HAS Everybody talks about itDenys Arcand, in response to criticism concerning the fact that his film Will relies on a double register, the comic and the serious, replied that there were also “some jokes in Hamlet.
The reply was bold. Comparison or simple literary reference? If I were asked to find a famous referent for Arcand’s film, I would rather think of Molière and his great social comedies, these comedies of manners and character from which emerge some of the types that we still recognize today.
Like Molière, Arcand painted in Will — his most recent film, which I dare not call his last — the portrait of a society whose failings, inconsistencies and excesses he explores. With undisguised pleasure, the spectator witnesses the trial of a world presented under the magnifying glass of a camera as generous as it is merciless.
Everything goes there. The professional demonstrators, appropriating the causes of the day in the name of absolute good, the compulsive athletes, the hypocritical politicians, the scandal-producing media, without forgetting the countless and unspeakable weaknesses of those we call “the elders” . The most missing from this repertoire are a few extensions of natural hair around the faces of the television presenters so that the illusion of the real thing is complete.
Of course, each episode is caricatured, exaggerated, even unfair. From there to deducing that it is a reactionary film, I allow myself to doubt it. However, we would have easily done without, at the opening, the literary prize giving sequence, which is frankly crazy and not very credible. But what anthology scenes are that of the arrival of Gaston Lepage and Louis-José Houde as building painters responsible for masking the incriminated painting. Or even Robert Lepage and Yves Jacques as guardians of artistic heritage. It is up to everyone to then debate art and freedom more seriously.
Witness to these scenes bordering on the burlesque, a character, from his retirement home, observes the events. He is a man without pretensions and, one might add, without qualities, simply seeking to understand the world in which he is immersed. Rémy Girard, in this role of “ordinary man” struggling with a society of eccentrics, brings to mind the “ordinary guy” of Charlebois or the “good guy” of Richard Desjardins. A man who himself needs support to manage his life, but does not hesitate to help a person in distress when the opportunity arises.
For Will, a diagnostic film and an iconoclastic film, the filmmaker has created this type of “ordinary man”, brother of Philinte and cousin of Alceste, who knows how to resist the ambient chaos through his ability to listen and empathize. In this film as in the previous ones, Denys Arcand poses as a skeptical moralist who, like Molière in his time, questions the excesses of his time.