Gerald didn’t want to be beige

In the credits of his new film, confessions, Luc Picard thanks “all Quebec taxpayers”. With reason. Without the contribution of taxpayers, there would be no Quebec cinema.

I thought of these taxpayers, the vast majority of whom are honest and uneventful, when I saw confessions. Not so much because without their contribution of roughly $1 per head of pipe, Luc Picard’s very good film would not have seen the light of day. But rather because these will never be entitled to the attention and consideration reserved for the subject of confessionsGerald Gallant.

Gallant, whom Picard himself embodies on screen, had everything of a banal and ordinary guy. baby boomer who seemed to lead a tidy life in Donnacona, a suburb of Quebec. Married for over 20 years to a woman who volunteered at the church, he was a non-drinker, had a passion since heart bypass surgery for bike rides and trips to Puerto Plata.

In fact, Gallant was one of the worst contract killers in the history of Quebec. He worked for the Rock Machine and the Gang of the West during their war on the Hells Angels in the 1990s. He was a psychopath who killed meticulously, in cold blood, without a second thought, and who knew how to be discreet. For 30 years, despite 28 murders and 12 attempted murders, he escaped the police, even though he had his first name tattooed on his arm…

What Gérald Gallant seemed to fear more than anything, according to Luc Picard’s film – freely inspired by the book by journalists from the Montreal Journal Felix Seguin and Eric Thibault, Gallant: Confessions of a Hitman – was to be seen as beige and insignificant. That’s how his own mother defined him, whom he hated (it was mutual, it seems).

Gallant didn’t want to cause boredom, which his mistress hated, an accomplice — in murder — and road bike partner, employee of his family’s funeral home, who suddenly thought she was the Bonnie Parker of this couple of Bonnie & Clyde from Donnacona.

Traumatized by his childhood in Saguenay, ridiculed at school (which he left after fifth grade) because he was a stutterer, scorned because of his “below average intellectual potential” by his mother, Gérald Gallant found early a way to stand out: that of crime. From car thefts to bank robberies and stays in prison as so many internships in a criminal enterprise, he has won the trust of the bonzes of the underworld. Those who have ridiculous nicknames like “Baloune” or “Mom”, but who don’t hear to laugh.

Gallant saw himself as a soldier in the biker war who followed orders. The people he was murdering were criminals, he had convinced himself (disregarding the collateral victims of his murders). We should perhaps thank you, ironically his wife in the film (Éveline Gélinas), visiting him in prison.

Especially after his arrest in 2006, but also long before, even when he was accepting pledges from organized crime, Gérald Gallant was an informer and an informer for the police. Like Henry Hill, the main character of Goodfellas by Martin Scorsese, played by the late Ray Liotta, which he inevitably brings to mind.

We can not accuse Luc Picard – nor the screenwriter Sylvain Guy (Monica the grapeshot, Mafia Inc.) — to praise Gérald Gallant. In confessions, the women who knew Gallant alternately call him heartless, a coward, an asshole, and so on. If he kills his victims at close range, in disconcerting calm, like in a Tarantino film, he is not necessarily glorified. He’s a poor guy, not very bright, incapable of empathy.

The fact remains that he is presented in the media as “the most prolific contract killer” in the history of Quebec. And that I hear it in a certain way as a coat of arms of honor. He, too, may be looking at it with pride. In his despicable existence, he will have been the best at “something”. The champion of local mafia and biker killers.

It is for this reason that we are interested in him, with an unhealthy curiosity, just as we were fascinated before him by the Mesrine and Monica la mitraille, which have also been the subject of films. And whether beige or not, boring or not, limited quotient or not, we will remember Gérald Gallant. As we remember the name of the killer of the Poly attack (who also became a film character) more than that of his 14 victims.

He may not have been erected as a hero, he will remain incarcerated until he is 83 years old, but he will not have gone unnoticed. Like a former Hells Angels warlord, once targeted by Gallant, who died of common cancer at almost 70, who made headlines last week. The honest taxpayer with no history, the ordinary model citizen, will not be entitled to so much consideration.