Quebec cinema | The new great seduction

viking, by Stéphane Lafleur, had not yet been released at the end of September, when it became only the tenth Quebec film in history to receive a rating of 2 (remarkable) from Médiafilm. The highest honor bestowed by the venerable body, with a 1 (masterpiece) rating only awarded after 20 years.

The reviews were to match. My colleague Marc-André Lussier spoke of a “high-flying exercise, mastered from start to finish”. “Stéphane Lafleur refines his unique style from film to film. vikinghis fourth, is in all respects his most accomplished,” wrote François Lévesque in The duty. ” viking is a great success,” summed up Maxime Demers in The Journal of Montreal.

viking was recognized as one of the Top 10 Canadian Films of 2022 by the Toronto International Film Festival, where it had its world premiere. Each of Stéphane Lafleur’s four feature films has also been selected for one of the four biggest festivals on the planet: Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Toronto.

When I met him last fall, the filmmaker admitted to me that he hoped to rally a wider audience with his new film, while being lucid about the situation of cinema in theaters in 2022 when we are not showing Following Top Gun orAvatar…

“I dare to hope that we will widen the audience a little with this film, he confided to me. The proposal is a bit left field, but if people put their mind to it, I think they can find something to benefit from it. If people bother…

Let’s talk numbers. A rating 2 from Médiafilm, 8.5/10 in The Pressfour stars in The Journal of Montrealfour and a half stars in The duty. How many people bothered to go and see viking At the movie theater ? Less than 20,000 people, according to the Statistical Institute of Quebec. It makes you wonder if the critics would have done better to say: “Above all, don’t go there! »

Some 20,000 spectators is already more than the number of people who saw the excellent Falcon Lakeby Charlotte Le Bon, who won the prestigious Louis-Delluc prize for first film in France, the Goncourt equivalent of the first work.

Even the most mediocre Quebec soap operas attract 50 times more viewers than the most remarkable Quebec films. And 10 times more viewers than the most popular Quebec films.

This was not always the case. Of the 20 films that attracted the most Quebecers to cinemas between 1981 and 2021, 6 were made here: Seraph, a man and his sin (1.34 million spectators), Good Cop, Bad Cop (1.32 million), From father to cop (1.24), The great seduction (1.19), The Boys (1.12) and The Boys 2 (1.03). Audiences comparable to those of most popular Quebec series and soap operas.

In comparison, of the 20 films that have accumulated the most box office receipts in 2022, only one is from Quebec (December 23) in a host of Hollywood productions. “It is clear that it is American cinema, with 84% of admissions [meilleur résultat depuis 2016]which is back in force in 2022”, explained to me this week Claude Fortier, coordinator at the Observatory of culture and communications of Quebec.

This is hardly surprising, as the releases of many blockbusters have been postponed during the pandemic. But that’s not reassuring either. The 10 most popular Quebec films of all time were all released between 1997 and 2009. What has changed since then? Netflix was launched in Canada in 2010…

The popularity and proliferation of online platforms have profoundly changed cinema consumption habits. The pandemic, and now inflation, has of course done nothing to reverse this heavy trend. The phenomenon, moreover, is global.

Everywhere, more and more people go to cinemas for the attraction of thrills. For the wow effect, which fills the eyes and ears, which explodes and which is thunderous. For the added value of image and sound on the big screen, special effects, impressive stunts, blue giants in the ocean and F-22s in the sky.

American cinema has the means for its ambitions that Quebec cinema does not have in such matters. For the rest, for what is less easily distinguishable with the naked eye, for more intimate or less spectacular films, there is an expression that sums up the fact that fewer people now go to the cinema: the comfort of home. And so much for Sara Mishara’s magnificent cinematography in viking.

How can Quebec cinema reach the public in such a context? On Friday, I read my colleague Émilie Côté’s very interesting file on the subject and I said to myself that it was not enough for a film to be good to attract the public in theaters.

Quebec cinema has been very good, in a variety of genres, in 2022.Arsenault & Sonsby Rafaël Ouellet, in confessionsby Luc Picard, ranked second among the most popular Quebec films of the year, which attracted approximately one million fewer people than The great seduction 20 years ago…

We will no longer see growth similar to that of the early 2000s, when the market share of Quebec cinema has continued to grow, rising from 4.5% to a record 18.2% in six years. We no longer consume cinema as we did in 2005. The model is broken. We can persist or we can adapt.

We must reach the spectators where they are, and not only the young people. There will always be cinephiles, like me, who prefer to see the majority of films in the cinema. But we are a tiny minority.

The main challenge for Quebec cinema is its “discoverability”, as audiovisual experts say. Quebec films are drowned in a sea of ​​essentially American content on platforms, which are also American.

“If you can’t beat them, join them”, they say on Sunset Boulevard. Without making a pact with the devil, we must ensure that platforms such as Netflix, Prime Video and Crave showcase Quebec films, which must be made available more quickly.

Quebec platforms must themselves do more to promote Quebec cinema. Recent films remain rare on Club Illico and Tou.TV. Public television in particular, Radio-Canada and Télé-Québec, must play a more prominent role. Radio-Canada, which has abandoned the Quebec Cinema gala, has still not decided on a new program format in order to “contribute to the influence of local cinema”, as it announced in October.

I come back to the figures: if we added up the spectators who saw a Quebec film at the cinema in the last year, we would not arrive at the average number of viewers for the gala that Radio-Canada no longer broadcasts. And yet, in 30 years, what will we remember about what has most marked Quebec culture in 2022: viking Where Discussions with my parents ?