In a Canada where Quebec is entirely assimilated and where the last vestiges of the French language are fading, political prisoners, activists for sovereignty, are serving life sentences in execrable conditions. Overnight, after years of detention, the convicts were found dead in the early morning, sitting on the toilet of their cell.
Although the jailers search in vain for the source of the problem, the viewer quickly understands that the deaths are caused by a tapeworm that its host, number 973 (Jean-François Casabonne), places every evening in the basin so that it can slip through. through the prison waterworks to his next victim.
This worm, and the desire to try his hand at science fiction – “a genre which almost ontologically relates to cinema” – in a film which “would be familiar with the collective destiny of Quebecers”, had haunted Simon Lavoie for several years. However, it was a feeling of urgency, rekindled by the pandemic, which allowed the filmmaker to Laurentie (2011) and Those who make revolutions half-heartedly have only dug themselves a grave (2016) to place the last pieces of his puzzle.
“The question of the future of Quebec keeps me up at night. What I perceive as a slow erosion of our language and the flattening of our cultural traits seems to be taking place in perfect indifference. I felt the urgency to embrace this somewhat taboo and uncomfortable nationalist thought. »
The filmmaker had such faith in his project that he threw himself headlong into the great and grueling adventure of self-production, with all that that implies in terms of constraints, precariousness and risks. “Today, you can see a few logos in the credits, but initially, I only had Arts Council grants to get started. With this modest budget, I bought the filming scraps from the TV series The night Laurier Gaudreau woke up, to be able to shoot my film on film. »
Jean-François Casabonne, who plays the main role, jumped headlong into the adventure with the man who directed him in The little girl who loved matches too much (2017). “It really is a fantastic privilege to be able to explore the interiority of a character in this way, that of a locked man who seeks to release what is brewing inside him. Simon invites the public to a radical experience, and I could only embark on this audacity. »
Hybridity and roughness
Although modest in its means, Melt does not lack ambition. Filled with unusual metaphors, the film is also intended to be the confluence of several genres, including the cinematographic essay, horror, science fiction, the political pamphlet, the documentary and silent cinema.
“I have the impression that something fruitful is born from this clash between genres,” maintains the filmmaker. In these clashes, there are astonishing creations of meaning, contradictions which forge a kind of advancement for the language of cinema. From the start, I had the desire, in the context of this production, to make a film that would allow me all the daring, all the freedoms. »
This heterogeneity of tones is perceptible in all aspects of the film, from the interpretation to the staging, including the image. So, Melt was shot in 16mm format, with an aspect ratio of 1.66/1 reminiscent of post-war French auteur cinema. The images have otherwise not been cleaned or cropped, and all jitters, scratches, dust and punctures have been retained.
“It’s a choice made in reaction against this kind of homogenization that all images have these days. The imagery that comes to us from platforms like Netflix is so uniform, icy, it makes me nauseous. With the transition to digital, a whole organic, material and physical side of cinema has been lost a little. It is also in line with our scenario, which was not refined for ten years and reread by around fifty people, but which starts from an intuition, from an impulse. »
Still in this desire to preserve his film from globalist sanitization, Simon Lavoie chooses to transpose the majority of his dialogues, all those spoken in English, into subtitles, in the style of silent cinema, in a refusal to “make people hear this language in a Quebec film, and thus contribute to its primacy to the detriment of French. »
Interrogate memory
Appearing before the judge, a quarter of a century after his incarceration, Matricule 973 renounces all his political convictions. Once released, he no longer recognizes the world in which he lived. In the streets of Montreal, he no longer hears his language. Reconnecting with resistance fighters, he understands that the tapeworm that inhabits his bowels is more than a simple parasite, and that it in some way represents the memory and knowledge of the Quebec people.
Like this worm, which becomes a symbol of the erasure and rebirth of memory, Simon Lavoie’s film questions the relationship the viewer has with it. To do this, he notably uses archive images, and quotes from thinkers such as Fernand Dumont, Maurice Séguin, André Laurendeau or Hubert Aquin, declaimed by the prisoners who seek in this word still under construction an impulse of life. “Simon chose to film in the same prison that served as the setting for the film Orders (1974), by Michel Brault. We are immersed in the memory of a Quebec cultural reference and, at the same time, the film constantly questions us about ways to revive this common history. It’s brilliant,” underlines Jean-François Casabonne.
This process also works in a cinema-vérité style sequence, in which the director documents the reality of men going eel fishing, and which is reminiscent in tone and form of the cinema of Pierre Perrault. “This tradition, practiced for hundreds of years, is in the process of being lost. It’s something that testifies to our relationship with the territory, and that we must cherish and protect at all costs,” he says.
The message that Simon Lavoie hammers home is clear. For a people to be able to hold the levers that will help them confront the major crises facing the world, they must first have a solid identity.
“I have the impression that since the failure of the second referendum, we have internalized the accusations of xenophobia and withdrawal into identity that our political adversaries have thrown at us, and we are now prisoners of them. It is still astonishing that a society of water carriers from extreme poverty and under-education, in a few years, has become a white society which generates oppression. I fear that we are missing this historic window of opportunity which is closing due to demographic pressures and globalization. To make the necessary decisions on the climate crisis and other contemporary issues, we need all our levers. »
The film Melt hits theaters on June 28.