are theatrical, as she tries to encourage her son to proceed with the strangulation by telling him “play the part, play the part.” To which Vallier responds, “I’ll play the part like you,” before killing her. This overlap of cinematic realism and stage artificiality could be read as a betrayal of the powerful theatrical experience elicited by the evocative mise-en-abyme, which is undermined by the cinematic process of “opening up” the scene. Furthermore, it could be argued that the dual mode of address of the scene also betrays the cinematic illusion of death through the artificiality of the theatrical codes. As a matter of fact, Greyson’s English-language version

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might seem to betray the original at another level as well: that is, through linguistic co-option, as French Canadian characters are made to express themselves in English. But a closer look at the film demonstrates that all these betrayals actually accentuate one of the main themes of the original: namely, lying. Everybody lies in Lilies. Most generally, there is the lie of acting itself, an argument developed by Elizabethan critics, such as Stephen Gosson, who chastised actors for pretending to be what they are not (Carlson, 80–1). Such a criticism could be aimed at the adult male actors in Les feluettes, who pretend to be women and choir boys; at least one reviewer has commented on the “Elizabethan quality” of Lilies (Groen, C2). But there are also the much more specific lies of the characters of the play-within-the-play: Young Simon claims to be in love with the French tourist Mademoiselle Lydie-Anne de Rozier to hide his homosexuality, the same way as young Bilodeau hides behind religious adoration to repress his desires for Simon; and, most tragically, the Comtesse, having lost everything after being abandoned by her husband, fabricates stories that allow her to maintain some degree of dignity. Dominique Lafon, in a detailed analysis of Bouchard’s dramaturgy, argues that one of the most common devices in his oeuvre is the appearance of a woman who reveals the truth to the protagonists, who lie to themselves and to others. “Most often, it is a woman who holds the truth that the male heroes are trying to hide,” says Lafon. “It is the daughter of the Master Daniel in La Poupée de Pélopia [1986] who comes back after several years to denounce her incestuous father, and it is Lydie-Anne de Rozier [in Les feluettes] who literally comes down from the sky to compel the two heroes to confess their love” (Lafon, 65).10 But what is the truth that Lydie-Anne reveals to the characters? “Should I have told you the truth?” she asks the Comtesse rhetorically, “That all men are liars … and I too was lying … to myself […] Now I shall know that love is the worst of all lies one can tell oneself” (Bouchard, 62, 61). Lydie-Anne’s truth therefore is, first, that all men are liars and, second, that even the one thing that seems to ring true to the Comtesse, Simon, and Vallier, “love,” is demonized as the worst lie of all. This revelation of the truth that everything is a lie is instrumental in the Comtesse’s ultimate demise, for she cannot face the fact that her life is a fiction and that her confidence in her husband’s imminent return is sheer self-delusion. Yet, at the very end, she acknowledges

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that even her death is part of her staging of her life: “Play the part.” Even her corpse lies about her life, for, in the theatrical performance of her death, there is nothing left of the Comtesse, not even a female body. Les feluettes is thus very much about lies. In her study of the drama, Sara Graefe argues that Bouchard specifically uses artifice for the purpose of revealing the truth. For instance, by “lying” about the gender of some characters, alleged heterosexual relationships are revealed to be truly homosexual in nature. “Heterosexual relationships depicted on stage,” explains Graefe, “are loaded with homosexual undertones. Simon’s relationship with Lydie-Anne represents an effort on his part to suppress his homosexual nature and is deemed socially acceptable. However, because Lydie-Anne is played by a man in drag, when she and Simon kiss in their explicit manner, the audience actually witness an exchange of passion between men” (Graefe, 174). Given that Bouchard manages to tell us more about Simon’s nature through double lies than through the straightforward statements the character makes, it is not surprising that Greyson would also choose to lie to his audience about Les feluettes. He chose to be unfaithful to the letter of the play – according to Bouchard “only 25% of the original … dialogue is retained” (Rice-Baker, 43) – in order to be faithful to its spirit. Thus the typical approach to adaptation, labelled “fidelity criticism” by Christopher Orr, Brian McFarlane, and others, must be replaced here by a consideration of the “infidelity” in which, ironically enough, lies the production of a faithful transposition. The first lie that Greyson tells is, of course, the lie about the language spoken by the characters: French Canadians living in Roberval in 1912 or sharing prison cells in 1952 do not speak English to one another. Greyson also lies in terms of the degree of oppression that young Simon (Jason Cadieux) and Vallier must endure because of their homosexuality. He does include scenes of intolerance, such as when Simon’s father, Timothée (Gary Farmer), beats him after having learned that he kissed young Bilodeau (Matthew Fergusson), which incites Simon to deny his homosexuality and fain affection for Lydie-Anne (Alexander Chapman). Also, by setting the film in a prison rather than on the more abstract “proscenium stage” called for by the play, to which I will return presently, Greyson does suggest the degree of entrapment that afflicts homosexuals in conservative societies. However, characters in the film are allowed to enjoy

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moments of freedom away from the judgmental gaze of the people, as in the shots where Simon lies voluptuously naked on a rock by the river while Vallier writes a love letter in an attic. On stage, on the other hand, characters are always being observed by Bishop Bilodeau, who self-righteously judges the performance that he is watching. Even more than the Bishop’s regular bursts of outrage, which are reproduced in the film, it is his actual presence throughout the performance that reminds the theatre audience of his role in the tragedy of 1912 as the devious boy who hides his own homosexuality behind homophobic religiosity. As Lafon points out, the continual juxtaposition of the robed bishop and the cross-dressed actors makes a clear statement on the ecclesiastical habit as a paradoxical sign of homophobia and homosexuality (Lafon, 82). By allowing the characters and the audience to escape the prison, Greyson clearly betrayes Bouchard’s original use of the mise-en-abyme stage as an inescapable scene of oppression and shameful exposure. By allowing his characters a degree of filmic freedom, Greyson denies the atmosphere of theatrical entrapment that Bouchard tries to produce with the stage on the stage. Lafon contends that through the spatial and temporal unity of the original performance, “the closed set becomes a sort of ‘No Exit,’ which, as we know, is the contemporary form of the tragic impass” (ibid., 73).11 It is not by coincidence that Bouchard indicates from the start that the setting of the play is a “proscenium stage,” for this image of the proscenium as the frame that contains actors has been associated by some drama critics with the Sartrian prison of compromised modern existence – think of Huis clos (1944). In her book, The Gothic Impulse in Contemporary Drama (1990), Mary Beth Inverso explains how several recent plays, which she lables “NeoGothic,” focus on the metaphor of the proscenium stage as a dungeon in which the characters are trapped. Modern plays, argues Inverso, “like the classic Gothic texts themselves, can be said to have lost the sense of the outdoor realm, [their] worlds seem most akin to the airless, exitless, interior demesne of Gothic fiction [… Characters] occupy a theatricalized Gothic cage […] The NeoGothic drama shares the Gothic narrative’s predilection for enclosed, architectural environments. This preference may be explained by reference to Laurence Kitchin’s notion of ‘compression,’ which he defines as ‘a marriage between modern man’s prison complex and the proscenium stage’s aptitude for boxing actors in.’ Thus the

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proscenium stage itself may be regarded as yet another potential Gothic container” (Inverso, 120, 122, 125). What is most interesting about Inverso’s argument is the suggestion that mise-en-abyme in many modern plays is actually used as a means to evoke imprisonment and even torture. She uses the term “scaffold play” to designate dramas that stress the oppressive nature of the stage itself. “In such ‘scaffold’ plays,” she explains, “the Elizabethan synonym for the performance platform is resurrected and reinvested with its sinister original meaning. In [these plays] the stage becomes a literal scaffold, an execution platform while still retaining its function as performance area. In the scaffold play, the stage […] seeks nothing less than complete annihilation” (ibid., 129). The stage within a stage for Inverso is thus a strategy used to suggest that “death seems to emanate from the stage itself” because the stage is the only place where we can see people dying live in front of us. “Of all the performing arts,” says Herbert Blau, “the theatre stinks most of mortality […] it is the actor’s mortality which is the acted subject, for he is right there dying in front of our eyes” (Blau, 132, 134, emphasis added). Unlike cinema, which can capture the instant of actual death, the stage is the scaffold where it is not the result of death that is ceased, but its endless process. As stated before, death is a subject on the stage, never an object. Clearly, in Les feluettes, the stage does turn into a scaffold that foregrounds the annihilation of characters, or at least one, the Comtesse, who is killed before the spectator’s eyes. But always the scaffold remains a performance area, for in both the play and the film the process of death is enacted, but death itself, as an eschatology, always remains explicitly deceptive, a pretense, a lie. Brent Carver, perhaps unwittingly, recognized the paradoxical quality of this moment in the film when he said in an interview that “the countess’s death scene [is] a very vital scene” (Adilman, “Lilies role,” D6, emphasis added). On the one hand, the oxymoron of “vital death” can make sense, given the strong Christian imagery present in both versions. This notion could lead to an interpretation of mortality in religious terms as a deception that seemingly marks the end of one’s life but in fact represents its true beginning. However, the lie of mortality as inescapable conclusion finds a more compelling signification in terms of the ending of the play and the film, in which the execution of the murderer, Bilodeau, is suspended.

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Death on stage is always performed by a “cadavre vivant,” as Malachy contends, a body that is no longer lively nor actually dead. This state of in-betweenness, in which life and death are superimposed in a process that shuns its putatively inevitable result, is precisely the aspect of the theatrical corpse that pervades Simon’s conception of an appropriate death for Bilodeau at the end of the film and the play. At the conclusion of the play, when Bilodeau comes to admit that he saved Simon from the fire but left Vallier to die, and recognizes that his repressed homosexual feelings towards Simon have held him prisoner all his life, the closing lines read: b i s h o p b i l o d e a u : Kill me. Kill me. I loved you so much I wanted to destroy your soul. s i m o n i n 1 9 5 2 [dropping the Knife]: I hate you so much … I’m gonna let you live. All the actors exit except for Bishop Bilodeau who is left alone on stage. (Bouchard, 69)

Like all actors boxed in by the proscenium at the end of a tragedy, Bilodeau stands on stage in a condition that is neither death nor life. Exactly as the death of the Comtesse or the near death of Vallier on stage are tragic precisely because they do not represent “the end” but rather a continuous process that will never cease to haunt Simon – we are told early in the play that the actors have been rehearsing for three years (ibid., 12), and the subtitle of Bouchard’s drama itself is “La répétition d’un drame romantique” (emphasis added) – Bilodeau’s death in the “reality” of the narrative must be perpetually deferred. If Simon had decided to kill Bilodeau, the corpse that would have been lying there, at curtain fall, would have been lying about the finality of Simon’s state of mourning. The play-within-a-play exhibiting the death of characters thus serves to draw the spectator’s attention to the notion of death as a living process at two levels: first, through the presence of the actor merely playing dead; and, second, through the suggestion that the deaths in question are constantly replayed, repeated, rehearsed in the mind of the stage director, who cannot forget those who have passed on.12 Greyson acknowledges Bilodeau’s state of theatrical living death and entrapment at the very end of the film by showing him alone in the prison chapel after Simon has sworn never to kill him. He also retains the feeling of imprisonment in limbo with regards to the

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Comtesse, as he always associates her dilapidated house with the prison of the film’s present tense, a place where one is not allowed to die, as a convict says. As well, the filmmaker increases the sense of Simon’s continuous mourning and longing for the idyllic Roberval of 1912 through his “unfaithful” emphasis on the wide-open skies, immense lake, majestic forests, and glorious nondiegetic chants that fill the film but are absent from the play. Greyson seems fully aware that the changes he made serve to italicize the connection between Simon’s staging of his memories and the film itself. In a scene where Bishop Bilodeau tries to stop the performance and accuses Simon of telling lies about the past, he says sarcastically to the convicts: “Whenever [Simon] and Vallier met there were dirigibles and sunsets. And the sweet sound of the boys choir filled the air.” To which the actor playing the Comtesse replies: “Simon may have stretched the truth a bit about his love story, but it’s so beautiful.” Here, as suggested in Martin Bilodeau’s review of the film in Le Devoir, Greyson implicitly admits that like Simon he embellishes the story to appeal to his public.13 For the adornments that Bilodeau criticizes in Simon’s production are exactly those that Greyson added to Bouchard’s minimalist play. Not surprisingly, just as Simon is berated by Bilodeau for beautifying the past, Greyson was accused by critic Marco de Blois (48) of having turned a harsh comment on homophobia into a pretty film that mainstream audiences can enjoy. De Blois is right in noting that the film is overly seductive. But, again, this deceitful re-presentation of the original comes across as a clever strategy on Greyson’s part to parallel Simon’s celebration of his dead lover’s beauty, dressing up the film the same way as corpses are embalmed with all the appealing artifices that render their death less abhorrent. Furthermore, the film also mirrors the issue of Bilodeau’s deceitful selfrepresentation as a righteous clergyman. Not unlike Greyson’s film itself, which could be seen as a sellout from an otherwise radical queer filmmaker,14 Bilodeau self-consciously dons beautiful apparel for the purpose of achieving success in mainstream society. There remains one betrayal on Greyson’s part that seems difficult to justify through this logic: namely, the crucial change he effected in the final moments of the film. In the original, the fire in which Vallier dies is actually set by Simon on purpose. Realizing that he and Vallier will not be allowed to live together in conservative Roberval, Simon, not unlike Yves in Being at Home with Claude, decides to commit suicide with Vallier, using fire as a symbol of their

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passion. Bilodeau’s involvement in the ending is limited to his rescuing Simon but letting his rival Vallier die in the blaze. Bouchard and Greyson change this ending significantly in the film. Rather than having a suicide, the film places the whole blame on the villain Bilodeau, who starts the fire that kills Vallier by throwing a lamp on the floor. This alteration diminishes the parallelism between, on the one hand, Simon and Vallier’s story and, on the other hand, the play in which they performed at school, D’Annunzio’s Le martyre de Saint Sébastien. This play, which combines a strong dose of homoeroticism and Christian sadomasochism, shows Sébastien, former officer of Emperor Diocletian’s army, rejecting Roman paganism in favour of Christianity and urging his loving archers to undress him and riddle his naked body with arrows so that through his suffering he may leave this oppressive world and reach eternal love in heaven.15 By transforming the metaphor of Saint Sébastien’s eagerness to die in the name of true love into a mere case of manslaughter, Greyson betrays the intricate intertextual web woven by Bouchard. Futhermore, the issue of willing death that links the two boys to the Comtesse in the play is also obscured by this change. According to Bouchard, the change was made at Greyson’s request to avoid the rather pessimistic conclusion that suicide is the only option for young gay lovers.16 If this were the only purpose of the change, then one could lay charges of political correctness against the scriptwriter and filmmaker. The film’s ending does have other effects, however, that reassert the reading proposed hitherto. Among other things, the ending of the film magnifies Bilodeau’s betrayal. Critics such as Patricia Belzil (176) praised Greyson for improving the ending precisely by stressing the villainy of Bilodeau and avoiding the disturbingly awkward love-suicide of the drama. More importantly, the film’s ending differs from the original in terms of its visualization of the final moments of Vallier’s life. On stage, the lovers are last seen collapsing in each other’s arms (Bouchard, 67) before the play closes on the bishop’s explanation of what happened after Simon fainted: He returned to save Vallier but decided to let him burn to death so as to assume the role of a vengeful God. “I went back to get Lily-White but just as I got close to him … I could hear your ‘never, never’ echoing louder and louder. Never, Bilodeau! Never! Never! I turned on my heels and left him there. I closed the door behind me. It was Sodom and Gomorrah that was burning, and I was God, punishing you both by saving you

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and letting him die” (ibid., 68–9). The final reference to Vallier in the play is a symbol, an abstraction, like Claude in Dubois’s play. This dramatic technique elevates the dead boy to the status of quasi-saint and elides the question of Vallier’s physical condition at the time. In the film, on the other hand, we are left with the ambiguous image of a body surrounded by flames. The flashbacks continue as the bishop reveals that he threw the lamp on the floor, saved Simon, and left Vallier to die. The very last flashback is a shot of Vallier’s body in the blaze, as the bishop says: “I told [the police] that it was too late for Vallier.” To Simon’s question, “was it really too late?” he simply shakes his head in tears. The juxtaposition of the bishop’s lie to the police and the body of “LilyWhite” lying on the floor conflates various lies that bear witness to the relationship between the stage original and the film adaptation. The bishop’s revelation of his act of betrayal in the film includes two lies: his lie to the police; and, more significantly, the lie that he tells Simon when he shakes his head confirming that it was not too late for Vallier. The bishop can be said to be lying in that final instance because he simply could not know if it was indeed too late for Vallier. He is an “unreliable homodiegetic narrator,” to use narratological jargon (Stam, Burgoyne, and Flitterman-Lewis, 96–9). Being absent from the scene of the fire at the moment when he states that it was not too late for Vallier – the preceding flashback shows him crying on the unconscious body of Simon while being held by the police – the bishop makes a claim that he cannot support. Furthermore, the medium shot on Vallier’s torso and head lying on the floor remains ambiguous as to his status as living body or dead corpse, for there are no obvious signs of life, although almost imperceptible pulse and breathing can be detected. The filmmaker could have indicated unambiguously that Vallier was still alive by having Danny Gilmore breathing with difficulty or even coughing. But, as it is, Gilmore’s performance remains ultimately unreadable, for he is alive whether or not Vallier is dead. As a result, the scene manifests the tension between afferent drama and efferent cinema. While efferent cinema escapes the confines of the stage and shows a close shot of the body surrounded by flames, thus potentially augmenting the semiotic field of the original, the afferent theatrical performance of the actor undermines this excess of information by forcing the audience to focus on a live player holding his breath and regulating the natural motility of the live body.

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The insertion of this theatrical “corpse,” necessarily lying between life and death, suggests another level of betrayal: namely, the final betrayal of the bishop, who, by lying about Vallier’s condition, takes full responsibility for a death that he may not have been able to avoid. The potential for this final betrayal is supported by Bilodeau’s ultimate request to be killed by Simon, as well as by the prison Chaplin’s (Ian D. Clark) contextualization of the bishop’s final admission as a confession that God has granted. The religious design that invests the final moments of the film suggests that old Bilodeau might have lied to Simon in his “confession” for the sake of finally achieving the role of martyr that was denied to him, both in the school performance of Saint Sébastien and in the tragic events that led to Vallier’s beatification in Simon’s mind. The bishop’s use of a line from Saint Sébastien to beg Simon to kill him at the end of the play – “Oh, my archers, let my destinity be fulfilled. Let me die at the hands of men” (Bouchard, 69) – bears witness to Bilodeau’s desire for martyrdom. But, while the play leaves little doubt as to the bishop’s genuine catharsis and admission of his guilt in the end, the mea culpa of the filmic bishop is rendered highly dubious through the diverse levels of betrayals generated by the adaptation process, especially the ambiguous lies told by the theatrical corpse lying in Lilies. The condition of “cadavre vivant” that afflicts Bilodeau at the conclusion of Les feluettes is also found in three texts of the past decade that attest to the growing significance of film adaptations of drama in Canadian cinema: Love and Human Remains, Le polygraphe, and Possible Worlds. In each of these three works, the living cadaver appears throughout the narrative as a character who walks in a state of constant liminality, occupying a space between life and death. Furthermore, in these works, cinema itself can be read as embodying drama’s corpse.

the cinematic corpse of theatre in l ov e a n d h u m an r em a i n s, le po ly gra ph e , and possible worlds With his recent film version of John Mighton’s 1990 play Possible Worlds, Robert Lepage has become the first filmmaker in Canada to “specialize” in feature film adaptations of drama. With three such works under his belt (including Le polygraphe and Nô),17

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Lepage has become something of a Canadian Bergman, moving effortlessly between cinema and the stage. Although he has yet to achieve with film the degree of international acclaim he has enjoyed with his theatrical productions, there is no doubt that Lepage has given film-mediated drama its lettres de noblesse. That such a respected theatre artist would spend such energy on filming dramatic pieces bears witness to the validity of this practice. But, for our immediate purpose, Possible Words serves as a useful way to broaden the notion of the living cadaver, for, in both versions, the corpse appears as the starting point of life rather than as its closure. If for Hélène Cixous a woman must die for a play to begin (Cixous, 19), for John Mighton it seems that a man must be murdered for Possible Worlds to unfold. The play begins with this stage direction: “The lights rise. Downstage: a body covered by a blood stained sheet” (Mighton, 11). While one narrative line revolves around the police investigation of George Barber’s violent death and the removal of his brain from his skull by the murderer, the other parallel stories focus on George’s multiple lives. The body that we see dead at the very beginning of the drama comes back to life in scene 2 and moves on to the many possible worlds that are available to George through a process sometimes labelled, in structuralist jargon, “transmondanéisation” (Lucie Roy, 100). As one reviewer wrote, “Though the police are busy trying to solve the mystery behind George’s death, George does not assume the usual behaviour of a corpse. He still has a life to lead. In fact, it becomes clear as Possible Worlds unfolds that he has many lives in many different worlds” (Anderson, 23). Like the actor on stage or on screen who stands up after having been killed and moves on to other things, George might happen to be dead in one narrative but can be very much alive in many others. Nevertheless, by the end of the play we are led to believe that all these “possible worlds” are actually not the various parallel lives that schizophrenia or quantum physics might make possible, but rather the dreams of George’s disembodied brain, connected to electrodes, floating in a jar in the lab of a “mad” scientist who is conducting neurological experiments to understand cognitive processes. The increasingly significant watery sounds, which echo the fluid in the jar (Mighton, 56, 65, 70, 74), George’s sense that he is dreaming in a case (ibid., 69), and parallel worlds overlapping as though by mistake (ibid., 40, 53) accumulate to give the impression

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that these possible worlds are perhaps not those of the actor moving from role to role, from life to death to life, but those of the spectators, immobile in their theatre seats as though in a jar, imagining stories in their minds in response to the stimulation of electrical impulses. One character in the play proposes a combination of these potential interpretations of the drama by saying: “Just as our bodies move about in physical space, so our minds move about in mental space” (ibid., 44). George moves around physically in all these spaces at the same time, as he is only imagining these various narratives. These two movements in the play – that is, the multiplicity of one’s own various physical performances of one’s life, including the performance of one’s death, and the multiplicity of imaginary tales that the spectators can create mentally – are among the themes that Lepage often explores in his own work. In many of his theatrical productions, Lepage focuses both on the physicality of the actor switching personae or props assuming different meanings and on the links established between these personae and props by an individual observer who gives free rein to her/ his imagination. In his first one-man show, Vinci (1986), Lepage constantly shifted and changed his persona by using simple theatrical techniques and objects (shadows, wig, shaving cream, cane and dark glasses) to evoke the various life-altering encounters experienced by a Québécois photographer travelling through Europe in memory of a dead friend whom he envisions in his dreams (Bovet, 5–13). In the 1991 Aiguilles et opium, Lepage personified another Québécois in Europe whose life merges with those of Miles Davis and Jean Cocteau through drug-induced hallucinations (Bunzli, 79– 80). Similarly, in his 1995 show, Elsinor, based on Hamlet, he played all the main parts of Shakespeare’s tragedy to emphasize, through the mesmerizing transitions for which he is well known, the relations that Hamlet’s maddening circumstances establish between all of the personae (Charest, 167–71). This overlapping of personae draws our attention at once to the performance of several roles by one actor and to the perception of these multiple narratives by an imaginative observer. This effect, of course, is very close to the purport of Possible Worlds not only in the depiction of George’s many lives, but also in the depiction of Williams, the young police officer who tries to open his mind by listening to “visualization” tapes that offer entries into other worlds. Furthermore, these expressions and impressions of multiple existences parallel the way

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Lepage sees his own artistic life as a flux of intersections with other lives, of convergences and coincidences that brought the historical figures of Frank Lloyd Wright and Georgei Gurdjieff together in La géométrie des miracles (1998) through a chance meeting Lepage had with Peter Brook (Hood, 130). Or the “crazy connections” that lead him to believe, among other things, that he is rock star Peter Gabriel’s alter ego (Charest, 93). What is perhaps most important to note in terms of the coincidental relations between Lepage and Possible Worlds is his understanding of death as a medium towards life: “Over time, I’ve learned that the recurring appearance of death and suicide in my plays has … led us towards life” (ibid., 87). It is death that allows the emergence of life. “There is in death,” he argues, “a deep sensuality, a profound fulfilment of carnal reality” (ibid., 86). The presence of the corpse at the beginning of Possible Worlds renders possible the various existences that George (Tom McCamus) experiences. The cadaver in Possible Worlds is the equivalent of the concrete “resource” that is the cornerstone of Lepage’s approach to theatrical creation as he developed it during his formative years at Jacques Lessard’s Théâtre Repère.18 From paintings and pianos to books and shoes, objects rather than themes are the starting point of the creative process at Théâtre Repère, and in this film the corpse similarly serves as a springboard for the narrative. The starting point is the body of George, both chronologically and visually. In one world, the police officers (Sean McCann and Rick Miller) and the scientist (Gabriel Gascon) both examine parts of George’s body for clues into either the solution of the crime or the mechanisms of the human mind. In quite realistic terms, the cadaver speaks of the lives of the dead. In the other, more surrealistic worlds, the “deep sensuality” of death emanates from George’s body towards Joyce (Tilda Swinton), the woman with whom he develops numerous relationships in various situations. Here the paradox of death as sensual carnality is rendered tangible through the juxtaposition of an emotion-based discourse and utterly emotionless performances on the part of McCamus and Swinton. Lepage seems to play on the notion that George is alive while dead by having McCamus perform in a lifeless mode, or in a “monocord” tone, as La Presse’s Marc-André Lussier puts it (Lussier, C2). While Geoff Pevere is being facetious when he writes in his negative review of the film, “when [George and Joyce] lock gazes they’re like two fish

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staring at each other from separate aquariums,” he does imply the intriguing point that neither can express emotions physically because they are equally severed from their living bodies. Indeed, it could be argued that these characters are merely corpses in love since, in one possible world, George recognizes Joyce as his wife who drowned three years earlier (Mighton, 41, 65) and, in a later scene, Joyce asks George if he as been to heaven too (ibid., 75). Joyce and George are possibly both brains floating in jars in the scientist’s laboratory. In addition to the narrative purpose of the corpse as catalyst for the stories, the cadaver is also the resource that inspires the form of the film itself. Again, Pevere’s facetiousness when he writes “you’ll wonder if the script itself hasn’t had its brains stolen” ironically suggests that it is the film that is the corpse that bespeaks of various lives. Lepage takes Mighton’s script and, while remaining faithful to the dialogue, superimposes upon the minimalist set requirements of the original a vision that transforms every scene into a clinical examination of the body of George to understand his lives. MarcAndré Lussier remarks, “The morbid universe of research labs is omnipresent in Possible Worlds” (Lussier, C2)19 The whole film, with its bluish hues and its clinical, distant, static, impersonal camera work, can be seen as adopting an autopsic mode of observation, as perusing the bodies of the actors to understand the cause of their devolution. But, even beyond this function as postmortem examination, the film can be seen as embodying death itself. “Cinema,” says Lepage, “is always the ghost of your ideas” (Tousignant, 18). Given film’s relative permanence in contrast to the ever-changing character of live performance, it could be argued that with the production of Lepage’s film, Mighton’s play is now dead in a can. The notion that cinema can be the death of drama is certainly not new. Marcel Pagnol considered this question years ago (Bazin, 103). Lepage’s exploration of this issue in Possible World goes beyond the idea that film kills theatre because the former’s greater technical possibilities makes the latter irrelevant. Rather, film comes to be seen as a corpse, frozen in time, that can be observed to understand the life the play once had. Working with someone else’s original, Lepage felt that the text was almost immutable, and he rigorously followed Mighton’s screenplay, cutting only a few lines (Tousignant, 16–17). Unlike the work-in-progress method that is the trademark of his theatrical work (Charest, 125),

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Possible Worlds came to him complete, arrested in its evolution: dead. Lepage merely allowed himself to let the script talk through the bodies of the actors. Some of his own theatrical performances do eventually reach that stage, after three or four years, when they have evolved as much as they can. It is at that point that Lepage thinks of these plays in terms of films (Tousignant, 17). In other words, when a stage show has reached the limits of what it can present live, it should be filmed. Four years before Possible Worlds, Lepage did something along these lines with Le polygraphe, based on the play he wrote with Marie Brassard several years earlier. Again death and corpses are central to the drama both on stage and on screen, and the multiplicity of possible lives is also among the work’s main themes. As Henry Garrity suggests in his analysis of the film version of Polygraphe and Lepage’s first feature, Le confessional (1995), “Polygraphe represents a mystery of confused texts, multiple and confused interpretations of lives and events like the intersecting lines of the polygraph” (Garrity, 106). The “multiple writing” that the polygraph performs thus refers at once to the various roles that the characters play, the possible paths that the narrative could potentially follow, and the different forms that the text itself can assume. There are three characters in the original: François, a waiter suspected of having murdered his friend Marie-Claude; Lucie, a theatre actress and a friend of François’s, now acting in a film based on Marie-Claude’s murder and playing the role of the victim; and David, a criminologist involved in the investigation into MarieClaude’s murder and Lucie’s new boyfriend. The play is based on Lepage’s own experience as a suspect in the death of a close friend and on Yves Simoneau’s subsequent attempt to make a film of these events. Although Lepage refused to be involved in the film, Simoneau went ahead with the project and released it in 1982 as Les yeux rouges ou les vérités accidentelles, his first feature after Les célébrations (Johnson, “The visionary,” 60). Feeling much less respectful of his own work than of Mighton’s, Lepage altered the storyline substantially, even changing the conclusion of the crime mystery. In the play, the murder remains ultimately unresolved. François breaks down under the tremendous pressure from the police, eventually becoming uncertain of his innocence and committing suicide in the end. Throughout the play,

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François is very much a “cadavre vivant”; his suicide only confirms his state of agonizing despair as a result of police harassment. In the film, the suspense is brought to a clear closure with the unveiling of the truth, and François (Patrick Goyette) is allowed to go on with his life and become a university professor. Characters are added in the film: the criminologist, David, is split into the forensic scientist, Christof (Peter Stormare), and the polygraph operator, Hans (James Hyndman); the anonymous and invisible film director of the play now becomes Judith (Josée Deschênes), a friend of Marie-Claude’s (now called Marie-Claire) who seeks catharsis through filmmaking; and the murder is pinned on Claude (Maria de Medeiros), the daughter of a diplomat enjoying immunity, who killed Marie-Claire because she was jealous of her relationship with François. Against attacks of unfaithfulness, Lepage insists that the film is not an adaptation of the play, but rather a means for him to explore issues that the (dead) play could no longer develop (Roberge, C1). He does not elaborate at length on these issues but adds that his concerns have shifted from the question of police harassment to the question of suspicion and technological surveillance though phones, x-rays, and cameras (ibid., C2). The play already focused on the power of the camera to control its subject. After her first day of shooting, Lucie explains to David: “I found the director quite aggressive with his camera … He wanted to shoot the scene from above, you know, as if you’re looking through the eyes of the murderer who’s watching his victim through the skylight … But during the shooting, I felt more observed by the crew, and the director himself, than by the voyeur in the scenario […] In the theatre it’s very different. When you perform, the audience is watching the whole you … But today, I felt that they were taking me apart […] Close up of one eye, middle shot of the knife in the back, my right hand scratching the floor” (Lepage and Brassard, 306). Lucie’s comments on the oppressive power of film compared to theatre have an impact on stage, for the spectator does observe in its wholeness the harassment inflicted on the actress when she is in front of the camera. Furthermore, there are a number of other references to the tortured body in the play, which supports Lepage and Brassard’s comment on physical oppression. François is whipped during a sadomasochistic game with a man he picked up in a bar (ibid., 301). The autopsy that begins the play also speaks of the pain of the body, as David describes the wounds and explains the cause of Marie-Claude’s death (ibid., 297–8). The idea of dissection

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of the body, both medical and cinematographic, is brought back in a later scene titled “The Line-Up,” which replays cinematographically on stage the previous scenes as the “movement fragments are repeated, overlaid, dissected and recombined at a pace of increasing frenzy” (ibid., 310). On stage, film can be denounced as a technology as manipulative as the lie detector. This crucial parallel between film and the polygraph is but one of the many analogies that Lepage and Brassard draw. Either on film or on stage, Lepage always foregrounds analogies among objects. Sometimes the analogies are based on visual similarities, other times they are based on functions, but they are always as astonishing as they are apt. “The object finds its global meaning in a network of analogies illustrated under different appearances throughout the play,” says Gilles Girard in his analysis of the work of Lepage, Gilles Maheu, and a few other experimental theatre artists from Quebec. The object is polyvalent, Girard continues, “being infinite in its virtualities and allowing multiple readings. It changes functions and metamorphoses before our astonished and delighted eyes” (Girard, 160). In Le polygraphe, initial analogies are created between the Berlin Wall and the septum, the wall that controls the flow of blood in the heart. With the stabbing of Marie-Claude and the changes in Eastern Europe, these two walls are seen to have collapsed, and much of the play revolves around the idea of the collapse of walls,20 separations, distinctions. Distinctions between spaces, the past and the present, guilt and innocence, truth and lie, reality and fiction all vanish. And the confusion between truth and lie, fiction and reality is essentially connected to two analogical technologies present on stage: the camera and the polygraph, two apparatuses that can tell the truth but are often used to lie and manipulate. Like the polygraph, whose ability to detect lies is exploited by the police to intimidate François, film technology is not enlisted to reveal the truth but rather to exploit and oppress those against whom the “truth” can be used. The idea of film as an oppressive technology has often been discussed. Robert Stam, Robert Burgoyne, and Sandy FlittermanLewis argue that “a number of critics have examined specific films in terms of […] Foucault’s concepts of the panoptic regime, i.e., a regime of synoptic visibility designed to facilitate a ‘disciplinary’ overview of a prison population […] Since the panopticon installs an asymmetrical, unidirectional gaze […] it has been compared to

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the voyeuristic situation of the film spectator” (Stam, Burgoyne, and Flitterman-Lewis, 212). The panoptic nature of film is evident in Lucie’s description of her experience before the camera. The polygraph is also associated with the panopticon, as the polygraph operator is allowed to observe the body of the suspect without being observed in return. Moreover, the idea of discipline raised in this quotation is also brought to the fore in a scene where Lucie has to repeat the same action – namely, Marie-Claude’s death – three times to satisfy the demands of the sadistic director. “Stage left, Lucie stands naked, her back to the wall. Suddenly she contracts as though she has been stabbed. She staggers forward, and to the left, clawing at the air, she swivels as she falls: her back is covered with blood from the wall. Her movement is closely tracked by a camera on a panasonic pee-wee dolly that zooms maniacally in and out of her face and body with the tension rhythm of the [thriller] music. Lucie falls, dead, to the floor. The music stops abruptly and she gets to her feet, appearing to listen to instructions from the director. She performs three ‘takes’ of the death scene. After the last one, she receives the ‘thumps up’ signal” (Lepage and Brassard, 304–5). The disciplinarian control that the director exhibits here is very much in keeping with Foucault’s comments on the panopticon in his book Discipline and Punish (1977). In this treatise, Foucault argues that the Cartesian modernist idea that the body, being unruly and unreliable, betrays the mind led to the emergence of a practice of discipline and punishment that sought to render the body more obedient and docile in order to make it a more reliable and faithful servant for the mind. According to Foucault, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the body fell under the control of a machinery of power and discipline that “defined how one may have a hold over others’ bodies, not only so that they may do what one wishes, but so that they may operate as one wishes, with the techniques, the speed and efficiency that one determines. Thus discipline produces subjected and practiced bodies, ‘docile’ bodies” (Foucault, 138). Two hundred years later, there remains a strong sense of this modernist mind-over-body hierarchy. The polygraph is one technological product of the rational mind that capitalizes on the body’s “betrayal” of the mind, as does film, which scrutinizes the body to uncover the secrets of the soul. But it must be pointed out that in reaction against such machinery of control, there emerged on stage in the eighteenth century a

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form that denounced corporeal punishment: melodrama. According to Peter Brooks, melodrama developed very much in response to a discourse of discipline and punishment. As Brooks says, “the body sequestered, enchained, unable to assert its innocence and its right to freedom, becomes a dominant element of melodrama [and] appears consubstantial with the genre” (Brooks, 18). It is therefore not surprising that, to this day, Lepage would resort to melodramatic devices on stage (death, betrayal, François’s hysterical attitude under the pressure of the authorities) to criticize panoptic technologies such as cinema. The denunciation of cinema as a tool of oppression becomes more problematic when the medium that conveys the issue of harassment is itself fully involved in the process of taking the actress (Marie Brassard) apart. How could Lepage use film to criticize film as an instrument of torture? The device that he finds is to use film as a sadistic force that compels the original theatrical piece into the sort of submission to which Lucie is subjected by film on stage; the play is manipulated and torn apart by the film in the same way as the afferent theatrical body is manipulated and torn apart by the autopsist and the film director on stage. Lepage chooses to manipulate and control the film spectator the same way as the police control and manipulate François by withholding certain information from him that would have revealed his innocence (Lepage and Brassard, 313). In his insightful reading of the film, Philipe Gajan writes, “In fact, Lepage manipulates [the spectator] with as much rigour as he denounces manipulations orchestrated by the political machine [… But] the obsessive character of the film ends up killing the experimental quality of the process (Gajan, 46).21 The victim of oppression in the film is the play itself, the experimental drama being killed by the film’s obsessive exposition of cinematic manipulation through cinematic manipulations. Certain critics have praised the film for having asserted its autonomy from theatre.22 It is less a matter of asserting autonomy, however, than of explicitly abnegating theatricality. Theatre is brought to the fore for the purpose of being suppressed by the film; it is introduced only to be dismissed. Lucie’s “stage” performance as Hamlet, which is shown shortly after she tells François that she would like to act in the film-within-the-film, is set in a large hanger without a proscenium arch. Her “Alas poor Yorick” monologue, spoken in French, is presented cinematically with medium shots and

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shoulder shots that do not reproduce the theatricality of the scene but rather erase all that is theatrical about the performance. The distant, stationary position of the theatre spectator is negated not only by the proximity of the camera, but also by Lucie’s delivery of her lines in a soft voice far away from the audience and with her back to them, addressing the film’s audience. The parallel “performances” by François as he defends his doctoral dissertation on the segmentation of Berlin after w w i i and by Christof as he gives an autopsy lecture on the laceration of a human body are introduced theatrically through long shots from the audience’s perspective only to be de-theatricalized by the use of various framings and shotreverse-shots. Even François’s subversive homosexual “play of coercion” (Lepage and Brassard, 301) is repressed and transformed into a typical heterosexual film intrigue. Like the other adaptations studied in this book, Le polygraphe manifests in its content the tension that always exists between theatre and film. The difference between this adaptation and the other works analysed previously is that in this case cinema “wins,” rather than theatre, as Lepage demonstrates how the cineaste can free himor herself from the ascendancy of the original source. This victory, however, is highly ironic insofar as it is achieved by using an array of cinematic clichés that gloss over much of the complexity of the original. It is not a coincidence that Lepage shows the producers of the mise-en-abyme film as crass businessmen primarily interested in the scandalous quality of the story and oblivious to the artistic potential of the drama. They have no qualms about tacking on some generic ending: A police officer committed the crime. Not surprisingly, Lepage himself “tacks on” a generic ending: The jealous woman did it. To show just how artificial the guilty character is Lepage even shows Claude in one shot with her head in a “line up” alongside three mannequin heads in black wigs that makes her look like one artificial head among others. However, perhaps because his commentary on film’s manipulativeness through film manipulations is too subtle, many critics have failed to recognize the cineaste’s intention and have criticized him for the cliché conclusion of the mystery.23 What most critics failed to perceive is that Le polygraphe does not (merely) seek to tell the complicated story of people involved in a crime and the film version of this crime. Rather, the film itself is the crime, as it proceeds very purposefully to kill the original play.

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Similar complaints of a “failed thriller” were made against Denys Arcand’s Love and Human Remains, adapted from Brad Fraser’s Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love. Although such objections might be more justified than the criticisms against Le polygraphe, for Love and Human Remains does fail as a thriller, such responses ignore the fact that Arcand never intended to make a straightforward thriller. Rather, he wanted to make a film about the loneliness of uprooted young adults (Castiel, “Entrevue – Denys Arcand,” 15; Charbonneau, 9–10). What the film turns out to be in the end is a requiem for an uprooted play that succumbs to a failed transplantation into the cadaveric urban landscape of a cinematic city. When, in the spring of 1991, Arcand saw a French version of Fraser’s play about love and serial killings in Edmonton, he was still very much riding on the success of Jésus de Montréal (1989) but had not been able to complete the screenplay on which he had been working. Having recently directed a stage play entitled Les lettres de la religieuse portugaise in 1990, his frame of mind was very much oriented towards the theatre, and on the very night he saw Unidentified Human Remains he asked his producer Roger Frappier to secure the rights for a film version (Loiselle and McIlroy, 158–60). At the same time, Fraser was being hailed as “the country’s hottest playwright” (Morrison, 44). So a project between an eminently bankable filmmaker and a high profile playwright emerged as a potentially ideal collaboration not unlike the typically Hollywoodian approach to adaptations of drama. Coincidently, at the same time, David Cronenberg began work on David Henry Hwang’s Broadway hit, M. Butterfly, which stands as an even more obvious movement towards the American model (i.e., productions driven primarily by financial considerations). Love and Human Remains did not meet with the unanimous acclaim that Déclin de l’empire américain (1986) and Jésus de Montréal had received. While some critics praised the film,24 others saw serious weaknesses in the serial-killer background story, in which Arcand seems “uninterested” (Johnston, “Love and Human Remains,” 45) and which “proves overly melodramatic and angstridden” (McCarthy, 29). Most critics, however, recognized Arcand’s genuine interest in the drama of dejected and lonely young men and women living in a world of one-night stands and brutal murders. For Odile Tremblay of Le Devoir, “Love and Human Remains is

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like Déclin de l’empire américain ten years later, when things have not improved and there is nothing left at the end other than death” (Tremblay, “Dix ans après le Déclin,” B8).25 While there are references to physical deaths in the film and the play, what Fraser’s play script and film script deal with primarily is the state of emotional death that comes from lack of positive commitment to others. This condition of living death, which both versions examine, is introduced first through the main character, David, a thirtyish frustrated actor who makes a living as a waiter. In both the film and the play, David has tried to make it in Toronto but has returned home jaded and cynical. The resentment caused by his failure as an actor finds an outlet in his hedonistic behaviour, denigration of love (Fraser, Unidentified Human Remains, 1996, 61, 81), and sarcastic wit. In a lengthy passage from the play, David describes a typical evening in his life, starting with a drinking binge at the bar Flashback: I do all the usual shit at Flashback – drink until the place is closed, avoid the eyes of all the ugly men who want me, dance, get bored, leave […] It’s warm. I start thinking about Victoria Park and even though I tell myself that I won’t go – that it’s scary and it’s dangerous – I know I will […] It’s dark. The wind’s blowing. You can hardly see anything when you get into the trees […] But you get used to the dark. Cigarettes glow. Someone coughs. Someone clears their throat. Someone moans […] I follow the path. Moonlight on the leaves […] I smell the leaves rotting. Bodies moving around me. Someone reaches out and touches my crotch. I lean against a tree and light a cigarette […] Sometimes, when I come down here, I think about what it would be like if I stumbled across a dead guy on these paths. I’m following some humpy number deeper into the bushes when my foot hits something soft […] Like a rotten log. Only it’s not a log. It’s some dead boy. Some dead boy with moss growing in his hair and maggots living in his eye sockets. It could happen. This is the perfect place for it […] Someone approaches me. He smells of cigarette smoke and Clorets. I stand perfectly still as he undoes the button of my fly. I unroll the condom and slide it onto my dick. He pulls his pants down and grabs a tree. And while I’m fucking his ass the same stupid song keeps running over and over in my mind. “Billy, don’t be a hero, don’t be a fool with your life. Billy don’t be a hero.” (Ibid., 88–92)

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The connection between David’s nightly roaming and death is evidenced in this section. He recognizes the morbid potential of his behaviour, but it will take the actual death of his friend Bernie before he acknowledges the importance of emotional commitment. Bernie, David’s childhood buddy, is also dissatisfied with his existence. But Bernie’s disaffection, rather than expressing itself through rather harmless sexual escapades, takes on the form of perversions ranging from homophobia and misogyny to actual murder. As is revealed at the end of the play and film, it is Bernie who has been raping and killing women over the last several weeks. When David confronts him about his crimes, Bernie throws the blame right back at him: da v i d : I thought I knew you. b e r n i e : You do David. You’re just like me. da v i d : No. b e r n i e : Yes […] They weren’t anyone that mattered. They were secretaries, waitresses, nurses – hairdressers for Christ’s sake […] They weren’t important. da v i d : Yes they were […] To their families. Themselves. To me. b e r n i e : You? Get real, David. No one’s ever mattered to you in your life […] You don’t give a shit about people. They drop in and out of your life all the time. Who cares how they feel? There’s only been one person you ever really cared about. Me […] Stay with me David. We’ll go away somewhere where they don’t know me. I won’t do it again […] It’s your fault! It’s because you left the first time! I could control it when you were around […] They’ll hurt me, David. They’ll put me in jail – they’ll […] I thought you loved me. da v i d : I do. (Ibid., 184–5, 188–9)

This passage italicizes the fine line between David’s refusal to care for anybody and Bernie’s brutal disregard for human life. David and Bernie are alter egos, with the former as the cool detached gay

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gallant and the later as the murderous misogynist unable to accept his latent homosexual desires for David (ibid., 94). It is only after David recognizes this parallel and Bernie has killed himself that he can become emotionally involved. Although death in the play is associated mainly with David and Bernie, the other characters are also “cadavres vivants” to various degrees. David’s former girlfriend (before he realized he was gay) and current roommate, Candy, is equally dissatisfied with her life. She is a book reviewer, but hates most of what she reads, and is desperate to find a lover, either male or female. “I hate my job” she says, “I hate my life. I hate this city. I hate myself. Jesus. I hate myself” (ibid., 180). To compensate for her unhappiness, she has developed obsessions. Verging on anorexia (ibid., 37), she is also obsessed with cleanliness (ibid., 40–1, 89). She has a fling with an equally obsessive lesbian, Jerri, who phones her constantly, and a few dates with Robert, a married man who lies through his teeth and eventually returns to his estranged wife. In the end, Candy remains unrequitedly in love with her gay roommate, who at least comes to recognize her importance in his life (ibid., 193–4). Seventeen-year-old Kane, David’s busboy, a rich kid whose parents are never around, is also in love with the main character, even contemplating homosexuality before realizing that all he needs is a father figure or a big-brother type with whom to be friends. The last words of the play, “I love you,” which express the growing emotional commitment between David, Candy, and Kane, are pronounced by Benita, David’s psychic friend who earns a living as a dominatrix and tells horror stories to her clients. Though Benita is perhaps the most contented character in the cast, the nature of her employment and especially her accounts of gruesome urban myths bear witness to the macabre backdrop of the play and the film. Her constant references to boyfriends with heads chopped off or babysitters harassed by psycho-killers not only mirror the tragic events described on the evening news, but also parallel the other characters’ ghastly dialogues. Everyone in Human Remains refers to violent death: Candy threatens to kill both David (ibid., 124) and Robert (ibid., 152); Jerri threatens to kill Candy (ibid., 169); Kane threatens to kill David (ibid., 158); David refers to Robert as the “Dick of Death” (ibid., 117); Kane and David both proclaim their own deaths while playing violent video games (ibid., 65, 68); and, for Bernie, it is the whole city that is dead (ibid., 141).

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The entire structure of Fraser’s original, as a mater of fact, is reminiscent of a mutilated body, fragmented into disparate, sometimes unrecognizable, parts. The first scene opens as follows: da v i d : Skin. c a n d y : Blood. b e r n i e : Breasts. k a n e : Hair. ro b e r t : Feet. j e r r i : Hands. b e n i t a : The case of the headless boyfriend. (Ibid., 31)

The rest of the play adopts this sparagmos structure of a body torn to pieces or a society on the verge of chaos (Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 192–3). While the final “I love you” implies an anagnorisis, or the promise of a rejuvenated society, the gruesome tone and violent design of the drama are not fully replaced by hopefulness through the last line of dialogue. On the contrary, one suspects that this is but a temporary wave of optimism that will soon be replaced by a pool of stagnating self-loathing. Interestingly, the first published version of the play, in the magazine Theatrum (Sept/Oct 1989), and the first book publication of the text in 1990 had both Benita and David saying “I love you” at the end (Fraser, Unidentified Human Remains, 1990, 103). By the 1996 publication, David no longer says “I love you,” perhaps implying that the author came to recognize that the living cadaver of David was not quite fully resuscitated in the end. Denys Arcand’s film also had two endings. In its released version, David (Thomas Gibson) is shown trying out for an audition and saying “I love you” to Candy (Ruth Marshall) and Kane (Matthew Ferguson), who have accompanied him to the theatre. In the first ending Arcand tried out, David says “I love you” on stage. Réal La Rochelle, who saw this original ending at a private screening in April 1993, describes it as follows: “In the film’s magnificent epilogue, a

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brief moment of high n f b purity, the actor/waiter David decides to return to the stage, to seek rebirth. In an empty theatre, comforting and luminescent like a freshly created earthly paradise, the fat producer asks if he has anything to say before the audition. ‘Yes,’ answers David, ‘I love you.’ ‘What?’ ‘I love you.› (Loiselle and McIlroy, 50). By having David say “I love you” on stage, Arcand makes the ending ambiguous. Who is David addressing? The fat producer whom he doesn’t know? “Theatre” itself, with which he seeks reconciliation? Or is David saying “I love you” on stage because in the theatre one can say anything without meaning it? The ambiguity of this ending would have added a layer to the adaptation that is unfortunately lost in the general release version. The straightforward happy ending of the released version is but one of the several aspects of the film that simplify or prettify Fraser’s original drama. The “mutilated” structure of the play was transformed into a linear story that is told skillfully by Arcand but without the sense of chaos that the play’s fragmented dialogue creates.26 Characters who, on the page and in the stage productions I have seen, came across as abrasively bleak or unattractively intense people become specious on screen. This is especially true of Cameron Bancroft as Bernie, who looks more like a bodybuilding g q model than a demoralized civil servant. Similarly, Candy’s anorexia disappears completely behind the curvaceous figure and rounded face of Ruth Marshall. The sense of place also disappears from the text, for Arcand, unable to shoot in Edmonton,27 shot in Montreal instead but chose not to specifically identify the locale (a newspaper can be vaguely recognized as the Ottawa Sun, but this is hardly something that one could spot from a casual viewing). The story thus seem to take place in a generic North American city. This alteration has at least two effects. First, the spectator loses the sense of nostalgia expressed primarily in David’s and Bernie’s longing for the good old days when their city and their friendship made sense. And, second, one simply does not feel that these characters are, or ever were, attached to this nameless place. What is lost in nostalgia, however, is gained in alienation. The fragmentary quality of the play finds a narrative approximation in the film’s strong emphasis on separation between the characters and their anonymous city. Rather than having lost their sense of home, the characters of Arcand’s film find themselves in an oppressive

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urban environment where they never belonged. Not unlike Jeanie in Wedding in White and Hélène in Les beaux dimanches, David in Love and Human Remains is a theatrical character thrown into a cinematic environment. One could even suggest that it is the play itself that is thrown into the middle of the cadaveric cinematic environment. The very few moments that remain theatrical, such as a bedroom-farce meeting of most of the characters in David and Candy’s apartment, hailed by some as one of the best moments in the film (Trevor Johnston, 45), and David’s performance as a cowboy for one of Benita’s (Mia Kershner) masochistic clients, singled out by Arcand as one of the scenes where he allowed himself to have fun (Charbonneau, 10), are performed within a closed space. Conversely, those scenes that acknowledge the external environment are almost all exclusively cinematic in both their style (quick editing and elaborate camera work) and their content (substantially altered from the original). It is thus the play that is alienated from the cinematic urban space. Significantly, this cinematic environment is shown almost exclusively to underline the threat of physical violence. The exterior space that the film adds to the play is indeed very much the space of the cadaver. Most often, the film leaves the closed theatrical setting either to evoke the risk of death in the city (with shady characters walking by) or to show explicitly the anonymous victims, whose bodies are found in the dark back allies of an anonymous metropolis. It could be argued that there is something uncannily Canadian about this sense of alienation from the city. Tanya Huff has written on the infernal Canadian city, claiming that as Canadians have moved from the country to the city, their fears have followed them and now lurk in the urban back allies as much as in the dark forests of northern Ontario or the wide-open spaces of the Prairies. Huff writes: “As everyone who’s sat through a Can Lit course in high school or university should know, the landscape is an integral part of Canadian writing and, in the beginning, Canada’s vast untamed geography provided sufficient inspiration for early horror […] But an increasing number of Canadian dark fantasy authors have been exploring the untamed geography in the heart of our cities. Some have adapted the old traditional horrors to a new arena of steel and concrete, others have created specifically urban terrors to roam an urban geography” (Huff, 141). In this updated version of the

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Wacousta Syndrome, exposure to the unthinking cityscape may lead to savage behaviour, and perhaps even to cannibalism. Robert Hadji writes, “An enduring Canadian fear is that, in entering the wilderness, it enters you. Going bush, a body can lose oneself […] Hunters […] wandering windswept in the frozen wastes, stripped of their humanity by starvation, until the cannibal emerged to feed on nearest and dearest” (Hadji, 133–4). The image of the cannibal emerging from the jungle of the city is an intriguing one, for it not only could account for Bernie’s brutal attacks on women, but also serves as a telling metaphor for savage capitalism, which leads us to consume goods indiscriminately, whether they be expensive cars, elaborate meals, brainless television, or people whom we use and discard. One of the most truly uncanny moments in the play is not a straightforward description of the cityscape, but rather David’s account of his roaming in Victoria Park, for this passage brings together both the theme of the ugly city and the threatening wilderness. The creepy park in the middle of the seedy city is perhaps the most nightmarishly evocative image in modern Canadian culture (William Phillips’s 2001 Treed Murray revolves around this idea). However, Arcand does not explore the horrific potential of these dramatic moments. While in other films, ranging from La maudite galette (1971) and Réjeanne Padovani (1973) to Joyeux calvaire (1997), Arcand shows in all their dreadfulness some of the scarier elements of the Canadian cityscape, in Love and Human Remains, by showing a city without an identity, he also shows a city without real horrific resonance. For horror, whether in its abject or uncanny incarnations, always emerges from the familiar made alien. As Huff points out, changing cityscapes represent “the very real terror of the urban Canadians displaced in the city they thought they knew. ‘Has that building always been there?’ ‘When did they tear down that block?’ ‘Did [this] street always dead-end at the ravine?› (Huff, 143). There is much alienation in Love and Human Ramains, but little familiarity. Familiarity could have been provided by the pre-existing dramatic text, which could have then been made strange through cinematic displacement. But, rather than gradually displacing the theatrical towards the filmic, Arcand insists on the separation of the two realms and therefore creates two exclusive spaces – one of

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lively performances and one of deathly cinematic clichés – celebrating the theatrical in the former and killing it in the latter. This is why the film does not work as a crime thriller (there are few uncanny thrills in this movie). Rather, it works as an examination of how a sense of cadaveric meaninglessness emerges from the absence of live art. Arcand’s original ending, David’s final attempt to return to acting and his pronouncing the words “I love you” on stage, would have clarified this point. Arcand conveys a similar message more successfully in Jésus de Montréal by juxtaposing the life of the passion play on Mont-Royal and the death of the media-saturated city below. If Love and Human Remains is not the film it should have been (Loiselle, “Love and Human Remains,” 45), it still offers an intriguing speculation on the tensions between theatre and cinema, life and death. If what dies in Love and Humain Remains and the other films examined in this section is a sense of live theatricality, there is an actual dying body in a little known film of the same period, Cynthia Roberts’s The Last Supper. I will close this chapter with a brief consideration of this work.

death of an actor in the last supper Cynthia Roberts’s adaptation of Hillar Liitoja’s play The Last Supper: A Performance of Euthanasia could be described as yet another early 1990s film about a i d s , but this would be grotesquely misleading. The work does focus on a man dying of a i d s , a former professional dancer, Chris (Ken McDougall), who convinces his doctor (Daniel MacIvor) to help him die and chooses to spend his last few hours having an elaborate meal with his lover, Val (Jack Nicholsen). Much could be discussed about the film: a i d s and its artistic metaphors; the controversial issue of euthanasia; the aesthetic decision to rigorously respect the unity of space; the importance of death rituals, as Chris performs a last dance while sitting on his deathbed; the emotional focus on the forlorn lover, Val, after the death of Chris; or the role of the doctor as a stand-in for the audience. Furthermore, one could try to situate The Last Supper in relation to Roberts’s other films, including her succès de scandal lesbian porn flick Bubbles Galore (1996), or in relation to other works produced by Greg Klymkiw, who was one of the driving forces behind the Winnipeg Film Group in the 1980s. These signifi-

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cant issues pale, however, in comparison to the central situation that the spectator is faced with while watching this work: Ken McDougall was actually dying of a i d s as the film was being shot and died a few days after the end of production. When I saw the film for the first time at the Vancouver Film Festival in the fall of 1994, I didn’t know about McDougall’s condition, which Roberts and Klymkiw discussed only after the screening. Yet I knew from the first few images of the film that the actor was at once performing and not performing death, at once playing the role of a dying man and simply being a dying man. As much as his voice and body language seemed contrived in the performance of terminal illness, his body was speaking of death in a way that no actor can reproduce. Unlike the body of Claude or Vallier or the anonymous victims of Bernie’s killing spree, the body of McDougall was not acting death but living it. As Marc Glassman recognizes, “The Last Supper transgresses the terrain that normally exits between documentary and drama” (Glassman, 36). The ritualistic dance that he performs as a final assertion of his life exudes artificiality, fabrication, even awkwardness. In her review of the three-hour stage performance, Georgina Uhlyarik writes, “The ultimate in embarrassing theatrical choices is Chris’ decision to dance – masked – for the last time while his lover takes pictures. A potentially beautiful goodbye is overdone by flinging white flowers and ridiculous hand movements” (Uhlyarik, 44). But beyond the annoying gestures of the artiste performing his swan song, there lies the dying body that reminds us of our own mortality – the last thing we want to be reminded of. If the role of Chris in The Last Supper had been performed by any other actor – a “non-dying” actor – the film would have come across as a relentlessly “faithful” adaptation that conveys the strong sense of claustrophobia that characterized the production at Theatre Passe Muraille in the fall of 1993. That is, it would have been a grueling viewing experience that made a strong statement about a i d s but would have vanished from the viewer’s memory rather quickly. As it is, however, The Last Supper is not merely a difficult and at times pretentious film. In light of the arguments advanced in this chapter, Roberts’s adaptation stands apart from the rest as a striking document on what differentiates theatrical performance from film: actual death inscribed on the cinematic body. That theatre reviewer

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Uhlyarik does not mention McDougall’s terminal illness at all while film reviewer Marc Glassman talks of little else confirms a point made earlier in this chapter: While actual death is outside the realm of the theatre, it truly comes to life when recorded on film. The films analysed in this chapter all have death or the corpse as an evident common feature. But they also share at least one other important similarity: They all acknowledge their theatrical origins in one way or another. Lilies and Le polygraphe explicitly refer to “theatrical” performances; Love and Human Remains and The Last Supper have performers as their central characters; and, although Being at Home with Claude and Possible Worlds are not as conspicuous in their references to theatricality, both films are intensely dramatic in their reliance on dialogue rather than on more ostentatiously cinematic effects. Beyond the prologue in the former and a few external scenes in the last section of the latter, both films remain anchored to the stage in their focus on character and dialogue rather than on the natural environment. This tendency to acknowledge questions of theatricality and drama, if only to dismiss them later, is perhaps the one trait that is still clearly recognizable in all recent adaptations of Canadian plays. This study will close on a brief overview of how contemporary instances of film-mediated drama, even those that are highly cinematic, remain in certain respects deeply stage-bound.

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6 Conclusion: Theatricality in Film Adaptations since the 1990s

While working on the adaptation of Michel Marc Bouchard’s Les muses orphelines, Robert Favreau constantly had to fight against theatre’s resilient struggle to impose itself (Loiselle, “Les muses orphelines,” 103–4.) This struggle, while not always acknowledged by filmmakers, is perhaps unavoidable. In their attempts to cinematize situations deliberately created for the stage and characters specifically designed to stand at the centre of a circumscribed space, adaptors of drama seek to alter the very nature of objects that were imagined not as images, but as bodies on a scaffold. It is not surprising, therefore, that these bodies would struggle for their live existence as they are projected through a frame that leaves them hanging between presence and absence. This book has ventured to identify and analyse this struggle in order to reveal the various forms that it takes. In many adaptations studied in the previous chapters, theatre’s resistance against film-mediation is expressed through an almost despotic interdiction of movement, denying cinema the freedom to explore space and manipulate temporal continuity. Consequently, closed sets and unity of time dominate film adaptations as otherwise different as One Night Stand, Being at Home with Claude, and The Last Supper. Furthermore, drama’s pull against cinema also translates into the actual or virtual imprisonment of characters within the narrow parameters afforded them by the stage. Here

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Will I Nest, Wedding in White, Les beaux dimanches, and Bordertown Café are all adaptations in which the limitless potential of film to open up the locus dramaticus is undermined by the characters’ inability to transcend their theatrical origins. Given this endemic resistance of afferent drama against efferent cinema, it is not a coincidence that the plays brought to the screen, from La petite Aurore, l’enfant martyre to Cold Comfort, would be works that focus precisely on themes of imprisonment and bondage. Nor does it come as a surprise that corpses and other death imagery would be recurrent themes in these works, for the cadaver itself – in Lilies and Possible Worlds, for instance – embodies the very tension between the concentration of the (theatrical) actor playing dead and the exosmosis brought about by film technology. And, if students of the Canadian imagination, from Northrop Frye to Tanya Huff, are right in their interpretation of our fears and anxieties, it is not surprising either that within the context of a culture of recoil, stage characters would be inclined to hide from both the urban wastelands and overwhelming natural landscapes with which film confronts them, as in Gapi and Love and Human Remains. My purpose throughout this book has not been to argue that all film adaptations of Canadian and Québécois plays must exhibit this tension between centripetal drama and centrifugal film. In fact, Le polygraphe attests to cinema’s ability to free itself from the stage, at least it part. Yet the very strategy whereby this film in particular manages to reject its theatrical antecedent – i.e., through clichés straight out of the most banal commercial movies – seems to proceed by reductio ad absurdum to demonstrate the impossibility of producing a valid adaptation without acknowledging at some level theatre’s claim on the material transposed. This is why even those adaptations that do not necessarily reproduce the theatre-film conflict elucidated in the previous chapters still bear witness to the stage’s influence over the characters, themes, and iconograpahy of the motion-picture version. Arrested movements towards the outside, fissures between theatrical characters and their cinematic environments, abject responses to forces of containment, or living cadavers may or may not appear in some of the more recent instances of film-mediated drama. But almost all the adaptations produced over the last decade make explicit reference to the theatre. Often the stage appears in an iconographic form, as images of the theatre itself emerge within the films’

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diegesis. Sometimes, if the theatre itself is not visible, its idea is certainly suggested through the dramatic language of the film. Peter Mettler’s Tectonic Plates and Lepage’s Nô, along with Laurie Lynd’s House, Raymond Saint-Jean’s Cabaret neiges noires, and Favreau’s Les muses orphelines all explicitly refer to the theatre on screen. Other adaptations, like Alan Zweig’s The Darling Family and Jean-Philippe Duval’s Matroni et moi, while not showing literal images of a stage, articulate their theatricality through other means, such as a strong reliance on character dialectics and language as the main mode of expression. It could be argued that both Tectonic Plates and House are closer to filmed theatre than to film-mediated drama. Tectonic Plates, once described by Don McKellar as a “bizarre documentation of the play” (Baldassdarre, 14) and referred to by Shawn Huffman as one of the “various traces of the theatrical representation” (Huffman “Adrift,” 169), is composed in great part of shots of a stage performance, with the audience, artificial decor, and machinery in full view. The film is not a mere recording of a performance, however. A number of shots of the “stage” performance are clearly designed for film. Low angle shots in which the camera emerges from a shallow pool of water, overhead shots of pianos moving towards and away from one another – like the characters who cross paths in various locations and the tectonic plates themselves that constantly shift on the face of the earth – and the numerous shot-reverse-shots of actors moving and speaking on stage are all cinematic creations beyond the scope of a mere audio-visual recording of a theatre production. The more or less extensive location footage of Venise, Scotland, and New York further undermines any simple reading of the film as a documentary about a live show. Lucie Roy in her article “Transréférentialisation et transmondanéisation” conducts a detailed analysis of the shifts between theatricality and “filmicité” in Tectonic Plates. But, as much as the film transcends theatre, Mettler is also clearly concerned with acknowledging the stage origins of this story of a few characters who move in and out of each other’s lives. Like the characters, who display the “pulsion d’agrippement,” clinging impulse, that Simon Harel (257) perceives in recent Quebec literature as a reaction against increasing global influences, and who thus move across continents and cultures while remaining attached to their respective origins, the film remains agrippé to its theatrical roots.

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Something similar can be said of Daniel MacIvor’s House, filmed by Laurie Lynd. House is a one-man show about a disturbed man just out of therapy who rambles to his audience about his peculiar life and the people in it. This first-person play blurs the distinction between the character, Victor, and the actor, MacIvor, to the point that some of the actor’s mistakes during rehearsals were incorporated into the final stage version (MacIvor, 16). Because the material is so close to MacIvor’s performance, the filmmaker retained the device of a one-man show, focusing almost exclusively on Victor’s recitation of his anecdotes about his dysfunctional family and friends to a group of ten spectators gathered in a church-cumtheatre. While Lynd dramatizes in short vignettes some of the stories, the film remains by and large a minimalist recording of a performance piece. Critics obviously found the film difficult (Kelly, “House,” 64). But, not unlike Mettler, Lynd remains bound to the stage for a reason: namely, to demonstrate the character’s inability to transcend his own experience. Victor is as compelled to talk about his past and the people who have moulded his life as the film is tied to its theatrical source. “The film’s structure is straightjacketed by the original theatrical work,” suggests Paul Eichhorn in his Take One review (44). While this is a criticism on the reviewer’s part, it attests to the logic behind the filmmaker’s decision to make a film “insanely” attached to the stage in order to convey the character’s state of psychological entrapment. Favreau’s Les muses orphelines is a much more cinematic film than Lynd’s. While Bouchard’s family drama respects the unity of time and place, focusing on four siblings awaiting the return of their estranged mother, the film features a number of external scenes, several additional characters, and flashbacks. The geographical space where the action unfolds, Bouchard’s beloved Lac St-Jean, which is imagined in the play but not shown, becomes almost a character in the film version. Screenwriter Gilles Desjardins started being able to see the filmic characters only after having taken a trip with Bouchard and Favreau to the location where the play takes place (Castiel, 36). Les muses orphelines is certainly a film that is less interested in the theatricality of the characters than in their existence as human beings living in a concrete environment surrounded by actual men and women rather than dramatis personae. Yet, in spite of their struggle to oust theatre from the film, the scenarist and filmmaker decided to add a theatrical performance ab-

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sent from the play. Although Favreau sees the addition of an amateur stage show as a realistic means to depict a certain cultural tradition (Loiselle, “Les muses orphelines,” 105), the fact remains that he was ultimately unable to eliminate theatre entirely from his film. The play-within-the-film is a school performance on the history of a forest fire in the region twenty years earlier in which the main characters, Chatherine (Marina Orsini), Martine (Céline Bonnier), Luc (Stéphane Demers), and Isabelle (Fanny Mallette), lost their fire-fighting father (Paul Dion). Shortly after this event, their mother, Jacqueline (Louise Portal), left with her Spanish lover. This marks a significant change from the original, in which there is no fire and the father loses his life at war. (Unlike the film, which is set in the present, the play takes place in 1965.) Catherine, the eldest child, who still lives in the family home with the youngest daughter, Isabelle, stages the play as a tribute to her father and has no interest in raising the ghost of her mother. Neither does Martine, a lesbian enlisted in the army and happy to have left behind the close-minded village where she grew up. Luc is still very attached to his mother, however, and is trying to write a novel about his imaginary relationship with her. But it is Isabelle who, in all of her emotional instability and mental inabilities, still clings most strongly to the memory of her mother. Just as Catherine is staging a tribute to the father, Isabelle stages the return of the mother. Assuming the role of Jacqueline, Isabelle walks out of the family house, where she has always been trapped by ignorance and the condescension of old maid Catherine and catches a bus to freedom. According to Favreau, it was in this final scene that theatre imposed itself most forcefully (ibid., 104). This is not surprising, for it is in this scene that issues of origins and the past (the mother, the original play) are reactivated most dramatically. Theatricality in Les muses orphelines thus serves the same purpose as in Tectonic Plates and House: namely, this sign of the film’s theatrical roots parallels the characters’ relationship to the past. The two “theatrical performances” in the film do not have quite the same function, however. The first signifies the false but official past that enslaves the present, and the second shows an idea of the past that opens up to the future. The performance of the children enacting scenes from the big fire is presented as an artificial construction and suggests a contrived and affected recreation of history. Favreau

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uses the term “onirisme,” dreamlike, to describe this part of the movie (ibid., 103). In a flashback, we come to understand that the father was not the hero he is made out to be, but just an ordinary man who lost his wife to an exotic foreigner. The second performance is that of Isabelle, who, inspired by Luc (who also wears his mother’s flamboyant Spanish gowns), dresses up as her mother in a subversive gesture that allows her to escape the limits of theatrical confinement. To liberate herself from the past, like Jacqueline liberated herself from an unhappy marriage and a conservative milieu, Isabelle moves beyond accepted conventions of theatrical representation and creates a new image for herself. I would argue that the film operates the same way: Regardless of Favreau’s efforts, the film had to adopt elements of theatricality to fulfil its departure from the stage. The theatre in Lepage’s Nô is also a means to connect to the past: namely, the colonial past of Quebec. The film, based on a segment of Lepage’s Les septs branches de la rivière Ota,1 takes place in 1970 as a French Canadian troupe is performing a Feydeau bedroom farce in Osaka during the World Fair. The main character, Sophie (Anne-Marie Cadieux), is performing in the play while her boyfriend, Michel (Alexis Martin), a committed separatist, is back in Montreal awaiting her return. Set only two years after Michel Tremblay’s Les belles-soeurs changed forever the face of theatre in Quebec, the performance of a work from France as part of the Canadian pavilion’s showcase is a clever comment on cultural hegemony. Even more clever is Lepage’s suggestion that at the same time another absurdist comedy was being staged in Montreal: the October Crisis, with its leading man, its villains, its victims, and its many extras. The comedy of errors in which the f l q terrorists are involved is much more amusing than the French farce (having set their bombs on Osaka time rather than on Montreal time, the terrorists blow up their own hideout), and the performance of the Mounties in their scarlet uniforms pausing for Japanese visitors to Expo ’70 is only marginally more ridiculous than that of the police officers and soldiers in the streets of Montreal. Robert Lévesque, who hated the film, argues that the superficiality of the play becomes sheer stupidity on screen (88). What Lévesque obviously misses is the importance of Lepage’s various uses of the notion of “stage” on screen. At one level, the theatrical

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excesses of both the Feydeau play and the October Crisis bring to the fore the very notion of staging individual and national identities in various spheres of public and private interaction (from the bedroom of Feydeau’s La dame de chez Maxim [1899] to the besieged city of Montreal). This issue is explored at some length in Christopher Gittings’s reading of the film in Canadian National Cinema (2002). Gittings does not even acknowledge the theatrical origins of Nô, but still recognizes the importance of the stage metaphor: “Structurally, Nô moves back and forth between sites for the staging of nation. The World’s Fair in Osaka is an international forum for the staging of national cultures in national pavilions [...] The streets of Montreal become a space where competing nationalisms, Québécois and Canadian, are staged by the f l q and the Canadian military. In the film’s final Montreal 1980 sequence Michel and Sophie are both audience for the televisual staging of contested nation on the English-language c b c and the French-language RadioCanada, and social actors in what Lepage constructs as the perpetual farce of nationalist politics in Canada” (Gittings, 191). As the film closes, Michel sets the stage for the literal creation of another identity, as political issues, from the October Crisis to the failure of the 1980 referendum, are co-opted as amorous metaphors in his attempt to seduce Sophie and conceive a child. More importantly, Lévesque is also oblivious to Lepage’s clear reference to a powerful theatrical tradition in the film: the Japanese Noh. The theatre here again is associated with the past of Quebec in the homonym “No” that won the 1980 referendum. But there is more to it than this multicultural pun. The Noh performance itself is limited to the very beginning of the film. In its solemness, slow pace, and rich textures, it stands in radical contrast to the 1970 kitsch of Sophie’s outfits and the bedroom farces that unfold both on stage and behind the scenes (one of which involves Sophie and Walter [Richard Fréchette], the Canadian cultural attaché). It is not clear why Lepage introduces the Noh performance only to ignore it throughout the rest of the film. As Richard Falcon stresses in his Sight and Sound review of the film, however, Lepage doubtlessly wishes to contrast the impressive depth and respectability of the traditional performance style with the petit, prejudiced society that would exclude the blind character, Hanako (Marie Brassard), because she is an ibakusha – a victim of the Hiroshima bomb (Falcon,

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52). Lepage seems to be saying that behind the sophisticated and highly codified public forms of the past, there lies an ugly private reality that no one wants to acknowledge. Conversely, the light-hearted comic imbroglios that characterizes the private narratives of the film might hide an ugly public reality that has been suppressed: namely, the failure of the nationalist movement in Quebec to achieve its goals. Lepage, the globetrotter who cannot pull off a philosophical reflection on Quebec culture, as Lévesque argues (88), is more than likely aware of the image that Quebec nationalism now has elsewhere as a ludicrous joke. Certainly, in English Canada in the late 1990s and early 2000s, no one takes Quebec’s nationalist aspirations seriously anymore (Howell, “The farce that is politics in Quebec”); and, through the lack of seriousness of his “October Crisis” spectacle, Lepage might in fact be pointing at something as dead serious as Noh drama: namely, the death of “Quebec.” This sense of a drastic collapse in the traditional national culture of Quebec is at the core of Cabaret neiges noires, a collective creation orchestrated by Dominic Champagne and first performed in November 1992 at Théâtre de la Licorne. A high-energy succession of sketches and songs that mix grotesque humour and pathos in an utterly irreverent spectacle, which ranges from a ridiculous parody of the old Radio-Canada show Les joyeux troubadours to a touching reflection on the life and death of filmmaker Claude Jutra, Cabaret neiges noires is by any standards a theatrical phenomenon (Sarfati, “Le phénomène,” D4), a turning point in the history of Quebec theatre, according to Shaw Huffman, which asserts that it is impossible to “believe” (Huffman, “Les nouvelles écritures théâtrales,” 90). It is a “cult show” that appeals to a younger generation who do not care much for the failed dreams of their elders and that thrives on contemporary paradoxes. Raymond Saint-Jean, in his version of Cabaret neiges noires, which was shot on video and blown up to 35 mm for theatrical release, seeks to maintain the character of happening of the original and therefore uses many devices that recall a stage performance. Saint-Jean clearly wants his audience to know that this film is a version of a stage performance, and in a sense the essential purpose of the movie is to attract audiences back to the theatre. While the live interaction between the players and the audience is obviously diminished in the film, critics still saw in the theatrically flamboyant

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film a decent approximation of the stage event that would allow a larger spectatorship to enjoy this bittersweet reflection on Quebec society (Sarfati, “Cabarets neiges noires”). Some critics did prefer the purely cinematic elements of the film, such as Cautre Jutra’s pathetic wandering through the city before deciding to jump off Jacques-Cartier Bridge, but they nonetheless enjoyed the party atmosphere that emanates from the cabaret numbers (Tremblay, “Pâle produit dérivé,” B5). In radical contrast to the flamboyant theatricality of Cabaret neiges noires, we find two films that show no explicit connection to the theatre: Alan Zweig’s version of Linda Griffiths’s The Darling Family and Jean Philippe Duval’s adaptation of Alexi Martin’s Matroni et moi. With no stage, no overt sense of performance, and no explicit reference to obvious theatrical gimmicks, these two films seem to ignore their origins. Yet both have been perceived as being stage-bound. Emphasizing primarily dialogue and dialectical character tensions, The Darling Family and Matroni et moi acknowledge their debt to the stage through their dramaturgy. The theatricality of The Darling Family, about a couple, She (Linda Griffith) and He (Alan Williams), who discuss their relationship and how to deal with an unplanned pregnancy, has been criticized precisely in terms of the overly stagy nature of the dialogue. The Toronto Star’s Graig MacInnis writes: “Griffiths, the writer, has structured the dialogue to reflect the characters’ dissynchronous aims – she wants commitment (well, maybe), while he wants to rock. This is all well and good, but the theatrical strategy of having two persons speak as if the other weren’t there present in the room simply doesn’t work on film” (MacInnis, B2). Even critics who enjoyed the film still disparaged the dramatic constructedness of the dialogue. “Starkly directed by Alan Zweig,” writes Brian Johnson, “the movie unfolds as a series of dialogues mixed with internal monologues. Often the characters break out of their conversation and start thinking out loud – a theatrical conceit that seems annoying on film” (Johnson, “Man versus woman,” 53). Yet the dramatic quality of The Darling Family offers an intriguing parallel between form and content. Like theatre and cinema, which can hardly coexist but still come together in the form of Zweig’s film, She and He pull against each other and struggle with what seems to be irreconcilable differences. But still they converge towards a common creation: their child.

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Matroni et moi received the same type of response from reviewers, albeit in a more positive tone. The play and the film relate the story of Gilles (Alexis Martin), a p hd candidate in philosophy who falls in love with Guylaine (Guylaine Tremblay), a waitress involved through her brother (Gary Boudreault) with a local mafia boss, Matroni (Pierre Lebeau). The comedy revolves around the tension between the ethical young intellectual and the crudely pragmatic gangster. The film opens up the play significantly, adding several night scenes in the seedier parts of Montreal and giving the film an expressionist spin. Critics, whether they enjoyed the film or not, recognize in the script clear signs of theatricality. Le Devoir’s Martin Bilodeau praises the film: “The inspired and well-structured script, as well as the dynamic shooting style, allow Matroni et moi to escape its original format. However, there are still signs of theatricality, especially in the dialogue, which maintains a stage resonance” (Bilodeau, “Une grande traversée,” B7).2 Brandon Kelly of Variety agrees: “Much of the humour comes from the rich wordplay of Martin and Duval’s screenplay, which frequently makes comic hay of the contrast between Gilles’ upscale vocabulary and Matroni’s rough profanity-packed language of the street. A scene in a junkyard, where the two discuss the ethics of Matroni’s criminal trade, is particularly funny. The only remnant of the piece’s legit roots is the verbose dialogue but it is usually quite funny” (Kelly, “Matroni and Me,” 37). Both Matroni et moi and The Darling Family, as well as other recent adaptations, such as Brad Fraser’s Leaving Metropolis, thus emphasize their theatrical origins less through references to the stage than through the age-old Aristotelian tradition that puts language and character at the centre of the drama. Interestingly, in its conflict between the two main characters – the criminal Matroni, who grunts more than he speaks (Martin, 36), and the verbose Gilles, whose main concern is the “Death of god and the profane conscience” (ibid., 23) – the film still sets drama, in the form of lengthy dialogues about profound issues, against a cinematic environment of cars and guns and shoot-outs. Whether the stage is prominently featured in the film, as in House or Tectonic Plates, or hidden behind a dramatic focus on dialogue and character dialectics, most recent instances of cinematic adaptations of plays acknowledge to a certain degree the constructive tension between the two art forms. While there is a risk in fostering “hyperawareness” of this tension, to use Neil Sinyard’s concept,

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broached in chapter 1, the recent adaptations that have managed to strike a balance between cinematization and theatricality, from Lilies to Nô, have enjoyed a great deal of success. Should one proclaim, therefore, that after sixty years of struggle, film-mediated drama in Canada has finally reached a happy compromise that will allow adaptation of plays to emerge as a viable practice that will consistently produce successful works that are at once challenging and entertaining? At this point, the stage-to-screen phenomenon began in the early 1990s still seems to be going strong. As Martin Bilodeau points out in his review of Matroni et moi, it is encouraging to see that cinema has started to rely on this country’s solid dramatic traditions (Bilodeau, “Une grande traversée,” B7). If the histories of Canadian and Québécois drama and film have taught us anything, however, it is that the struggle is never over. Theatre and cinema in this country have experienced many highs and even more lows. It is quite likely that the history of film-mediated drama will wind its way through the same stages of evolution and regression.3

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appendix Canadian Plays Adapted into Canadian Feature Films since 1942

This list includes only Canadian feature-length motion pictures produced for theatrical release and Canadian made-for-tv movies that have received at least one public showing in a cinema, such as One Night Stand and Cabaret neiges noires. This list includes only film adaptations of original Canadian stage plays. Excluded are plays that were themselves adapted from other media. Such is the case for René Delacroix’s Coeur de maman (1953), based on a play by Henry Deyglun that was originally conceived as a radio drama (aired in 1936). Similarly, Gordon Pinsent’s John and the Missus (1986) was a novel (1974) before being a play (1976) and a film. Other examples include Aaron Kim Johnston’s The Last Winter (1989), which is a free adaptation of the stage version by Sandra Birdsell et al. (1985) of William Kurelek’s children’s book A Prairie Boy’s Winter (1973); and Milas Bessade’s A Quiet Day in Belfast (1973), which was produced first as a radio program (cbc, Jan. 1972) before being rewritten by Andrew Angus Dalrymple for a stage production at Tarragon (1973). This list does not include either film recordings of stage performances or documentaries on theatre productions, such as Roger Frappier’s Le grand film ordinaire (1970) on the activities of the troupe “Le Grand cirque ordinaire” and Albert Kish’s Paper Wheat (1979) on 25th Street Theatre’s collective creation. Because Peter Mettler’s Tectonic Plates (1992) does include an element of adaptation through various instances of location shooting, it is itemized here. Also excluded, in spite of their

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Canadian connections, are us-produced adaptations such as Norman Jewison’s Agnes of God (1985) and Joel Zwick’s My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002). The list is organized chronologically based either on the date of the premiere or on the date of publication of the stage play, whichever came first. 1 Aurore, l’enfant martyre (Léon Petitjean and Henri Rollin, 1921; film by Jean-Yves Bigras as La petite Aurore, l’enfant martyre, 1951) 2 Here Will I Nest (Hilda Mary Hooke, 1938; film by Melburn E. Turner, 1942) 3 La folle aventure (Guy Stein, 1942; film by Jean-Marie Poitevin as À la croisée des chemins, 1943) 4 Tit-Coq (Gratien Gélinas, 1948; film by Gélinas and René Delacroix, 1952) 5 Les beaux dimanches (Marcel Dubé, 1965; film by Richard Martin, 1974) 6 Fortune and Men’s Eyes (John Herbert, 1967; film by Harvey Hart, 1971) 7 Wedding in White (William Fruet, 1972; film by Fruet, 1972) 8 See No Evil, Hear (Jack Cunningham, 1972; film by Cunningham as Peep, 1973) 9 Me? (Martin Kinch, 1973; film by John Palmer as Me, 1974) 10 Metal Messiah (Stephan Zoller, 1975; film by Tibor Takacs, 1977) 11 Les célébrations (Michel Garneau, 1976; film by Yves Simoneau, 1979) 12 Gapi (Antonine Maillet, 1976, film by Paul Blouin, 1981) 13 One Night Stand (Carol Bolt, 1977; film by Allan W. King, 1977) 14 Une amie d’enfance (Louise Roy and Louis Saïa, 1977; film by Francis Mankiewicz, 1978) 15 Hank Williams: “The Show He Never Gave” (Maynard Collins, 1979; film by David Acomba, 1981) 16 Cold Comfort (Jim Garrard, 1981; film by Vic Sarin, 1989) 17 Memoirs of Johnny Daze (John Beckett Wimbs, 1984; film by Bachar Shbib [formerly, Chbib] as Memoirs, 1984) 18 The Mark of Cain(Peter Colley, 1984; film by Bruce Pittman, 1985) 19 Blue City Slammers (Layne Coleman, 1985; film by Peter Shatalow, 1987) 20 Being at Home with Claude (René-Daniel Dubois, 1985; film by Jean Beaudin, 1992)

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21 Les feluettes (Michel Marc Bouchard, 1987; film by John Greyson as Lilies, 1996) 22 Bordertown Café (Kelly Rebar, 1987; film by Norma Bailey, 1991) 23 Le polygraphe (Marie Brassard and Robert Lepage, 1988; film by Lepage, 1996) 24 Tectonic Plates (Robert Lepage et al., 1988; film by Peter Mettler, 1992) 25 Les muses orphelines (Michel Marc Bouchard, 1989; film by Robert Favreau, 2000) 26 Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love (Brad Fraser, 1989; film by Denys Arcand as Love and Human Remains, 1993) 27 Possible Worlds (John Mighton, 1990; film by Robert Lepage, 2000) 28 The Darling Family (Linda Griffiths, 1991; film by Alan Zweig, 1994) 29 Cabaret neiges noires (Dominic Champagne et al., 1992; film by Raymond Saint-Jean, 1997) 30 House (Daniel MacIvor, 1992; film by Laurie Lynd, 1995) 31 The Last Supper (Hillar Liitoja, 1993; film by Cynthia Roberts, 1994) 32 Singing the Bones (Caitlin Hicks, 1994; film by Gordon Halloran, 2001) 33 Les sept branches de la rivière Ota (Robert Lepage, 1994; film by Lepage as Nô, 1998) 34 Poor Super Man (Brad Fraser, 1994; film by Fraser as Leaving Metropolis, 2002) 35 Matroni et moi (Alexis Martin, 1995; film by Jean-Philippe Duval, 1999) 36 Marion Bridge (Daniel MacIvor, 1999; film by Wiebke von Carolsfeld, 2003) 37 Mambo Italiano (Steve Galluccio, 2002; film by Émile Gaudreault, 2003)

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Notes

chapter one 1 I use the term “film-mediated drama” to suggest that even minimal transformations resulting from the passage of the work from one medium to the other have an impact on the meaning of the final product. 2 All translations in the book are mine from the original French. “C’est vrai qu’on est une des rares cultures à faire si peu d’adaptations. Je m’explique cet état de chose d’une part par la jeunesse de notre cinéma – 40 ans c’est quand même très jeune pour une cinématographie et je crois qu’on manque encore un peu de maturité – et d’autre part par nos origines documentaires. Le documentaire au Québec s’est développé dans le mépris du texte. C’était un mépris souhaitable, nécessaire car la réalité documentaire est une réalité mouvante qui se capte avec la caméra mais qui ne s’écrit pas. L’idée d’avoir un texte antérieur au film est contraire à la pratique documentaire. Cependant je crois que ce mépris du texte s’est longtemps accompagné d’une peur du texte. On a eu peur de travailler avec des auteurs et avec des textes préexistants et ce, qu’il s’agisse de pièces de théâtre ou de romans. Il y a donc une tradition de rencontres entre cinéastes, scénaristes et auteurs d’œuvres littéraires qui ne s’est pas établie ou du moins qui s’est établie très tardivement au Québec. Il a fallu passer par un bon nombre d’expériences un peu navrantes avant de réussir à dépasser cette peur.”

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3 “Il a fallu que je me batte contre le théâtre tout au long du tournage […] car le théâtre s’imposait toujours.” 4 “une adaptation quasi intégrale de la pièce à succès.” 5 “Le cinéma canadien sort de l’âge des cavernes.” 6 Here, I stipulate “talking” motion picture because certain sources suggest that as early as 1907, French Canadian dramatist Julien Daoust combined theatre and silent film for the production of his stage play La fin du monde (Lacasse, 58). 7 For an analysis of the sadomasochistic structure of the film and its relation to the collective unconscious prevalent in Quebec during the Duplessist Grande Noirceur, see Tremblay-Daviault, 222–4. 8 “On pourrait passer le film tel quel à la radio!” 9 Information provided in a personal letter from Yves Simoneau, 24 June 1991. 10 I omit Tom Shandel’s Walls (1984), written by Christian Bruyere, who also wrote a play of the same title (1978). The stage-play and the screenplay are so different that they can be considered two distinct versions of the same factual material. Significantly, the credits of the film do not refer to the play. I also omit Gordon Pinsent’s John and the Missus (1987), which is based on his novel (1974) and his play (1976) of the same title. While all three works have obvious similarities, the film is more clearly an adaption of the novel than of the play (see Loiselle, “Novel, play, film”).

c h a p t e r tw o 1 Peter Morris in Embattled Shadows (187) and Gerald Pratley in Torn Sprockets (37–8) only mention the film in passing. 2 Théâtre de Grand-Guignol opened in the late nineteenth century and soon became renowned throughout France for its gory shows. André de Lorde was the chief playwright of Grand-Guignol and was nicknamed the “Prince of Terror.” 3 “Bientôt devant Dieu. Le ciel s’ouvre, les Anges sourient. Ah! Que c’est beau! Maman, ma petite maman, viens donc me chercher! Je veux, je veux un meilleur sort. [Elle meurt.]” 4 “Toute l’horrible tragédie de Ste-Philomène se déroule sous les yeux de l’auditoire, avec ses brutalités inouïes, mais la croix illuminée de la consolation divine resplendit à l’aurore de la délivrance et les spectateurs soulagés par l’entrevue du Paradis, applaudissent de bon coeur au talent des artistes qui réussissent à faire ainsi d’un spectacle

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abominable un nouveau succès qu’explique le triomphe de la Foi sur la persécution humaine réduite à sa plus basse expression.” 5 “est présenté de façon peut-être trop réaliste.” 6 Mme Lucia Elizabetta Vestris (née Bartolozzi) was the first theatre producer to consistently use the “box set” in her productions of the mid-1800s. The box set is made up of three walls and sometimes a ceiling (hence the term “box”) and creates the illusion of a room into which spectators can look through an invisible fourth wall. See Brockett 471–2. 7 “Car si la conclusion est pénible, si elle nous fait mal, on voudrait pouvoir se dire: ‘ça devrait finir autrement,’ mais on est bien forcé d’admettre que dans la vie, ça finirait également comme ça.” 8 “Les dernières paroles de la pièce, alors que le Padre infuse à pleine dose la morale à Tit-Coq, apparaissent ampoulées.” 9 “On n’arrive pas à croire qu’un personnage aussi pâle vienne à bout des instincts de Tit-Coq.” 10 “Respecter l’autorité civile, la raison et la foi en témoignent. La raison: l’autorité, constituée en vue du bien commun, a droit au respect pour mieux assurer l’unité d’action de la société. La foi: ‘Donne-leur [aux chrétiens] l’avertissement d’être soumis aux pouvoirs, aux autorités, de leur obéir’ [S. Paul à Tite, III.1].” 11 “Le catholicisme social rejetant, pour des raisons d’ordre moral, l’invitation au profit illicite qui anime l’individualisme libéral, et la suppression de la liberté la plus légitime, qui résulte du collectivisme [marxiste], est raisonnablement amené à conseiller de fonder la vie économique sur la collaboration libre et raisonnable d’organismes patronaux et de syndicats d’employés […] Tel est en effet la véritable, l’ultime but de la doctrine sociale de l’Église, comme le rappelait Pie XII le 25 janvier 1946 […] L’autorité de la doctrine sociale et économique dispensée par les Papes, garantie par la sollicitude du Très-Haut, est maintenant expérimentalement vérifiée par l’échec, si douloureux, de ceux qui la méprisent” (italics in the original). 12 “Dès la première séquence, il saute sur vous à bras raccourcis et trouve, en une heure et demie, toutes les ‘ouvertures’ qu’il faut pour vous décocher une séries de directs au plexus solaire […] Tit-Coq est vivant, d’une vie rude agressive […] Et tout à coup, de ne plus être simplement intéressé à titre documentaire ou ému par fraternité humaine, mais de se sentire touché au vif et comme flambant nu, violé par l’oeil de la caméra […] C’est nous qui rions et pleurons d’apercevoir, comme dans une glace féérique et brutale, nos traits et nos tics, notre réalité.”

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13 “Dans les rares passages où Gélinas a pris le parti du cinéma, les résultats sont fort appréciables. Excellente, la scène de bagarre qui ouvre le film en coup de tonnerre; excellente, la fête de Noël chez les Désilets, avec l’oncle qui chante une complainte démodée, dans le salon, tandis que la jeunesse dans la cuisine, danse le fox-trot; excellente, la scène d’explications entre Tit-Coq et Marie-Ange au carré Saint-Louis. Gélinas, s’il se décidait, pourrait probablement faire du bon cinéma.”

c h a p t e r th r e e 1 Unlike other contemporary plays, such as George F. Walker’s Sacktown Rag (1972) and David French’s Of the Fields, Lately (1973), in which events of the past are enacted or narrated to illuminate the source of the characters’ shame, Wedding in White makes very few significant references to past family experiences. 2 Brett Enemark has argued that Jimmie is immobilized by the father’s imago and must rely on Billy to express his masculinity (Enemark, “Double Vision”). 3 For some reason, Jeannie is spelled with two ns in the film credits. In the play it is spelled with only one n. 4 “Indexing, bracketing and scaling” are identified by Noël Carroll as the three main “formal devices for directing the movie audience’s attention […] The variable framing insures that the spectator is always attending to the details and configurations that, for the purposes of the story, are appropriate; variable framing virtually guarantees that the spectator is attending where and when she should” (Carroll, 4, 201). 5 “Équivaut au cinéma au travail du monstrateur scénique de l’activité théâtrale.” 6 “Elle aura beau avoir la possibilité de se dissocier de la monstration profilmique s’autonomiser par rapport à elle et lui adjoindre une autre couche langagière, la monstration filmographique n’en demeure pas moins rivée, tout comme celle-ci et au même titre, au hic et nunc de l’énoncé […] Impossible pour [le monstrateur] de réaliser ce qui est l’enfance de l’art pour tout narrateur digne de ce nom: se déplacer instantanément (temps) d’un endroit (espace) à un autre.” 7 “On change de local le plus souvent possible pour ne pas faire théâtral, mais l’éclairage demeure très secondaire. On ne compte pas sur la lumière pour traduire des états d’âmes […] Au lieu de fouiller les

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Notes to pages 95–104

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9 10 11 12 13

14 15 16

17 18 19 20 21 22 23

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visages pour voir ce qui se cache derrière les masques, la caméra s’attarde à nous montrer les détails de la riche demeure.” “Mais chaque jour, quand je sors du lit, je pense à mes affaires. Toute ma vie, toute notre vie en dépend, c’est notre forteresse, c’est notre roc de Gibraltar.” “Qu’est-ce que les chinois viennent faire dans ça, Hélène?” “Si je le savais! Si seulement je le savais!” “Disparais […] moi je peux plus te voir.” “Qu’est-ce qu’elles ont à me haïr?” “Olivier dans son fameux monologue [fait] une sorte d’autocritique [mais] cette longue diatribe ne se traduit par aucune action positive.” “On vit dans un monde où nos actes nous mènent nulle part […] tout est sans conséquence.” “Le mal a commencé quand on nous a enlevé le droit de vivre.” For instance, Paul wears his reservist’s uniform because he attended a military mass before the party (Dubé, 49), and Angéline admits that she was so thirsty during the mass that she almost drank holy water in replacement of the spirits she drinks at Victor’s (ibid., 64). “Votre confort, votre sécurité ne seront plus suffisants pour vous protéger.” “ceux qui demeurent en place et qui conservent l’assurance des autruches.” “C’est de hasard qu’il s’agit, pas d’amour.” “J’ai de plus en plus peur de mourir”; “la mort continue de faire son travail. Lentement mais sûrement.” “Je suis repartie, j’avais la mort dans l’âme.” “Tout ce dont j’ai besoin, c’est de changer de peau.” The allusion to Isaiah’s Messiah, Emmanuel, in Manuel Lacroix’s name is reinforced by the reference to the Cross in his family name. The messianic connotation of Lacroix’s name is hinted at in Paulette Collet, “Le théâtre de Marcel Dubé,” 48. Victor’s mood changes drastically on page 149, and Manuel Lacroix is first mentioned on page 150. “Si j’apprends qu’elle est partie chez Manuel Lacroix, je la tue.” In the first act, Victor brags, “At 40, and built like I am, I can bend over without hurting my back” [A quarante ans, bâti comme je le suis, je peux me pencher encore souvent avant de me donner un tour rein] (Dubé, 44). The youthful energy expressed in this line resembles Muriel’s in her enthusiastic statement, “I still have enough

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34

35

36 37

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Notes to pages 104–15

energy to party all night” [Il me reste suffisamment d’énergie pour veiller jusqu’aux petites heures] (ibid., 134). Paul’s suggestion to play badminton also conveys a similar childlike animation (ibid., 76). So much so, in fact, that Olivier picks up on the absurdity of Paul’s purposefully immature behaviour and adds sarcastically, “Why don’t we play catch or hide-and-seek?” [Pourquoi pas la cachette ou bien la balle au mur?] (ibid.). “Qu’est-ce qu’elles ont à vouloir me tuer tranquillement?” “Le monde? Les étoiles? La lune?” “Chaque jour vous essayez de me démolir, vous essayez de jeter par terre tout ce que j’ai construit.” “Je me dégoûte autant que tu me dégoûtes.” “L’idée me vient de vouloir me défigurer avec de l’acide.” “Arrange-toi pour pas la mettre enceinte celle-là.” Here, I use the term “internal focalization” as Gérard Genette defines it in Nouveau Discours du récit (1983): “With internal focalization, the focus is on a character who becomes the fictional ‘subject’ of all perceptions, including perceptions of the subject him or herself as an object. The narration can thus tell us all that the subject sees and thinks” [En focalisation interne, le foyer coïncide avec un personnage, qui devient alors le ‘sujet’ fictif de toutes les perceptions, y compris celles qui le concernent lui-même comme objet: le récit peut alors nous dire tout ce que ce personnage perçoit et tout ce qu’il pense] (49). “Il fallait d’autre part sortir du salon, sortir de la maison, créer des atmosphères […] Et puis on a ajouté beaucoup de scènes avec des jeunes; et je voulais que le drame de ces jeunes se passe au soleil. Alors que chez les adultes, au contraire, les drames se déroulaient en vase clos, à l’intérieur, dans la noirceur.” “On pourrait faire notre vie ensemble. Mais t’as admis avec moi que ça serait la pire folie avant la fin de mes études. Y’a plus rien qu’une solution.” “C’est ça mon vieux. Ça va te soulager. Fallait que tu te vides toi aussi. Demain tu y penseras plus.” In terms of intertexuality, it is worth mentioning that Filiatrault plays very much the same role in Tremblay and Brassard’s 1973 Il était une fois dans l’Est, as her character, Hélène, is an aging woman who desperately clings to her former persona of the ravishing Queen of Main Street (Loiselle, “Film-mediated drama,” 168). “Moi aussi j’ai le droit de crier. J’ai le droit de penser. J’suis cheznous ici-dedans!”

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chapter four 1 After his two American films, The Dead Zone in 1984 and The Fly in 1986, Cronenberg explicitly set Dead Ringers in “Toronto, Canada, 1988.” 2 For an overview of this trend in recent Quebec cinema, see the special “dossier” by Marie-Claude Loiselle et al. on this issue in 24 Images 105 (Winter 2001): 14–27. 3 “Qui a peur de Coco? Tout le monde.” 4 “Moi, si j’me lâchait [sic] lousse, j’démolirais ma maison.” 5 “Viens m’aider, on va mettre un peu d’ordre au moins.” 6 Note that the film’s title as written in the credits does not comprise a question mark. 7 See, for instance, “imaginary line,” in Konigsberg, 164. 8 “L’mariage là c’est l’fascisme à maison.” 9 “paul-émile fume / ou ben j’m’en va chez ma mère.” The virgule denotes a break between two lines of text. These breaks are part of Garneau’s idiosyncratic mode of writing. Furthermore, Garneau never capitalizes proper names and rarely uses punctuation. 10 “moi la mort c’est comme les arbres la nature l’océan.” 11 “j’ai peur j’ai peur pour vrai / y’a pas un soir que j’pense pas à mort.” 12 “on pourrait s’marier”; “s’marier c’est ça la mort.” 13 “Partir ou rester? Tel est le débat intérieur qui agite Gapi.” 14 The non-performative character of Daisy’s filmic depiction in the introductory sequence is most evident in the scene at the disco, in which she is cut off from the “performers” (singers, dancers) both visually and through her withdrawn behaviour. 15 See works ranging from George de Coulteray’s Sadism in the Movies (1965) to Gaylyn Studlar’s In the Realm of Pleasure: Von Sternberg, Dietrich, and the Masochistic Aesthetic (1988). 16 Given the role-playing aspect of Riva and her partner’s sadomasochistic games, it could be argued that the sequences in the neighbour’s apartment confer an aura of theatricality on the proceedings. But, as Turner writes: “I also think the questions that lie at the foundation of theatre and theatrical performance lie at the foundation of ritual and ritual performance – questions about the relationship of actors to text, of actors to audience, or fiction to fictive reality, and so on” (Victor Turner, 149). It is thus apparent that the two transgressive lovers are not partaking in a theatrical performance, for they do not have an audience and hardly interact with a

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text. Unlike Daisy, who literally performs for Rafe, Riva and her companion (and Rafe when he joins them) play together as in a carnival but lack the detached observer necessary for theatre to exist. 17 While set in the Prairies, the film was actually shot in Ontario (Wise, 5). 18 Unlike the play, which takes place over a period of less than twentyfour hours, the film covers five or six days. 19 “Au bout du compte, le film souffre de n’être au fond qu’une adaptation d’un texte écrit pour la scène. Le réalisateur a beau multiplier les «sorties» pour briser le huis clos théâtral, cela ne fait qu’amoindrir l’impact du suspense et montrer jusqu’à quel point l’ensemble repose sur un scénario artificiel.”

chapter five 1 “situation vécue par un personnage animé.” 2 “La mort y est soumise à des codes de représentation qui se basent sur la spectacularité.” 3 “C’est la caméra qui part à la recherche du personnage. Elle passe à travers toute la ville qui est Montréal vu presque d’est en ouest, à travers les édifices, les rues, le festival de jazz, le boulevard SaintLaurent avec ses prostitués, pour arriver chez Yves [sic] dans une course folle jusqu’à l’épuisement total. Ce sont donc des lieux. C’est aussi la synthèse de toute la pièce. Quelqu’un qui pourrait décortiquer ces neuf minutes trouverait là toute l’histoire, c’est-à-dire toutes les données de la pièce. Rien ne manque. Ensuite, on en reparle avec des mots pour essayer d’expliquer ce qui s’est passé.” 4 “Il n’y a plus de solution de compromis et seule demeure la solution illusoire de refuser le monde extérieur en lui substituant un monde intérieur.” 5 This symbiotic union is exactly what Yves achieved with Claude: “You know those corny stories: I am him and he is me? Well, it’s true. It exists. I dunno how to explain it. But that’s the way it is. I didn’t feel like I was holdin’ someone in my arms. It was like there was no difference between him and me” (Dubois, 429). On the notion of primary narcissism and its relationship to theatrical representation in Quebec, see Hélène Richard’s “Le Théâtre gai québécois.” 6 Strangely enough, the only difference between this line in Dubois’s original and in the film is the address. The published play says “8544 Casgrain,” rather than “8574” as in the film.

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7 Without imposing any narrow allegorical reading on the text, it could be argued that the setting of the play in 1967 makes an ironic reference to the Canadian ideal that Expo 1967 vainly sought to glorify. That is, the dream of national harmony and unity of the Fathers of Confederation is shown to be as remote from the hysterical spectacle of Expo as Claude’s congenial home is from the ruthless scene of Dubois’s drama. See Nardocchio, 190, for further reflections on the 1967 context of the play. The film is set in the “present”: namely, around 1990. 8 “C’est le personnage de Claude qui étonne. D’une part, celui-ci demande maintenant à mourir, il est le moteur du geste d’Yves […] D’autre part, Dubois précise qu’on ne verra jamais Claude au complet et qu’il sera joué par plusieurs interprètes: l’un pour la main, l’autre pour la gorge, l’autre pour le dos, l’autre pour le torse, l’autre pour la voix. Ce personnage “virtuel” est censé devenir ainsi un Dieu.” 9 “Le cadavre – vu sans Dieu et hors de la science – est le comble de l’abjection. Il est la mort infestant la vie. Abject.” 10 “Il s’agira le plus souvent d’une femme détentrice d’une vérité que les héros masculins cherchent à occulter. Telle la fille de Maître Daniel, dans La Poupée de Pélopia, qui revient après des années d’absence dénoncer l’inceste paternel; ou Lydie-Anne de Rozier, qui, au sens propre, tombe du ciel et descend de son aerostat pour obliger les deux héros à s’avouer leur amour.” 11 “Le lieu clos devient ainsi un huis clos dont on sait qu’il est la forme contemporaine de l’impasse tragique.” 12 Two other Canadian plays of the 1980s show a similar process: Normand Chaurette’s Provincetown Playhouse, juillet 1919, j’avais 19 ans (1981) and Sharon Pollock’s Blood Relations (1981). On these works, see my article “Paradigms of 1980s Québécois and Canadian Drama.” 13 “Like Simon,” says Martin Bilodeau in “Un évènement digne des Feluettes,” “John Greyson is excessive in privileging representations that focus on artificiality” [À l’image de Simon, va jusqu’au bout en privilégiant une illustration qui mise essentiellement sur l’artifice] (Bilodeau, B6). This approach did please the public, as the film won several prizes at film festivals and the 1997 Genie Award for the best Canadian film of the year. 14 Toronto Sun reviewer Bruce Kirkland, for instance, saw Lilies as being “more conservative and less brazen” than Greyson’s earlier queer films, Urinal (1988), The Making of Monsters (1991), and Zero Patience (1993).

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15 For a more detailed analysis of the metaphorical meaning of Saint Sébastien in the play, see Huffman, “Le trépas vient tout guérir?” 16 In Belzil, “Contraintes et libertés de la scénarisation,” Bouchard talks at length about the compromises he had to make while working with Greyson. 17 One could even argue that Le confessional is another adaptation since it is based on Hitchcock’s I Confess (1952), which was itself based on Julien Daoust’s play La conscience d’un prêtre (Benson and Conolly, 128). 18 See Irène Roy’s Théâtre Repère. 19 “L’univers morbid des laboratoires de recherche est d’ailleurs omniprésent dans Possible Worlds.” 20 The virtual collapse of the ramparts that were to protect the City of Quebec but failed to do so in 1759 is implicit in the use of French and English in a scene where Christof, Lucie, and François are walking by the old structure. 21 “De fait, Lepage manipule [le spectateur] avec le même soins qu’il prend à dénoncer la manipulation orchestrée par la machine politique: protection de la fille d’un diplomate; dénonciation des rouages policiers, maîtres du polygraphe [… Mais] le côté extrêmement obsessionnel de l’oeuvre finit par tuer la nature exploratoire de la démarche.” 22 See, among others, Michel Vaïs, “Robert Lepage: Un homme de théâtre au cinéma,” especially pages 126 and 127. 23 Both David Stratton (Variety), who liked the movie, and Peter Howell (Toronto Star), who hated it, dismiss the cliché ending. 24 See, for instance, Suzanne Dansereau’s report on some critical responses in “Love and Human Remains.” 25 “Love and Human Remains constitue en quelque sorte un Déclin de l’empire américain, filmé dix ans plus tard, quand les choses ne se sont pas améliorées et qu’il reste juste la mort au bout du chemin.” 26 Arcand has argued that a unified structure is more appropriate for film: “For the purpose of cinema, a unified structure had to be created” [Il fallait en quelque sorte créer une structure unitaire plus propice à la mise en scène cinématographique] (Castiel, “Entrevue – Denys Arcand,” 14). 27 The Alberta Motion Picture Development Corporation refused to fund the film because “the production simply had too great a Quebec orientation and not enough money would have been spent in Alberta” (Cernetig, “Film agency decision decried,” A8).

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chapter six 1 Francis Leclerc directed a one-hour video adaptation of the play in 1997. Since this production is not a “feature film adaptation” of Les septs branches, it falls outside the scope of this book. 2 “Le scénario inspiré et bien construit, ainsi que le filmage presque toujours dynamique, ont permis à Matroni et moi de s’affranchir de son format d’origine. Cependant, quelques marques de théârealité sont encores apparentes, notamment dans les dialogues, qui possèdent encore la résonnance de la scène.” 3 I would like to acknowledge the help and support of my legal advisor, Ms Kerri Froc, in writing this book.

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Index

À la croisée des chemins, 18–19 À toi, pour toujours, ta Marie-Lou, 8 abjection: as metaphor of outward desire, 105–6, 114, 124, 125, 129, 137, 150, 159, 175–6, 205, 210 Acomba, David, 23, 142 afferent drama vs efferent cinema, 84, 87, 89, 92, 93, 109, 110, 113, 114, 117, 125, 129–33, 136–8, 140, 141, 150, 152, 157, 158–9, 160, 166, 173–4, 176, 186, 196. See also centripetal drama vs centrifugal cinema Aiguilles et opium, 189 Alberta Motion Picture Development Corp., 234n27 Albertine en cinq temps, 7 Allen, Lewis, 21 Altman, Robert, 10, 48

American Graffiti, 118 American Psycho, 4 amie d’enfance, Une, 25– 6, 120–7, 130 Antoine, André, 51 Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, The, 4, 118 Arcand, Denys, 5, 23, 28, 86, 119, 127, 198–9, 202–6 Asselin, Émile (also Marc Forrez), 19, 42 Atwood, Margaret, 16, 34 Au coeur des quenouilles, 68–9, 70, 71 Au retour des oies blanches, 7 Auger, Jacques, 37 August, Billy, 28 Aurore, l’enfant martyre, 19, 39–54, 55, 117 Austin, Jane, 4 auteurist practices: difference between Canada and Hollywood, 10; influence on Canadian cinema, 9–10, 15, 20

automatistes, 67–8 Back to God’s Country, 4 Bailey, Norma, 27, 120– 4, 158 Balconville, 7 Baldassdarre, Angela, 5 Ballard, J.G., 4 Bancroft, Cameron, 203 Barthes, Roland, 95, 106, 109, 161 Baudry, Jean-Louis, 49 Bazin, André, 12–13, 32– 3, 116 Beattie, Richard, 155 Beatty, Nancy, 76 Beatty, Warren, 144 Beauchemin, Jacques, 69 Beaudin, Jean, 6, 28, 165–76 Beaulieu, Janick, 24, 26, 28, 94–5 beaux dimanches, Les, 24, 25, 82, 94–116, 117, 120, 121, 125, 127, 129, 130, 134, 135, 204, 210

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254 Beckett, Samuel, 161 Bégin, Catherine, 110 Being at Home with Claude, 6, 24, 28, 117, 120, 129, 164, 165–76, 177, 184, 208, 209 Béliveau, Juliette, 73 belles-soeurs, Les, 7, 24, 149, 214 Belzil, Patricia, 185 Benjamin, Walter, 123, 133 Benner, Richard, 118 Bennett, Susan, 8 Bertrand, Jeanette, 43 Bérubé, Robert-Claude, 27 Best Intentions, The, 28 Bien-être, 68 Bigras, Jean-Yves, 17, 19 Bilodeau, Martin, 184, 218, 219 Blanchot, Maurice, 160–2 Blau, Herbert, 182 Blood Relations, 233n12 Blouin, Paul, 27, 140–2 Blue City Slammers, 23 Bodelsen, Anders, 118 Bolt, Carol, 25–6, 142–53 Bonneville, Léo, 28 Bonnie and Clyde, 144 Bonnier, Céline, 213 bons débarras, Les, 119, 127 Bordertown Café, 5, 27, 120–7, 143, 158, 210 Borduas, Paul-Émile, 67 Borsos, Philip, 119 Bouchard, Michel Marc 3, 5, 161, 177–87, 209, 212 bouchers, Les, 51 Boudreault, Gary, 218 Bourassa, André-G., 67 Bourque, Gilles, 69 Bradley, Paul, 22, 85 Braithwaite, Max, 4, 119

Index Brassard, André, 24, 230n37 Brassard, Marie, 5, 192– 7, 215 Braudy, Leo, 32–3 Brault, Michel, 82–3, 127 Brecht, Bertolt, 50, 137 Brockett, Oscar, 50 Brood, The, 126 Brook, Peter, 48, 190 Brooks, Peter, 47, 196 Bruyere, Christian, 226n10 Bubbles Galore, 206 Buffalo Jump, 26 Burgoyne, Robert, 194 Burns, Gary, 10, 16 Bye Bye Blues, 119 Cabaret neiges noires, 6, 29, 211, 216–17 cadaver: as metaphor for theatre and film, 158, 160–4, 171, 175–6, 177, 180, 183, 186–8, 190–2, 198, 202, 204, 206, 208, 210. Cadieux, Anne-Marie, 214 Cadieux, Jason, 180 Cambron, Micheline, 34 Canadian Film Awards, 23 Canadian Film Development Corporation (CFDC) / Telefilm Canada, 10, 25, 117–18 Canadian Gothic, 79, 155 Cannes Film Festival, 23 Carle, Gilles, 4, 23, 119 Carr, Emily, 35 Carroll, Noël, 228n4 Carver, Brent, 147, 150, 177, 182 Case, Bonnie Carol, 85 Castiel, Élie, 5 célébrations, Les, 26–7, 133–8, 140, 192

centripetal drama vs centrifugal cinema, 12,15, 38, 52, 54, 111, 112, 121, 131, 134, 136, 138, 149, 152–3, 158–9, 160, 174. See also afferent drama vs efferent cinema Champagne, Dominic, 6, 216 Chapman, Alexander, 180 Charbonneau, Mgr Joseph, 69 Chaurette, Norman, 233n12 Chaykin, Maury, 155 Chiasson, Zénon, 139 Christie, Dinah, 149 cinematic theatricality, 3, 48 Clark, Ian D., 187 Clément, Marcel, 70 Cocteau, Jean, 189 Coelina, 47 Coeur de maman, 19 Cold Comfort, 27–8, 75, 124, 153–9, 210 Coleman, Layne, 23 Collet, Paulette, 97, 229n23 Colley, Peter, 23 Collick, John, 107 Collin, Maynard, 23 Come Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, 48 Comédie Française (Paris), 47 confessionnal, Le, 192, 234n17 conscience d’un prêtre, La, 234n17 Conte de Noël, 52 corpse. See cadaver Corrigan, Timothy, 48 Costello, Tom, 4 Council of Canadian Filmmakers, 22

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Index Crash, 4 Cronenberg, David, 4, 6, 119, 126, 198, 231n1 Crossley, Peter, 76 Cruising Bar, 119 Cunningham, Jack, 23 Curtis, Tony, 144 Curwood, James Oliver, 4 D’Annunzio, Gabriel, 177, 185 dame aux camélias, la vraie, La, 18 dame de chez Maxim, La, 215 Dansereau, Suzanne, 234n24 Daoust, Julien, 226n6, 234n17 Darling Family, The, 5, 29, 217, 218 Davies, Robertson, 66 Davis, Miles, 189 de Blois, 184 de Coulteray, George, 231n15 de Lord, André, 226n2 de Medeiros, Maria, 193 de Pixérécourt, René Guilbert, 47 de Varenne, Nana, 43 dead body. See cadaver Dead Ringers, 119, 231n1 Dead Zone, The, 231n1 death: contrast between theatre and film, 160– 4, 207–8; in Being at Home with Claude, 175–6, in Les beaux dimanches; 103–6; in Les celebrations, 135–8; in Les feluettes, 181–4; in The Last Supper, 206– 8; in Le polygraphe, 193–4; in Possible Worlds, 181–3; in Un-

identified Human Remains, 199–201. See also cadaver déclin de l’empire américan, Le, 119, 198–9 Defraeye, Piet, 177 Delacroix, René, 17, 18 Demers, Stéphane, 213 Denis, Roch, 71 Derrida, Jacques, 170 Deschênes, Josée, 193 DeSève, Alexandre, 17, 18, 19 Desjardins, Gilles, 212 Desmarteaux, Paul, 42 Deyglun, Henri, 19 Dickinson, Peter, 20 Diderot, Denis, 161 Dion, Paul, 213 documentary: and the body, 163–4; influence on Canadian cinema, 9, 20, 117–18 Doll’s House, A, 50 Donohue, Brenda, 131 dos Santos, Pereira, 107 Dreyfus, Richard, 118 Dryden, John, 161 Dubé, Marcel, 7, 24, 94– 116, 134, 135, 169 Dubois, René-Daniel, 6, 28, 165–76, 186 Duceppe, Jean, 24, 71, 94 Duchastel, Jules, 69 Dufour, Yvon, 112 Dufresne, Pierre, 114 Duke, Daryl, 118, 126 Dunaway, Faye, 144 Duplessis, Maurice, 41, 68, 69 Dupuis, Paul, 37, 56 Dupuis, Roy, 166 Dussault, J. Yves, 137 Duval, Jean-Philippe, 6, 211, 217, 218 Ecstasy of Rita Joe, The, 7

255 Egoyan, Atom, 4, 119 Eichhorn, Paul, 212 Ellis, Bret Easton, 4 Elsinor, 189 Encore cinq minutes, 7 Enemark, Brett, 228n2 Esslin, Martin, 13, 33 Étienne Brûlé, gibier de potence, 36–7 Expo 1967 (Montreal), 172, 233n7 Falcon, Richard, 215–16 Family Viewing, 119 Far Shore, The, 22 Farmer, Gary, 180 Favreau, Robert, 5, 9, 11, 209, 211, 212–14 Felicia’s Journey, 4 feluettes, Les, 3, 5, 161, 177–87 Fennario, David, 7 Fergusson, Matthew, 180, 202 Festival des Films du Monde (Montreal), 27, 142 Festival of Festivals (Toronto), 28 Feydeau, Georges, 214, 215 Filiatrault, Denise, 24, 112, 230n37 film adaptation of drama: in the context of Canadian cinema, 7–12, 15, 17–29 film adaptation of novels: difference from drama, 9–10, 14 film and theatre: comparative theories, 12–14, 32–4, 48–9, 92–3, 115– 16, 162 filmic space vs theatrical space. See afferent drama vs efferent

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256 cinema and centripetal drama vs centrifugal cinema Fineberg, Larry, 8 fleurs de mal, Les, 65 Flitterman-Lewis, Sandy, 194 Florence, 169 Florida, La, 122–4 Fly, The, 231n1 folle aventure, La, 19 Fortune and Men’s Eyes, 5, 20–2 Fothergill, Robert, 92 Foucault, Michel, 194–5 Frappier, Roger, 198 Fraser, Brad, 5, 7, 11, 198–206, 218 Fréchette, Richard, 215 French, David, 7, 8, 228n1 fridolinades, Les, 18, 67 Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ), 100, 104, 107, 214–15 Fruet, William, 21–2, 24, 75, 76–94, 96, 130 Frye, Northrop, 16, 34, 37–8, 81–2, 155, 210 Gabe, 26 Gable, Clark, 144 Gabriel, Peter, 190 Gajan, Philipe, 196 Galluccio, Steve, 6 Gapi et Sullivan, 139 Gapi, 27, 138–42, 210 Garneau, Michel, 26, 133–8, 231n9 Garrard, Jim, 27, 124, 153–9 Garrison Mentality, 16, 34, 37–8, 81, 155 Garrity, Herny, 192 Gascon, Gabriel, 190 Gaudreault, André, 92–3, 115–16

Index Gaudreault, Émile, 6 Gauvreau, Claude, 67–9, 71 Gélinas, Gratien, 17–18, 54–74, 76, 89 Genette, Gérard, 230n33 Geoffroy, Jean-Louis, 47 Ghosts, 50 Gibson, H.B., 41 Gibson, Margaret, 118 Gibson, Thomas, 202 Gilmore, Danny, 177, 186 Gimme Shelter, 162–3 Girard, Gilles, 194 Girard, Martin, 28, 157 Girard, Rémy, 123 Gittings, Christopher, 215 Glassco, Bill, 23 Glassman, Marc, 207–8 Godwin, George K. 121 Goin’ Down the Road, 22 Gone with the Wind, 144 Gosson, Stephen, 179 Gothic drama, 181–2 Governor General’s Award, 27 Goyette, Patrick, 193 Graefe, Sara, 180 Grande Noirceur (Duplessis era), 226n7 Grand-Guignol, 40, 226n2 Greimas, A.J., 56 Grey Fox, The, 119, 142 Greyson, John, 3, 28, 177–87, 234n16 Griffiths, Linda, 5, 217 Gross, Paul, 156 Group of Seven, 35 Guilbault, Muriel, 67–8 Guilbeault, Luce, 112 Gurdjieff, Georgei, 190 Gury, Paul, 17 Guthrie, Tyrone, 6 Gwyn, Richard, 82 Hadji, Robert, 205

Halloran, Gordon, 6 Hamblet, Edwin C., 98 Hamburger, Käte, 14 Hamilton, Patrick, 10 Hamlet, 189 Handling, Piers, 76 Hank Williams: “The Show He Never Gave,” 23, 142 Hardcastle, Valerie Gray, 41 Harel, Simon, 16, 34, 211 Harron, Mary, 4 Hart, Harvey, 20, 21 Hébert, Anne, 4 Hedda Gabler, 50 Helman, Alicja, 107 Hemmer, Bjørn, 50 Hendry, Tom, 25 Herbert, John (also John Herbert Brundage), 5, 20–1 Here Will I Nest, 3, 20, 28, 30–9, 42, 43, 209– 10 Hick, Caitlin, 6 Highway 61, 122–4 Hitchcock, Alfred, 10, 144, 160, 234n17 Hoberman, J., 26 Hogan, Susan, 149 Hooke, Hilda Mary, 3, 20, 30–9. House, 6, 29, 211–13, 218 Howards End, 28 Howell, Peter, 234n23 Huff, Tanya, 204–5, 210 Huffman, Shawn, 177, 211, 216, 234n15 Hwang, David Henry, 6, 198 Hyndman, James, 193 I Confess, 234n17 I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing, 119

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Index Ibsen, Henrik, 49–50, 51, 52 Icre, Fernand, 51 Il était une fois dans l’Est, 24, 230n37 Ilsemann, Hartmut, 46 International 16 mm Film Festival (Montreal), 23 Inverso, Mary Beth, 181– 2 Ionesco, Eugene, 161 Ivory, James, 28 Jaffe, Chapelle, 130, 146 Jagger, Mick, 163 Jésus de Montréal, 198, 206 John and the Missus, 226n10 Johnson, Brian, 217 Johnston, Denis, 21–2 Joyeux calvaire, 205 Julien, Jean, 51, 52 Jutra, Claude, 4, 23, 217 Kamouraska, 4, 23 Kane, Carol, 21, 83, 84 Kane, Leslie, 169–70 Kantor, Tadeus, 161 Kelly, Brandon, 218 Kerekes, Davis, 162–4 Kernodle, George, 47 Kershner, Mia, 204 Kinch, Martin, 24–5, 127–33, 134, 142 King, Allan, 22, 26, 119, 142, 146–53, 158 Kirkland, Bruce, 233n14 Klady, L., 27 Klymkiw, Greg, 206–7 Knelman, Martin, 8 Kotcheff, Ted, 4, 118 Kracauer, Siegfried, 13 Kristeva, Julia, 16, 105–6, 159–60, 175 L’Anglais, Paul, 17, 18

La Rochelle, Réal, 202–3 Lachapelle, Andrée, 112 Ladd, Alan, 144 Laflamme, Yvonne, 42 Lafon, Dominique, 179, 181 Lajeunesse, Jean, 43 Lanctôt, Micheline, 10 Langrick, Margaret, 155 Laroche, Maximilien, 100, 169 Last Supper, The, 5, 206– 8, 209 Latour, Clément, 56 Laurendeau, Arthur, 64 Lauzon, Jean-Claude, 119 Laxer, James and Robert, 82 Le Blanc, Alonzo, 98 Leach, James, 77 Leaving Home, 7 Leaving Metropolis, 5, 11, 218 Lebeau, Pierre, 218 Leclerc, Francis, 235n1 Lefebvre, Jean-Pierre, 10 Leigh, Vivien, 144 Leiterman, Richard, 22 Lemelin, Roger, 4, 119 Lenne, Gérard, 163–4 Lepage, Gaston, 171 Lepage, Robert, 5, 6, 7, 28, 187–97, 211, 214– 16. Lessare, Jacques, 190 Létourneau, Olivier, 112 Lettres d’une religieuse portugaise, 198 Lévesque, Norman, 136, 138 Lévesque, René, 18, 54, 71 Lévesque, Robert, 214– 15, 216 Liitoja, Hillar, 5, 206–8 Lilies, 3, 4, 180–7, 208, 210, 219

257 Linert, Auguste, 52 Lion in the Streets, 8 Little Canadian, The, 31–2 Lodge, David, 14 Loiselle, Marie-Claude, 231n2 Long Day’s Journey into Night, 6 Loranger, Françoise, 7 Love and Human Remains, 5,198–9, 202–6, 208, 210 Lucas, George, 118 Lussier, Marc-André, 190–1 Lynd, Laurie, 6, 211, 212 M. Butterfly, 6, 198 MacDonald, Marylea, 177 MacInnis, Graig, 217 MacIvor, Daniel, 6, 206, 212 MacKenzie King, William Lyon, 57 MacKinnon, Kenneth, 13 Maheu, Gilles, 194 Mailhot, Laurent, 125 Maillet, Antonine, 27, 138–42 Major, Ginette, 18 Making It, 118 Making of Monsters, The, 233n14 Malachy, Thérèse, 161–2, 183 Mallette, Fanny, 213 Maltais, Robert, 108 Mambo Italiano, 6 Manitoba Theatre Centre, 76 Mankiewicz, Francis, 26, 119, 120–1, 124–7, 146, 158 Mansfield Park, 4 Manvell, Roger, 5, 9, 13– 14

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258 Marat/Sade, 48 Marcotte, Gilles, 72 Marion Bridge, 6 Mark of Cain, The, 23 Markle, Stephen, 130 Married Couple, A, 22 Marshall, Bill, 54, 167, 174 Marshall, Ruth, 202, 203 Martin, Alexis, 6, 214, 217, 218 Martin, Richard, 24, 94– 5, 96, 106–16, 117, 130 martyre de Saint Sébastien, Le, 177, 185 Maslin, Janet, 26 Matroni et moi, 6, 29, 211, 217–19 maudite galette, La, 86, 205 Mayles, Albert and David, 162–3 McCamus, Tom, 190 McCann, Sean, 190 McCaughna, David, 147 McDonald, Bruce, 119, 122–3 McDougall, Ken, 206–8 McFarlane, Brian, 180 McGrath, Doug, 22, 85, 86 McGregor, Gaile, 16, 34– 6 McKeller, Don, 123, 211 McKinnon, Thérèse, 52 McLuhan, Marshall, 108 Me, 25, 130–3, 142 Me? 25, 124, 127–33, 142 melodrama, 19, 46–8, 178, 196 Memoirs, 23, 24 Memoirs of Johnny Daze, 23 Ménard, Robert, 119 mère abandonée, La, 19

Index Metal Messiah, 23 Metler, Peter 6, 211, 212 Metz, Christian, 48–9, 162, 175 Mighton, John, 6, 187–9, 191, 192 Mihalka, George, 122–3 Miller, Monique, 56 Miller, Rick, 190 Mina, Mina E., 149 Miss Julie, 149 Mitchell, Lucie, 42, 45–6 Mitchell, W.O., 119 Mon oncle Antoine, 24 monstration: in theatre and film, 92–3 Morris, Peter, 20, 226n1 mort d’un bûcheron, La, 23 Moss, John, 79, 155 Mourir à tue-tête, 119, 126 Munger, Léo, 136 Murrell, John, 7, 8 muses orphelines, Les, 5, 9, 11, 29, 209, 211, 212–14 Nardocchio, Elaine, 233n7 Narizzano, Silvio, 4, 118 narration: in film, 92–3 narratological theory, 92– 3, 116 National Film Board (NFB), 17 naturalism, 16, 40, 51–3, 108 Nichols, Bill, 163–4 Nicholsen, Jack, 206 No-, 6, 29, 187, 211, 214– 16, 219 Norris, Frank, 51–2 O’Malley, Martin, 108 O’Neill, Eugene, 6 October Crisis (1970),

74, 83, 107, 117, 214– 16 Oedipus Rex, 6 Of the Fields, Lately, 228n1 ombre sur le cerveau, L’, 68 One Night Stand, 25–6, 142–53, 209 ordres, Les, 82–3 Orr, Christopher, 180 Orsini, Marina, 213 Osadnik, Waclaw, 107 Outrageous! 118, 126 Ozep, Fédor, 17 Pagnol, Marcel, 191 Pallascio, Aubert, 178 Pallister, Janis, 53 Palmer, John, 24–5, 130– 3, 142 Panofsky, Erwin, 13 Parti Québécois, 134 Patriot’s Rebellion (1837– 38), 100 Peep, 23 Pelletier, Denise, 73 Pelletier, Gérard, 69 Pelletier, Gilles, 140 père Chopin, Le, 17 Perkins, Anthony, 144 Persky, Lester, 21 petite Aurore, l’enfant martyre, La, 19, 30, 39–54, 72, 210 Petitjean, Léon, 19, 39 Petrie, Doris, 22, 89 Pevere, Geoff, 190–1 Phillips, William, 205 Pichette, Jean-François, 166, 175 Pinsent, Gordon, 226n10 Pittman, Bruce, 23 Pius XII, 70 Plante, Albert, 69 Pleasance, Donald, 21, 84 Plouffe, Les, 4, 119

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Index Poirier, Anne Claire, 119 Poirier, Gérard, 95 Poitevin, Jean-Marie, 19 Pollock, Sharon, 8, 233n12 polygraphe, Le, 5, 187, 192–7, 208, 210 Poor Super Man, 5, 11–12 Portal, Louise, 95, 213 Possible Worlds, 6, 187– 92, 208, 210 Poulin, Roch, 44 Pratley, Gerald, 226n1 Price, Thomas, 55, 57 Provincetown Playhouse, 233n12 Provost, Guy, 140 Psycho, 144 Pygmalion, 47 Quiet Revolution, 41, 74 Rabe, David, 10 Rahill, Frank, 47 Ramsay, Christine, 3 Realism, 16, 40, 48–53, 178 Rebar, Kelly, 5, 27, 120– 4, 143 Red Emma, 26 Refus global, 67, 69, 70 Règle du jeu, 163 Réjeanne Padovani, 23, 205 Renoir, Jean, 163 “retour du conscrit,” “Le,” 18, 67 rhetoric: in Jesuit magazine Relations, 67, 69– 70; in Tit-Coq, 59–64, 73; use by Duplessis, 69 Richardson, John, 34, 37 Richler, Mordecai, 4, 118 Ripley, John, 59 Ritter, Erika, 8 Road Kill, 119 Robb, Wallace, 32

Roberts, Cynthia, 5, 28, 206–8 Rollin, Henri, 19, 39 Rolling Stones, 162–3 Rope, 10 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 46 Roy, Louise, 25–6, 120, 124–7 Roy, Lucie, 211 Rozema, Patricia, 4, 119 Ryga, George, 7 Sabourin, Marcel, 178 Sacktown Rag, 228n1 Sadlier, Darlene J., 107 Sagouine, La, 27 Saia, Louis, 25–6, 120, 124–7 Saint Lawrence Centre for the Arts (Toronto), 131 Saint-Jean, Raymond, 6, 211, 216 Sarin, Vic, 27–8, 75, 124, 155–9 Schwerin, Jules, 21 See No Evil, Hear …, 23 sept branches de la rivière Ota, Les, 6, 214, 235n1 sérénade, La, 52 Shakespearean film, 107 Shandel, Tom, 226n10 Shatalow, Peter, 23 Shaviro, Steven, 175 Shbib (also Chbib), Bachar, 23, 24 Shebib, Don, 22 Sheen, Erica, 118 Shipman, Ernest and Nell, 4 Shum, Mina, 10 Shuster, Nat, 83 Silent Partner, The, 118, 126 Silverman, Robert, 147 Simoneau, Yves, 26, 136– 8, 192, 226n9

259 Sims, Elliot L., 155 Singing the Bones, 6 Sinyard, Neil, 14, 28, 34, 218–19 Skene, Reg, 27 Slater, David, 162–4 Smart, Patricia, 68 Son of Ali Baba, 144 Stam, Robert, 194 Stein, Guy, 19 Stormare, Peter, 193 Stratford Festival, 21 Stratford Film Festival, 25 Stratton, David, 234n23 Streamers, 10 Strindberg, August, 149 striptease: in Les beaux dimanches, 95, 99, 104, 106–7, 113–14 Studlar, Gaylyn, 231n15 Sweeney, Bruce, 10 Swinton, Tilda, 190 Tadros, Jean-Pierre, 24, 90, 94 Takacs, Tibor, 23 Talbot, Thomas, 20, 35 Tarragon Theatre (Toronto), 23, 26 Tectonic Plates, 6, 29, 211, 213, 218 television drama/téléthéâtre, 7–9, 20, 27 Théâtre de la Licorne (Montreal), 216 Théâtre Libre (Paris), 51 Theatre Passe Muraille (Toronto), 22, 207 Théâtre Repère (Quebec City), 190 Thériault, Serge, 112 Think of a Number, 118 Thomas, Christine, 92 Thompson, Judith, 8 Tit-Coq, 17–18, 30, 39, 41, 54–74, 75, 76, 111, 117

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Törnqvist, Egil, 12–13 Toronto Free Theatre (TFT), 25, 131 Treed Murray, 205 Tremblay, Guylaine, 218 Tremblay, Michel, 7, 8, 24, 149, 214, 230n37 Tremblay, Odile, 198–9 Tremblay-Daviault, Christiane, 41, 46, 53, 226n7 Trevor, William, 4 Trudeau, Margaret, 82 Trudeau, Pierre Elliott, 69, 82–3, 107–8, 117 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 35 Turner, Melburn E., 3, 20, 31, 36–7 Turner, Victor, 148, 231n16 25th Street Theatre (Saskatoon), 153 Uhlyarik, Georgina, 207–8 Ulmer, Gregory L., 170 Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love, 5, 198– 206 Urinal, 233n14 Usmiani, Renate, 57–8

Index Vaïs, Michel, 234n22 Vancouver Film Festival, 207 Véronneau, Pierre, 174 Vestris, Lucia Elizabetta, 52, 227n6 vie édifiante de Jean Baptiste Laframboise, La, 65 Vinci, 189 von Carolsfeld, Wiebke, 6 W.W. Productions (Toronto), 22 Wacousta Syndrome, 16, 34–6, 205 Wacousta, 34 Waiting for the Parade, 7 Walker, George F., 8, 9, 228n1 Walls, 226n10 Wapi, the Walrus, 4 War Measures Act, 82 Wasserman, Jerry, 5 Way Downtown, 16 Webster, William, 130 Wedding in White, 21–3, 75, 76–94, 98, 110, 115, 121, 125, 127, 130, 131, 147, 155, 169, 204, 210, 228n1 Weinmann, Heinz, 46, 53, 74

Wellington, David, 6 Wheeler, Anne, 119 Whittaker, Herbert, 25, 66 Who Has Seen the Wind, 22, 119 Why Shoot the Teacher, 4, 118–19 Wieland, Joyce, 22 Wielopole, Wielopole, 161 Williams, Alan, 217 Wilson, Stanley D., 80–1 Wimbs, John Beckett, 23, 24 Winnipeg Film Group, 206 Woodward, Joanne, 144 World Fair, 1970 (Osaka), 214 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 190 yeux rouges ou les vérités accidentelles, Les, 192 Zero Patience, 233n14 Zola, Émile, 51– 2 Zoller, Stephen, 23 zoo la nuit, Un, 119 Zupancic, Alenka, 16, 30, 160 Zweig, Alan, 5, 211, 217 Zwerin, Charlotte, 162–3 ^ ^

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