“This is the story of a brilliant CEGEP student disappointed by a grade given by a teacher she respects. She wears the veil. She’s a Muslim …
– If she wears the veil, we suspect that it is a Muslim, dad!
– She could have just worn a veil! ”
Welcome to my daily life. Where each pleonasm, each tautology is immediately noted by Fiston-le-pointilleux.
“This is the story of a brilliant CEGEP student, Muslim, disappointed by a note given by her philosophy teacher. He is an excellent teacher, who gives a lesson on Spinoza …
– Spinazzola? Oh no. This is the Italian player.
– It’s not all about your football references! ”
They laughed. They and they. We met at the table, for the first time, at six: parents, Fistons and friends. Teenagers aged 15 and 17. I prepared campanelle with tomato sauce. You can never be too careful with teenagers. Overnight, they can change their dietary orientation. The burger eater of the day before turns vegan, and vice versa. We keep our fingers crossed that they are flexitarians. Compromise tastes much better.
“This is the story of a Muslim student at CEGEP who asks for a review of her grade in philosophy, because her teacher failed her and she is afraid for her R score and her admission to university . Her dissertation was off to a good start, but she quoted a passage from the Koran when the teacher had specified that no religious text could serve as an argument …
– Me too, I have to meet my philosophy teacher tomorrow to talk about my first essay. I was disappointed with my rating. I don’t understand what happened.
– Did you quote a religious text too? »R. is Son’s friend. She is a brilliant college student who likes her philosophy teacher, but who is (too) worried, like many college students, about the repercussions of a bad grade on her R score.
I smiled at the synchronicity of our two stories. The one I painfully tried to tell them is the starting point ofA revision, first feature film by Catherine Therrien, from a screenplay by Louis Godbout and Normand Corbeil, two former professors of philosophy, which will be showing Thursday.
“It’s a Quebec film. I think you might like it. »I felt that their interest was not as keen as when I told them about my impromptu meeting with Denis Villeneuve, my table neighbor in a bar the day before. Yes, dear R., I was a step away from Timothée Chalamet …
They would undoubtedly protest in unison and say that I am exaggerating, but they have prejudices about Quebec cinema. For them, it’s a daddy’s cinema. A dad exasperated by the amount of mediocre series they automatically gobble up on Netflix, victims of fashion. And now I prove them right by speaking like an old man …
The main criticism that these teens make with most Quebec films is that they do not identify with them. The dialogues of the characters of their age ring false in their ears.
As if they had been written by screenwriters of their parents’ generation (which is often the case). Son gives me an example: a scene fromAntigone by Sophie Deraspe during which teenagers spontaneously whistle a tune by Félix Leclerc.
“I have the impression that we are presented as we imagine, or as we would like us to be, rather than as we really are,” he says. A fantasized idea that the old have of the young, in short. “Precisely, I think thatA revision comes closer to who you are and to your concerns, ”I told him, finally trying to convince him.
This hard-hitting film, which I really liked, is very fashionable. It deals with ethics and religious culture, pedagogy and education, identity issues and political correctness.
How far do institutions go to show a good profile? Are we doing “good” when our benevolence is on display, to give ourselves a clear conscience? How much can you harm yourself and others when you stick to your principles and refuse to compromise? Even, or even more so, when one has the conviction to be right.
It is in its nuances thatA revision finds all its richness. In its refusal of ready-made answers, of Manichaeism, of the confirmation of prejudices and a priori. In this film as in life, the obstinacy of some is reflected in the mirror of the intransigence of others. They are two sides of the same coin.
The anti-religious inclination of many atheist intellectuals, in Quebec traumatized by the Great Darkness, is opposed, with great support from Enlightenment accounts, to the deemed unshakeable faith of those who rely on the millennial interpretation of texts. Holy. Some reproach others sometimes for their paternalism, sometimes for their credulity.
The truth is that you can be an open-minded professor of philosophy, an exegete of Spinoza (or even Pascal), and not see the blind spot of your own religious intolerance. How one can be a brilliant student, in good faith and with faltering faith, who does not measure the scope of his actions.
A revision could have been a thesis film or a cynical pamphlet on the so-called liberticidal era, like a satire by Denys Arcand. Fortunately, it is a work which, despite an unnecessary twist and a blue flower conclusion, invites reflection. By the most ingenious of mechanisms: empathy for complex characters, beautifully interpreted by Nour Belkhiria and Patrice Robitaille (the cégépienne and the teacher), credible in their gray areas and their doubts, their contradictions and their paradoxes.
One scene in particular, during a radio show where the teacher, who is also an essayist, is confronted by a host, a young feminist and a racialized activist, however made me fear the worst. The film, at this point, gives way to cliché and caricature woke. The teacher, who is my age, suddenly speaks a speech similar to that of the baby boomers who claim that it is the left that has changed, especially not them.
Suddenly I understood better the reserve expressed by my teenagers.
A revision will open on the 27the Cinemania festival on November 2. It will hit theaters on November 4.