We see the journey of a cultural giant unfold, but it is not a traditional biographical film. The documentary At the end of nothing, on the life and work of Marcel Sabourin, is a poetic and dense film. A strange creature, like the “sweet madness” of the 88-year-old character.
This 90-minute film signed by Jérôme Sabourin, the protagonist’s eldest son, shows the journey of a significant artist – actor, screenwriter and director, among others – who has contributed to around fifty films and around thirty series, in no longer teach at the National Theater School. Seasoned cinematographer, Jérôme Sabourin is directing his first film here, which is released in theaters on Friday March 15.
The evolution of Marcel Sabourin is that of Quebec in the 20the century. This son of a pharmacist and a stay-at-home mother from the Snowdon neighborhood in Montreal, got rid of the conventions of his time to become the iconoclastic character we have known since the mid-1950s. He embodies the generation that has become adult after the Second World War, the one who abandoned the Catholic religion and gave its letters of nobility to the Quebec language.
We are a little destabilized at the start of the documentary. The old man looks confused in his big house in Beloeil. He talks, talks, talks. He talks to ants, he counts the number of leaves on a tree, he gesticulates, grimaces and clowns. But we are quickly reminded that Marcel Sabourin is not a clown, he is simply as he has always been: whole, free and crazy.
Consistent, too. Generous. Emphatic. Without malice. A bit like Professor Mandible that he played in La Ribouldinguein the 1960s. His role in JA Martin photographer (Ecumenical Jury Prize and Best Actress Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1977), which he co-wrote with Jean Beaudin, also remains striking.
Beaudin’s memory is evoked in a moving scene fromAt the end of nothing altogether. Sabourin toasts with his friends Denys Arcand and Fernand Dansereau in honor of their traveling companions Jean Beaudin and Jean-Claude Labrecque, who died two weeks apart in May 2019. At almost 89 years old, one of the great sorrows of life is losing your old ones boyfriends…
Significant influence
Marcel Sabourin had a decisive influence on the baby boomer artists who took his “nothing pantoute” classes at the National Theater School. Robert Charlebois says in the film that his mentor changed his life by teaching him improvisation and a love of the Quebec language. Several of Charlebois’ successes (Commitment, All spread apart, There you areetc.) are signed Sabourin.
It was he who created the National Improvisation League, with his friend Robert Gravel, returning from a Canadiens game at the now defunct Montreal Forum. We would have taken more anecdotes from his companions in the artistic community, such as Michel Rivard, who appears briefly in At the end of nothing to tell how Sabourin recorded their conversations with his famous cassette tape recorder that he carried everywhere.
This tape recorder returns a few times in the film’s setting, notably in the dreamlike scenes filmed at the Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris. These minutes at the cemetery are among the passages which weigh down the documentary, but Sabourin is so flamboyant, so visionary, that we readily forgive him for these slightly bizarre scenes.