Marie-Soleil Tougas and Jean-Claude Lauzon died in the other century. 25 years have passed and everything has changed.
The kids of yesteryear only had one for Zoé, that rebellious prepubescent girl from the Banana Skin series broadcast by Télé-Métropole. In no time, Marie-Soleil, who embodied it with a unique truth, became one of Quebec’s big stars, if not the biggest. The series ended, another followed, then another and another until the last, Ent’Cadieux, whose rehearsal ended in June, a few days before going on holiday with Jean-Claude Lauzon, his lover.
After the rehearsal I ate at Marie-Soleil’s, at his request. She had just lived with Jean-Claude again for the umpteenth time. Their love was turbulent. Although I loved Jean-Claude like a son, having known him a few years earlier while filming a corporate film for Bombardier, I had advised Marie-Soleil to end that relationship. “This love is too difficult, it will swallow you up in the end. »
Good soul and heart of gold, Marie-Soleil wanted to give him one last chance. I would never see her again.
ALL OF QUEBEC IN MOURNING
It was the time when our TV stars came first. Netflix and the other streamers hadn’t yet dissolved Quebec television’s tight-knit audience. Télé-Métropole is enthroned at the top of the ratings, the up-and-coming radio Canadian still on its heels.
When the news broke on Sunday evening, August 10, 1997 that Marie-Soleil had died in the crash of Jean-Claude’s seaplane, all of Quebec found it hard to close its eyes.
The next day, all the media was draped in black and playing sad music. The tone of the animators was funeral. From Montreal to Gaspé, from Rouyn to Sherbrooke, the Marie-Soleil name was on everyone’s lips. The mourning was national. As it had been for former Prime Minister René Lévesque ten years earlier.
I am not exaggerating.
Few Quebecers knew Jean-Claude Lauzon. His first feature film, Un zoo la nuit, won the Genie Award for Best Canadian Film, but his second, Léolo, left the Cannes Film Festival jury cold. His film had won at most the Genie for best screenplay and best costumes.
TOP 100 MOVIES LIST
Although The Decline of the American Empire won the Oscar for best foreign film in 1986, that century was not that of Quebec cinema. The public still avoided him. And what about this Lauzon? He was just a drool, a rebel and badly brought up. Hadn’t he torn up the $100,000 check SODEC had just written him for Un zoo la nuit on live TV?
Nonetheless, Léolo, his second and final feature film, made the list of the 100 Greatest Movies of All Time compiled by Time Magazine’s famed critics Richard Schickel and Richard Corliss. But Jean-Claude never knew anything about it. It was 2005 and he had died eight years earlier. He might have torn up Time Magazine for taking so long to recognize his talent!
A DOCUMENTATION YOU SHOULD NOT MISS
Can a filmmaker as extraordinary and assertive as Jean-Claude still receive a check from the treasury today?
Could a woman as free and transparent as Marie-Soleil date a man as reckless, rude and impulsive?
Maybe, but only if she were as generous and authentic as the girl described by Micheline Bégin in Marie-Soleil and Jean-Claude, Beyond the Stars, the remarkable documentary that director Jean-François Poisson has just completed. Micheline, Marie-Soleil’s mother, restrains her tears and sobs with modesty and is the most touching witness of the film that we can see from today on Videotron’s Vrai platform.
Marie-Soleil and Jean-Claude come from another century, but it will be a long time before we forget this so radiant and lovely young woman who managed to give the reins around the neck to this fiery director for whom we believed to lay indomitable. .
