Yesterday morning I attended the press screening of a film from Quebec.
I naturally focused on the soundtrack, following the column I wrote about the ubiquity of English songs in “My Mother’s Men” and “The Time of a Summer.”
Well, in Solo by Sophie Dupuis (opened September 8), I counted fourteen songs in English, compared to just six in French.
They’ll tell me that the movie is set in the world of drag queen bars and that it’s easier to have fake breasts in ABBA than it is in Smiling Boot.
But the director was able to place Mitsou’s fabulous song Dis-moi, dis-moi for drag choreography. So why not a little more Mitsou and French songs to get our butts moving in our films?
THE WOOD LANGUAGE
I knew I was touching a sensitive nerve by writing about this topic.
Françoise wrote to me: “I had the pleasure of seeing the two Quebec films you are talking about and, like you, I regretted the fact that the soundtrack was almost entirely in English, especially since the two people who accompanied me don’t speak English.” English (we live in Quebec…)! So from there to feeling the emotions that the songs were trying to convey, there’s a world. When will songs in Quebec films be subtitled?
We agree that it is primarily music that conveys emotions and justifies the choice of a work as a counterpoint to a film scene. But not always. Often the lyrics stay to the point, like when Jean-Claude Lauzon played “See a Friend Cry” in “A Zoo in the Night” by Jacques Brel. If you don’t understand any of the lyrics, you risk missing the message.
For his part, Daniel affirms that English is also too present in the soundtracks of Quebec television series: “Newcomers are asked to integrate into Quebec culture and learn French. However, I imagine they are telling themselves that we don’t care that much about our language because we trivialize the regular use of English titles.
Finally, a reader who works in the world of communications wrote to me about My Mother’s Men and The Time of Summer: “I had the same thought when each of these films came out. Given that these two films are largely funded by institutions, this is unacceptable! This is the most obvious sign of the weakness of our institutions and the lack of real political will of governments towards Quebec culture. Although the Quebec government is playing the identity card, in reality it has failed to understand the true drivers of the identity axis in the culture.
I HAVE THE RIGHT !
I am the first to regret that our creators on television and in the cinema are addicted to English. But I don’t want our institutions to make it a funding criterion or, even worse, impose quotas. Creators must have the freedom to make the artistic choices they like. But we as an audience have the right to tell them it annoys us! There is freedom of creation, but also freedom… of reaction!
