Caroline (1964)

 

Keywords: Montreal; boulevard Décarie; ennuie; motherhood; domestic drudgery; workplace drudgery; modern living; anomie.

Nothing says “Mother’s Day” like a disenchanted young mother living in a Décarie boulevard high-rise, caught in a double bind of domestic drudgery and the banality of the modern workplace.

Clément Perron and Georges Dufaux’s Caroline is an example of Quebec’s New Wave cinema at its cool, mod best. Emphasis on the cool.

Don’t worry. It’s got a happy ending. Kind of.

You can find this classic in the original French here.

aj

À Saint-Henri le cinq septembre (1962)

 

Back to school special 2.

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À Saint-Henri le cinq septembre (1962), dir. Aquin

Produced with a veritable who’s-who of Quebec cinema superstars (Brault, Groulx, Jutra, Borremans, Carrière, Dufaux, Godbout, Owen, Portugais, and Lipsett among them, plus Hubert Aquin, of course) over the course of a single day in 1961—Tuesday, the 5th of September, the day after Labour Day (not unlike today), and the first day of school.

Working-class districts provide a particular frame through which one can understand a city, we’re told, and here Saint-Henri, in Montreal’s southwest, is the prism that’s used to come to terms with the metropolis of “French North America.”

Heavily inspired by the works of Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, and Jean Rouch, Hubert Aquin’s film is both probing and touching, a masterpiece of the new Quebec cinema of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s.

[late summer; back to school; Saint-Henri; dog days of summer; working-class districts; Lachine Canal; RCA Building; showgirls]

You can find Aquin’s film here in the original French, and here in English.

aj