There are some very beautiful scenes in “Testament,” Denys Arcand’s latest film. Bright scenes full of poetry that remind us why Arcand is a monument of Quebec cinema. We have often praised Arcand, the dialogue writer. The filmmaker of “The Decline of the American Empire” and “Jesus of Montreal” is also a talented director.
Published at 12:53 am. Updated at 06:00.
The character played by Marie-Mai, a young woman who visits every week a disappointed septuagenarian in need of affection (Rémy Girard), is bathed in a golden light, like Mary Magdalene in a painting by Georges de la Round. The faces of young Aborigines light up around a lacrosse field in Kanesatake. Two house painters’ rollers collide as they erase the last traces of a piece of history.
Arcand gives the story its own rhythm. He films the Quebec autumn, a metaphor for the twilight of life, with the same elegance as in Les Invasions Barbares. However, unlike “Barbarian Invasions,” we are not tied to the gallery of figures in “Testament.” They don’t have enough depth, flesh and humanity to allow us to do this. Some fly by, the time for an answer in a sketch (the duo Marcel Sabourin and Clémence DesRochers deserve a special mention).
To be honest, Denys Arcand all too often prefers the effect of a sardonic style to open emotion in his increasingly reactionary thesis films. Furthermore, “Testament” presents itself as a series of hackneyed sketches that sometimes seem lifted from a bloated “Bye Bye” around a main plot that is nevertheless full of ethical dilemmas and dramatic potential.
Jean-Michel (Girard), a semi-retired archivist, lives in a retirement home that is targeted by activists out of respect for First Nations people. They refuse to leave the site until what they say is an offensive 19th-century fresco depicting Jacques Cartier and half-naked indigenous leaders is removed. The minister responsible (Caroline Néron) calls on the director of the RPA (Sophie Lorain) to immediately solve the problem of these propagandized “Indians” who are damaging the reputation of her government.
To the complex questions of respect for art history and the history of a people victimized by cultural genocide, Denys Arcand responded with gentle satire and simplistic caricature, discrediting with conventional cynicism all the demands of activist groups, indigenous and otherwise. A brief appearance by Robert Lepage seems to summarize Arcand’s position on the controversy surrounding the SLĀV and Kanata pieces.
Testament begins by lampooning a fictional Quebec awards ceremony, named as a tribute to pioneers of Quebec culture and given almost exclusively to young women with unlikely compound first names. Among the clichés of feminist supporters of intersectionality, we naturally find a veiled Muslim woman and the “author” of the poetry collection “Vagines on Fire.” When it comes to female characters, Arcand has been more interested in the cliché of the young luxury escort for 40 years…
PHOTO PROVIDED BY TVA FILMS
Sophie Lorain and Remy Girard
We know the refrain, delivered here in the form of an inner monologue by a disaffected baby boomer waiting to die between a “trivial Quebec film” (his words) and a walk to the cemetery. Jean-Michel’s entire complaint came from the litany that the most embittered representatives of his generation had reserved for their descendants.
It is the broken record of the commonplaces about Homo quebecensis that the historical majority loses its orientation, privileges and Latin expressions and feels limited by the recognition of rights against discriminated minorities. The guy who confuses political correctness with a change in morality feels threatened by MPs sitting with babies and regrets that millennials haven’t read On Grammatology or seen Andrei Rublev too busy getting tattoos to leave and drink alcohol. Sangria on the terrace.
Arcand is so good at capturing the zeitgeist that he makes a hilarious comment about gender-segregated toilets… “hashtag irony,” as young people don’t say. We will of course say that he is making fun of everyone, which is not wrong. He gently makes fun of himself and his generation, the older people with a lack of technology or the Sunday cyclists returning home who brag about their mileage. The fact is that he has his favorite targets that he inflicts more blows on than others.
Ridiculing a minister’s bureaucratic gobbledygook is not the same as mocking the demands of generations of ostracized groups.
The amount of rumors Arcand spreads about young activists (or disengaged young people, as the case may be) seems to be more important to him than the coherence of his scenario. It depicts an incredible romance between two quasi-strangers (who talk to each other like in the Victorian era) or even an affectless family reunion after decades of separation. For the core of a conspiracy to be credible in the 21st century, one can hardly ignore the existence of a search engine as banal as Google…
Between the complete pessimism of his alter ego Jean-Michel and the relative optimism at the end of his film, one wonders where Denys Arcand is going with this. In one scene, he peppers the speech of a nationalist MP who worries about the Louisianaization of Quebec with clichés. In the credits, he films a Cajun group performing the (very beautiful) traditional song that the Chosen One refers to…
We leave Testament with the impression that, in the eyes of Denys Arcand, nothing resonates in this “peaceful province of a boring country with no room for maneuver,” as Rémy Girard’s character says. The filmmaker has a mania for placing himself above the fray (and his company), like Jean-Pierre Ronfard’s Machiavelli character in Comfort and Indifference. In the end, Jean-Michel pays lip service to the fact that he must care about the climate crisis. For his part, Denys Arcand seems to be saying: After me comes the flood.
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