JESUS OF MONTREAL
It must have been about 30 years ago that I saw Jules Dassin’s He Who Must Die, a popular art-house movie at the time and one of my first foreign films. Dassin, an American expatriate chased to Europe by the Hollywood blacklist, was a highly skilled film noir director whose best efforts included The Naked City, Thieves’ Highway, and Night and the City. He Who Must Die, set on Crete in 1921, was a French picture based on Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel The Greek Passion, concerning the performers in a passion play whose theatrical roles take over their real lives as they suffer from Turkish oppression; the theme was that if Christ came back today, he would be crucified all over again.
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I avoided Jesus of Montreal at the Toronto film festival last fall, and I wasn’t looking forward to seeing it when it finally got to Chicago this summer. (The fact that foreign-language films now commonly take a year or more to reach our theaters seems to be largely the result of big-studio imperialism–the cultural mandate that we see without delay, for instance, the infantile proto-fascist ravings of Andrew Dice Clay.) I knew that it was supposed to be a satire, but my aversion to the subject matter and lingering doubts about the facile cynicism of Denys Arcand’s previous feature, The Decline of the American Empire (1985), made me fear the worst.
An actor in a costume drama named Daniel Coloumbe (Lothaire Bluteau) is spotted by a Catholic priest (Gilles Pelletier), who invites him to “modernize,” restage, and play the lead role in a passion play that is held annually for tourists on the grounds of a church overlooking downtown Montreal. Daniel enlists Constance (Johanne-Marie Tremblay), a friend from acting school now working in a soup kitchen, to play Mary Magdalene; Mireille (Catherine Wilkening), a French model working in TV commercials, is signed up to play the Virgin Mary; and two actors–one who dubs porn films for a living (Remy Gerard) and another who lectures at a planetarium (Robert Lepage)–fill the other parts. Living collectively in Constance’s apartment, they write the new version of the play.
The movie’s centerpiece, which is not especially satirical, is an abbreviated version of the passion play itself–a fascinating extended sequence that is in certain respects the best passage in the film. Alternately essayistic and dramatic, with most of the actors narrating as well as playing various parts, it contains everything from Christian miracles (such as Jesus walking on water and passing out loaves of bread to the spectators) to archaeological inquiry (Constance scraping dirt off a religious mosaic) to diverse historical speculations about Jesus. (One of these–the possibility that Jesus might have been the illegitimate son of a Roman soldier, based on references in Jewish texts of the period to Jesus as Yesha Ben Pantera rather than Yesha Ben Joseph–becomes the focus of the priest’s disapproval.)
