To say is to do. The jack-of-all-trades of boards and screens Denise Filiatrault was one of the first Quebecers to shoot in France. It was in the 1970s and she spoke sharply there, since she embodied characters claiming it.
Quebecer Yves Jacques also plays in French and in French when he has been hired in France for twenty years. He can also sound Parisian so easily — and even golden triangle, a chic corner of the Parisian district of the Champs-Élysées — that he recently played the couturier Yves Saint Laurent in kissat TNM.
When Antoine Bertrand’s turn came to break through on the screens on the other side, the compatriot paid for himself, did not fool around with the puck and had his forehead all the way around his head, blowing his chops. Tigidou lai lai, and five times rather than one.
If I keep my accent in a film, it’s not to abandon it in life. But I choose my words.
In Three times nothing, the choice to keep his accent was all the easier since Antoine Bertrand embodies an itinerant Quebecer in Paris. The role was tailor-made by French director Nadège Loiseau, who had previously worked with him for The little tenant (2016).
“Nadège wanted the character to be Quebecers from the outset”, explains Antoine Bertrand in a telephone interview, granted “in the woods, at the top of a mountain”, according to his explanations. “She and I like each other. She has already said that she loves me in all that I am, including my Quebecness. »
For his next French shoot, in a few weeks, he himself offered the director to keep his natural accent. “It didn’t change much of the story. For me, keeping my accent can make me much freer as an actor. »
The reverse is also true, sometimes. Antoine Bertrand, a theater school graduate, can play Racine or Feydeau with the expected accent, as he has embodied a contemporary Frenchman in other Franco-French films. “It all depends on the story, the context, the genre, summarizes the versatile actor. In a comedy, a different accent brings an additional funny and sympathetic touch. »
The fat laugh
The recipe is proven everywhere. The Marseille singspeak is quite often used in France to camp a simpleton from the South ignorant of the main and essential realities of Paris. The actor Fernandel (1903-1971) made it a specialty, including in the cinema of Marcel Pagnol.
To adapt The time of secrets, memories of the same Pagnol, the director Christophe Barratier rather played with fifty shades of tone. An actor from Marseilles recorded the script with strong intonations to teach the typical southern way to actors from all over France. The result lets almost everyone express themselves in their own way, in fact especially as a Parisian. So we play Pagnol without the accent of Pagnol, and this sweetening has been debated.
The issue of accents in cultural productions, mass media, educational institutions and society in general thus constantly raises controversy, there as here. The critical reception from the movie Alineinspired by the life of Celine Dion, focused a little on the way the Frenchwoman Valérie Lemercier tried to imitate the speech of her model.
“If you’ve been living in France like me for decades and you speak with a Quebec accent, you’re told fifty times a day: ‘Ah but, you’re Canadian. Ah, that’s a cute accent. Ah, but Celine Dion, she’s really dumb,” explains Quebecer André Thibault, professor of French linguistics at the Sorbonne, switching from one accent to another.
“At some point, we are no longer capable. We adapt. In addition, when I teach, my goal is for the students to listen to the content. I teach a lot of foreigners. My master’s classes are three-quarters full of Chinese. I have to articulate a lot to make myself understood. »
Antoine Bertrand, he speaks Quebec behind the camera, on the French sets as in the country. “If I keep my accent in a film, it’s not to abandon it in life,” he explains. But I choose my words. »
The actor, known for his frankness, explains that when a Frenchman tries to imitate him to ridicule him (again, by ridiculing himself, because very few manage to do it correctly), he politely asks him to he would dare to do the same with a Senegalese accent in front of a Senegalese. “It’s very effective,” he says. But imitating my accent is not necessarily a joke. You quickly feel it if it’s clumsy affection or petty condescension. »
An old case
Discrimination based on accent is called “glottophobia” in France. A bill adopted by the National Assembly, now blocked in the Senate, aims “to promote the diversity of pronunciation of the French language” and to prohibit discrimination based on one or the other way of speaking.
In French Canada, we speak rather of “accentism”, a neologism formed like the words “sexism” or “racism”. The psychologist Nathalie Freynet was the subject of a pioneering doctoral thesis defended in 2019. The work focuses on the effects of discrimination on speakers by focusing on the Canadian Francophonie, an ideal environment for this subject.
“Everyone speaks with an accent and people are naturally prejudiced about ways of speaking,” says Ms.me Freynet, herself a francophone from Manitoba. Intergroup dynamics explain the experience of this stigmatization. »
For her, discrimination is transactional and people manage the perception of their tone in different ways. “If someone is told that he speaks badly, that he has a funny accent, he can stop expressing himself or use his language less,” she notes. In a minority situation for francophones who are bilingual, this is an additional factor in the transfer to English. »
Hence the importance of hearing a diversity of accents in all the media to respect regional identities, but also the history of these communities. Radio-Canada, the only pan-Canadian general-interest French-language broadcaster, has an obvious responsibility from this point of view.
“The discrepancy between the French spoken at Radio-Canada, very Quebecois, even Montreal, creates insecurity among Francophones in minority settings: they do not feel heard, explained last month in a special section of the To have to sociolinguistics researcher Adéla Sebkova, who is preparing a thesis on the subject. Recently, I read comments from Internet users even wondering ironically if the Manitoba newscast hadn’t been made in Paris: the host and several journalists on the team were French. This creates a strangeness; people wonder, “Is this really about my community?” »
Again, saying is doing. “I think the media are making more and more efforts to include diversity in their programming,” says psychologist Nathalie Freynet. She cites the case of Unis TV, whose mandate it is to reflect pan-Canadian diversity. “For a long time, we talked about the accent of Radio-Canada, which was in fact the French accent. There was only this one, who communicated the idea that there was only one way to speak well. The diversity of accents normalizes the different ways of expressing oneself and gives value to each. »