J’en suis - Heads
or Tails
Quebec film by Claude Fournier
Filmed : summer 1996 Screened : spring 1997
Screenplay by Claude Fournier and Marie-José Raymond
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Where fantasy meets reality just for the fun of it ….
Saturday 15th March 1997
J’en Suis had a gift for me. Something unexpected. An incredible link between fantasy and reality. When I came across this scene in the cinema I smiled to myself, as I sometimes do, when coincidence has fun sending me delightful, unusual little moments, no doubt knowing how much I like them.
It’s quite a short scene. It’s the one where we see Dominique meeting his wife at the cafeteria of the hospital where she works. The scene begins with the arrival of Dominique, dressed in the height of fashion and looking around for Maude. In itself, nothing out of the ordinary, nothing sensational. What is magical is that the door behind him, the Pepsi machine on his right, the chairs, the tables, the décor, was my very own daily life. I watched this scene, staggered to see him moving in on my territory. Like Orpheus in the middle of Hell. It was a surreal scene. To see him crossing the Mailloux cafeteria of the Notre-Dame Hospital, walking in my footsteps, sitting down at one of the tables where so often over the years I too had taken my place every lunchtime, was completely unimaginable. Then I remembered that, the previous summer, half of the cafeteria had been closed for filming. But I hadn’t paid it much attention. Nor to the huge trailers parked by the walls of the Mailloux wing, except that they blocked the view of Rue Plessis from our office windows (I worked on the ground floor). I am not inquisitive by nature. I observe a lot, but I don’t automatically examine things, and investigation is not my strong suit. So Roy had worked for several days two floors above me during the beautiful month of July 96, and I knew nothing about it. Even so, the outcome astonishes me. I always get a warm feeling seeing this scene as a wink from one of Roy’s characters, a fleeting moment in my life.
I love it when real life takes on the shades of fantasy and vice versa. It colours our lives with light touches of pleasure, it’s enjoyable and it makes us happy, like a childhood memory.
J’en Suis: like a guilty pleasure. The sin of gluttony.
J’en Suis is not a great film. This comedy is rather closer to the unbearable lightness of ridicule than of being. On closer inspection and having grown a little fonder of certain details, the film has an undeniable quality; it gives us a view of men on a subject that touches them intimately: contemporary masculinity. At the dawn of a new millennium, men and women try once again to redefine the links between them, and so, consequently, their link with each other. The director, Claude Fournier, has chosen to reveal what man has become today against an artistic and humorous backdrop, using a very physical approach. While singing the praises of aestheticism and the beauty of the male.
Since the Lascaux caves, man has learned to master the power of the image, the magic of representation. We are no different from the men who preceded us. Our methods are simply refined, polished. But we are still the same. Fascinated by the miracle of creation. Cinema is the wall-painting of the 20th century.
To convey the concerns of his contemporaries, Fournier uses the medium of cinema, but borrows the style of the painters and sculptors of the Renaissance, probably because we have a lot of affinity with the period. Emerging from the Middle Ages, Renaissance men discovered that the world was very much bigger than their predecessors had imagined. Just as they set their gaze on new horizons, they delved behind them into the past. That’s why they revamped the whole culture of Ancient Greece to inspire themselves artistically, with form as well as themes. The expansion of their universe paved the way for the discovery of perspective. Perspective in drawing, perspective in spirit and in reason. An age that was revolutionary in its own way, curious about everything, the Renaissance was good for artists, eloquent and rich in its love of beauty. An age where Man occupies a prime place in Art. By glorifying the physical attributes of men, painting and sculpture threw into relief the androgynous side of males, focussing on this aspect of beauty while still respecting the characteristics of the male gender. The search for beauty demands a balance of the genders.
That’s exactly what Claude Fournier chose to do with J’en Suis, by showing in pictures rather than words what he perceived of the masculinity around him. And by opting for the voice of comedy, no doubt because it’s easier to treat a serious subject lightly than to take the rocky path of tragedy. It’s a current trend in Quebec. We prefer to look at the saddest or most tormented aspects of our lives from this angle. J’en Suis is not unique. La Florida, Les Boys, La vie après l’amour (Life after Love) are local comedies which were box-office hits in Quebec and which spared nothing of the terrible anguish they dealt with. J’en Suis is an instance of this type of disguised humour. There are tragic elements in Dominique’s life. His rapport with his body, with women, particularly his mother, with other men. His pretensions to homosexuality, as feigned as it seemed, concealed something else. His unease with being a man. Exploring this avenue would have been interesting, but perhaps we are not yet ready for this kind of introspection.
I don’t believe that Dominique is at odds with his affiliation to the male gender, nor that he renounces his virile side. It’s rather that he has not come to terms with its female equivalent. Too obvious on the surface, too suppressed inside. For all sorts of reasons, arising both from himself and from the outside world. It’s strange that Roy was chosen to play such a character because he seems a perfect example of the opposite. In Roy there exists, unlike in Dominique, a fine balance of the forces of yin and yang. That will be Dominique’s quest throughout the film, the pursuit of harmony between his masculinity and his femininity.
