Tuesday, December 10, 2024

Jesus of Montreal (Max Film Productions, Gérard Mital Productions, National Film Board of Canada, Téléfilm Canada, Société Générale des Industries Culturelles de Québec, La Société de Radio-Television Québec, Super Ecran, Sofica Sofinergie, Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, Cineplex Odeon Films, UGC Distribution, Orion Classics, 1989)


by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, December 9) my husband Charles and I worked out a compromise evening during which we ordered a pizza to go from Gnarly Girl at Louisiana and El Cajon and stayed in for a 1989 movie on YouTube called Jesus of Montreal. It was a French-Canadian production, spoken almost entirely in French except for a few brief interjections in English and one scene towards the end in Italian (more later), written and directed by Denys Arcand. The story is about a young French-Canadian actor, Daniel Goulombe (Lothaire Bluteau) – the Wikipedia page in the film spells the name “Coulombe” but I definitely saw a “G” in the film itself – who’s hired by a “with-it” priest named Father Leclerc (Gilles Pelletier) to rewrite the town’s annual Passion Play to make it more acceptable to modern sensibilities. Unfortunately, Daniel takes his job way too seriously; he decides to incorporate recent researches into the life of Jesus that suggest he really wasn’t born of a virgin as the son of God, but was actually the normal sexual offspring of Mary and a Roman soldier named Pantera, and Jesus’s true name was Yeshua Ben Pantera. The Passion play is staged at various locations in the town (not Montreal but a smaller community where pilgrims go) corresponding to the thirteen Stations of the Cross, which means that the actors have to move about from one location to another while staying in character and acting each scene of the play at a new locale. For the two main female characters in the play, Mary and Mary Magdalene, Daniel wants to use Constance (Johanne-Marie Tremblay) in one and Mirielle (Catherine Wilkening) in the other – only Constance is the mistress of Father Leclerc (who admits to breaking the vow of chastity but explains to Daniel that he couldn’t help it) and Mirielle is a successful model who auditions for a part in a commercial, Daniel tags along to the audition and is so upset when Mirielle is ordered to take her top off and reveal her breasts that he smashes the TV studio and all its expensive equipment.

Earlier in the film Mirielle was shown as one of the women dubbing a porn scene in French, with a heavy-set man pressed into service to do both male roles, bouncing back and forth from one microphone to the other depending on which character he’s supposed to be dubbing. (Given that this is a porn film, one wonders why they bothered to dub it when no one watching this sort of entertainment is all that interested in what the characters are saying to each other as they fuck.) Ultimately Daniel goes off the deep end after he’s told by Father Leclerc to go back to the old script on the order of the Church authorities above him, and their final performance is shut down just two minutes before it ends by a security person (I wondered if the patch on his shoulder was for the Swiss Guards, who are to the Pope was the Secret Services is to the U.S. President). Daniel goes on a crazed rampage through a Montreal subway station, getting in people’s faces and assailing them with beatitudes of his own creation but drawn loosely from the Sermon on the Mount. Ultimately he collapses and is taken to a hospital – having had enough of the church, they refuse to let him go to St. Mark’s and insist he be taken to the nearest Jewish hospital instead – where he’s kept on life-support but is declared brain-dead. Since Daniel has no living relatives, his doctors ask for permission to turn off the life-support and harvest his organs, specifically his heart and his eyes, for transplants. Charles first saw Jesus of Montreal in London around 1990, when it was still new; I’d never seen it before and it was good but one of those maddening movies which simply tries too hard to achieve political, ethican and moral depth. I’ve said that recently about movies like Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Act of Violence; though these three films are made during wildly different times with quite different production agendas, all of them seemed to me to be trying too hard, mangling their stories in search of “Social Significance.”

As Jesus of Montreal develops, we eventually realize that we’re supposed to see Daniel as a modern-day Jesus, betrayed by the religious authorities of his time the way Jesus was by the Jewish leaders of his (curiously, one aspect of the traditional Passion plays Daniel did not change was the anti-Semitic plot point that Pontius Pilate really didn’t want to order Jesus’s crucifixion but was badgered into it by the Jewish leader Caiaphas) and living on through the donation of his organs, with his heart raising a modern-day Lazarus from near-certain death and his eyes curing a blind woman the way Jesus cured Shula in the Bible. The film ends with Daniel’s disciples pledging to organize a theatre company bearing his name and produce exclusively cutting-edge avant-garde plays – as if they are the apostles continuing the new religion Daniel as Jesus has founded. Charles hadn’t seen Jesus of Montreal since it was new and I’d never seen it at all, and the film didn’t really connect with me as a whole despite some good and effectively chilling scenes. It didn’t help that while we were watching this, Turner Classic Movies was showing Orson Welles’s regrettably truncated masterpiece, The Magnificent Ambersons, and I would much rather have been watching that. Charles said that when he first saw Jesus of Montreal he was as close to being an atheist as he’s ever been (before he went on a spiritual journey that has led to him being ordained as a minister in two separate independent churches), and I, who have grudgingly moved away from hard-core atheism but still don’t take the concept of God all that seriously (though the difference between me in my 20’s and me now is that I’ve come to accept the importance of religion in other people’s lives even while disdaining it myself and going to Charles’s church more to support him than out of any desire for the religious experience), liked Jesus of Montreal for its irreverence but also found it slow going because I’m really not all that concerned for the fate of my immortal soul – which I don’t believe in anyway. I still reject the idea that any part of me is going to survive the physical death of my body.