There’s a good chance you’ve never heard of André Forcier, the writer-director of the new comedy Ababooned. But he is actually one of the grand old men of Québécois cinema, and this latest film is his sixteenth feature in a career that began in the early 1970s. Despite this, Forcier’s work has had some difficulty making it across Canada’s southern border, and judging from Ababooned, there are a couple of reasons for this. For one thing, Forcier is committed to a sort of madcap form of magic realism that had its day in the sun in the 1990s — think Caro and Jeunet’s Delicatessen or Kusturica’s Underground — but has generally fallen into disfavor. But there also appears to be a dogged parochialism to Forcier’s filmmaking. It’s extremely specific to the Québécois experience, and so, like most popular comedies from France, there’s a bit of a cultural translation problem.
Granted, there seems to be a unique fixation on fanciful coming-of-age stories in French Canadian cinema, and some of these films have indeed found a wider global audience. Jean-Claude Lauzon’s Léolo, Léa Pool’s Set Me Free, and Jean-Marc Vallée’s C.R.A.Z.Y. are among the most successful of this strand, and one could arguably include the more recent dramedies of Xavier Dolan in this category. But Ababooned is something altogether stranger. It takes place in the late 1950s and is specifically about the period known as the Grande Noirceur, or “Great Darkness,” a 25-year reign of conservative politics in the province that was largely administered by the Catholic Church.
This broader context helps to explain a roiling anger simmering beneath the seemingly lighthearted exterior of Ababooned. It is told from the point of view of Michel (Rémi Brideau), a young boy with polio who loves poetry and baseball, and hates the bible-banging sanctimony he sees controlling his little pocket of Montreal, a factory district referred to as Molasses Town. After his elderly friend, Archange Saint-Amour (Gaston Lepage), publishes a pamphlet entitled “For a Secular Quebec,” Michel and all his nonconformist friends are targeted by local honcho Cardinal Madore (Rémy Girard) and his toady, Vicar Cotnoir (Éric Bruneau), who runs the local Catholic school.
There are several bizarre elements in Ababooned that are simply taken for granted, which means that many of Forcier’s most interesting ideas go unexplored. Why does the Cardinal have a posse of enforcers, the Zouaves, who are dressed like 14th-century court jesters? Why is there one student in Michel’s class, Tomcat (Miguel Bédard), who looks like he’s 22 years old, and has werewolf hands? And in a film so virulently anti-clerical, why does Forcier conclude with events that can only be described as miraculous? Even the title refers to an under-explored throughline involving the kids’ secular teacher (Martin Dubreuil) compiling a sort of dictionary of made-up nonsense words, none of which are ever defined.
But the real problem has to do with Forcier’s wild tonal shifts, some of which lead to spectacularly misjudged plot developments. For the first half of Ababooned, Vicar Cotnoir is depicted as a cartoonish bad guy, the sort of square who thrives on squelching the fun of others. But he is eventually revealed to be a child molester, having groomed the most religious girl in the class (Maïla Valentir), whose misplaced devotion to the priest makes her a target of her classmates’ scorn. Perhaps there is some weird variety of black humor specific to Quebec within which Forcier’s choices make sense, but more likely Ababooned is just the film of an old auteur, an unreconstructed liberal who doesn’t have time to accommodate present-day sensitivities. Either way, the result makes Ababooned an inscrutable and at times intolerable experience.
Published as part of Fantasia Fest 2024 — Dispatch 5.
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