Yves P. Pelletier has several strings to his bow. Director, screenwriter, actor, comedian and radio host, he is also a “gatherer”, he says, and a traveler. In Confusedan irresistible learning story in which he recalls, with a good dose of self-mockery and a lot of sensitivity, his first trips, the beginnings of RBO, his loves, his friendships and his bereavements, he takes advantage of his mania for picking up everything .
“I’ve been caving among all the things I’ve picked up in my life,” he confides on the phone. I sorted and filed everything. At some point, I realized the simultaneity of several things that I had somewhat categorized, segmented, in my head. It came off as a story, with a dramatic and emotional arc. »
An avid reader of Tintin, a communications student, the young film buff from Laval we discover is thirsty for freedom and dreams of meeting the woman of his life: “I wanted to be the perfect guy. Obviously, instinctively, I make bad choices, but I have to be somewhere. In my show, I said that my loves were my greatest happiness, but for the girls I lived with, it’s the opposite. My 1980s, that was it. It’s a Saturnian return. »
In a theater class, where he plays the role of aspiring actresses, the teacher, who saw him as a Harlequin, calls him a playboy. To the ears of the future creator of Stromgol, Swami Fréchette and Mr. Caron, the insult sounds like a truth, an epiphany. In his own way, the teacher had just given him permission to be light, to amuse the gallery. Unconstrained, unattached.
“I was happy because it was true: on Fridays, I was fooling around on the radio with my friends. RBO was completely embryonic; before CKOI, we were on the mode of improvisation. All I wanted was to be authentic. I wanted to make cinema that looks like me. I would say I was more like a boat that has no anchor, tossed about by the waves, with lots of intentions. I’ve never been very, very groundy. Confused, that pretty much sums it up. »
leave, come back
The idea of going back to his childhood memories came to him about ten years ago. Yves P. Pelletier wanted to go back to basics, to write a self-fiction comic as he did for student newspapers. However, he rather threw himself into writing a show, Me ?, which he presented across Quebec, thus reconnecting with small venues and the proximity of spectators. In the process, the game became less caricatural and the artist allowed himself to be more transparent in his way of telling himself. He then said to himself that if he had to redo a show, it would be more personal. At the end of the tour, a book forced itself into her mind.
“There are lots of people who express themselves, either on social networks or in books, I add my voice to that because I have the taste. I am 61 years old, I was born in 1961. My mother died at 60 years old. There are all sorts of unconscious things that have to come out and that make me want to tell that. In fact, I started from zero, telling myself that I was going to put myself in my head from 1983, my head from 1987 so that the narrator’s point of view was in 1993. Today, I am elsewhere. »
In fact, the eccentric introvert, who has not suffered from being deprived of travel for two years, is no longer like the one he was at 20, in a hurry to flee the family home to conquer of the world, let yourself be carried away by chance encounters.
“I like being in Quebec. I am also a homebody, a solitary person. I have the happiness of being in a couple; During the pandemic, we took good care of each other. I found drafts of letters from the time. I wanted to leave, to travel. The premature death of my brother was even stronger; life is fragile, we are vulnerable. Imagine if I had told myself that I would work all my life and travel in retirement: I would have arrived in the middle of a pandemic! »
With the current situation, the time is probably not conducive to travel. Basically, no more than he was when he was 20 years old, as he implicitly recalls in Confused, especially in the passages on Eastern Europe: “In the 1980s, there was the Berlin Wall, tensions, the war in Lebanon, a South Korean Boeing had been shot down by the Soviets. As a teenager, I was haunted by the bomb; we feared a world war for a while. The fall of the Berlin Wall has created a kind of myth, but there are international tensions that have persisted throughout this time. In Russia, there is something worrying, there is a possibility of slippage. »
The story ends in 1993, when Yves P. Pelletier is getting ready, like the reporter imagined by Hergé, to go to Tibet, a country that has greatly upset him. Is it too early to dream of a second volume?
“If I had to write a sequel, I would have to dive back into it. I’m working on long-term projects, documentaries and feature films, but when will all of this materialize? Will this come to fruition? It doesn’t belong to me. I go there instinctively, with my heart, my head. My concern was to create a story that held together. I don’t write to convince or seduce people who don’t like me or don’t give a fuck about me. Me, I want to be entertaining. ” Mission accomplished.