Jesus of Montreal (1989)

Posted on Jan 24, 2006 under Fantasy |

Written and directed by Denis Arcand
Starring
- Lothaire Bluteau
- Catherine Wilkening
- Johanne-Marie Tremblay
- Remy Girard
- Robert Lepage

I’m not an actor (nor do I play one on TV), but I have heard it credibly contended that the role of Jesus is one of the hardest to play. I have no problem with that; I’d be more worried about actors who come in just sure of how to play the role. With two millenia of lore and conflicting interpretation heaped on a scant historical record (even considering the Gospels as history), I can imagine the weighty questions behind any portrayal: How do I form and present a personality for a character who is supposed by many to be utterly unique? How do I present a consistent Jesus? A Jesus who inspired passion and devotion? A Jesus who is human in the right ways without being human in the wrong ways? How do I play God without remaking God in my own image?

It follows, then, that a movie about an actor sincerely trying to play Jesus should be a compelling and searching drama. Jesus of Montreal fits that description, though it dances a little too freely around many of the issues that it purports to deal with. It’s a beautiful, moving, flawed picture that too often refuses to find its own center.

Young actor Daniel (Lothaire Bluteau) is offered the job of updating the stilted, decades-old passion play put on every season by a Catholic shrine. He begins his labors not merely by going back to Catholic theology and doctrine, but by exploring current scholarship and the more ambiguous areas in Christian thinking which passion plays don’t often address.

“How do the disciples keep their whites so bright? New FAB, with Dead Sea salt!”

With himself cast as Jesus, he starts recruiting other talented, idealistic actors:

- Constance (Johanne-Marie Tremblay) is a single mother who’s long been associated with the play in its previous form. It doesn’t take too long to find out that she’s also involved in a long-standing affair with Father Leclerc (Gilles Pelletier), the priest who hired Daniel in the first place. What could easily have been a cheap shot at the hypocrisy of organized religion becomes at least a little less cheap when we see Leclerc as a man who feels trapped in his role, but tries his best to do God’s work, even though he has no faith that God is guiding him.

- Martin (Remy Girard) works crummy jobs as a porno voiceover artist; in fact, the funniest scene in the movie shows him dutifully dubbing for two main characters, bringing a level of respect for his work that the work really doesn’t deserve.

- Rene (Robert Lepage) also works steadily in voiceovers, providing narration for cosmically-concerned documentaries. He’s only persuaded to join the cast when assured that, yes, he’ll be able to deliver Hamlets’ soliloquiy at some point in the play.

- Mireille (Catherine Wilkening) is a successful television model who’s tired of being seen as a piece of meat and wants a role that wants more from her than a glimpse of her ass, even if it means stretching herself and losing income.

Ooh. Pritty.

Yes, that’s right. Daniel is gathering his “disciples,” meeting them at their current jobs, essentially saying, “Come follow me,” and watching them leave their nets. And herein lies one of the essential balancing acts of this movie: How to include meaningful echoes of the Gospel story in the modern-day narrative without slipping into blatant allegory. It’s a pitched battle, and although it is lost before the movie ends, the effort is in itself noble.

Skipping over the rehearsals, we experience the new play as its first gaggle of observers does: at night, by firelight, without everyone in the cast changing roles and costumes as needed except for Jesus himself. This is not a catechism; Daniel & Co.’s narrative strips away theological preconceptions, purposely forcing an awareness of ambiguity into the perceptions of an audience who are maybe too familiar with the same old story told the same old way. Beyond the first-person sermons and teachings in the Gospels, we really know very little of what we think we know about the familiar Jesus: How he was brought up, what he meant to accomplish during his life, even what he looked like. Historical context is thrust upon the audience — the contemporary meaning of a vile execution by crucifixion, the conception of Jesus during his life as a devout Jew instead of the founder of a breakaway religion, and of course, rumors of his parentage. Throughout it all, Daniel is the only one who doesn’t break character to play narrator, maintaining his impassioned role as a teacher of ethics and social reformer, reciting the familiar aphorisms from the Sermon on the Mount with just enough change in wording and emphasis that their power isn’t blunted by familiarity. The crucifixion is presented as accurately as possible, right down to Daniel’s complete nudity, and the audience is drawn away to the last station, leaving Jesus hanging there on the cross alone. The coda, a discussion of the resurrection, is less a statement of a theological premise and more a discussion of rumor and over-hopeful thinking among the slain leader’s devotees.

“As long as we’re here, we might as well do the balcony scene too, right?”

Naturally, Father Leclerc hates it. This was supposed to be a dramatic rendition of the doctrines of the faith, not a discussion of the faith’s unsupportable ambiguities. I have to say that I do feel some sympathy for the Father at this point, as there is certainly the idea of fulfilling a contract lurking in the background here; if you’ve been contracted by a Catholic priest to update a Catholic passion play to be performed at a Catholic shrine, you might want to consider making it at least nominally Catholic in character. (On the other hand, the fact that Leclerc never checked in on their script or their rehearsals before opening night doesn’t say much for the man’s foresight.)

And how do others react? The most gushing bravos, and subsequent promotion of the play, is from the theatre patron crowd who came largely because of Daniel’s presence. Their praises are hyperbolic and more than a little familiar, because we’ve already seen them use the very same words to describe the performance of another actor in a small academic play, leading us to believe that they see nothing qualitatively different between this, the last performance they patronized (in both senses of the word), and the one they will next week. Perhaps the only observer who “gets it” is the frenzied woman who takes Daniel for the real Jesus and interrupts a performance to beg his forgiveness and blessing.

As I mentioned before, the temptation move from symbolism straight to allegory is strong in a movie like this, and it’s here that we see Arcand’s defenses weakening. Daniel accompanies Mireille to an audition for a beer commercial, and is disgusted at the contemptuous way in which the actresses are treated, especially by the director who had had a relationship with Mireille previously and now looks down on her for trying to find some asset of talent greater than her ass. It ends with Daniel turning over the equipment tables, and even beating someone with his belt; sound familiar?

“The Suits! Verily I say unto you, don’t trust the Suits!”

Mireille arranges for him to meet an attorney to defend against the assault charges, who’s also a whiz at entertainment management. There’s a lucrative future to be mapped out for a young actor-director who’s getting all of this publicity, and the attorney takes him to a classy restaurant in a highrise, overlooking Montreal, to tell him that “this city is yours if you want it.” Sound familiar? (It’s a scene that was played out again in Devil’s Advocate (1997), a movie not noted for its subtlety.)

It’s too bad that the race to the end of the movie becomes an Allegory Hunt, because as diverting as that pursuit can be (”Ooh, I just figured out who John the Baptist is!” “Ooh, there’s Leclerc’s ‘Pontius Pilate’ scene!” “Ooh, it’s a sacramental organ donor thing!” “Ooh, it’s the founding of a church which will misrepresent him for years to come!”), it obscures — and possibly on purpose — unanswered questions. Daniel remains to us a cypher; we’re watching a character whose heart we don’t know, try to find the truth about Jesus, another man we don’t know. In the end (not to be too ***spoileriffic*** or anything), a concussion has reduced him to disjointed sentences and prophetic mutterings, and we have to ask: Has Daniel come to understand and internalize Jesus? Has he come to actually believe himself to be the Christ, thanks to cerebral trauma? Or are his recent research binges the nearest materials at hand when his synapses start firing spontaneously?

You know, it’s entirely possible to be TOO OBVIOUS in one’s symbolism…

There are many valid points made here, about the ease with which Christ is reinterpreted for convenience, and the ways in which his legacy has been used to uphold the very hypocritical kinds of power structures that he preached against. (Nor are such ideas applied with too big a sledgehammer; the institutional reprisal that comes through Father Leclerc is shown to be expected and moderate rather than a kneejerk reaction by the Big Bad Church That Fears The Truth, and his little speech about how promoting ambiguity about Jesus doesn’t help the church to comfort the careworn rings true.) But in destroying preconceptions and misconceptions to leave nothing but ambiguity in their place, the movie fails to give us a core character in either Jesus or Daniel to show how far the misconceptions are in error. Daniel instead becomes another vague messiah.