Recently a friend shared on Facebook photos of the Mars record shop which was located on Sainte Catherine Street and where I spent many hours of my teenage years.
Posted at 8:15am
It was a real dusty dump full of records and knick-knacks, with no heating in the winter. We risked frostbite if we searched the rows of panels for too long. We didn’t have a smartphone to download music or to immortalize every second of our existence, which an archive could have given us. We would freeze happily on Mars that would always exist as we would stay young forever during this crucial time when music is at the heart of our identities, our friendships and our love.
Whenever I come across photos of old, defunct record stores like Mars, Dutchy’s, Rock in Stock, Primitive, or Sam the Record Man, a fictional character looms over my memories: Vernon Subutex. The hero of Virginie Despentes’ trilogy of novels, which I consider to be one of the greatest works of contemporary French literature. Of these works that do not surf the air of time, but seize it and register it in literature for eternity.
This character alone (Vernon Subutex) embodies like a missing link everything we lost with the triumph of neoliberalism paired with technology.
The fact that Virginie Despentes touches on something essential with this social fresco shows that artists are increasingly appropriating her work. Vernon Subutex was the subject of a great comic strip by Luz, was made into a bad TV series on Canal+ (disclaimed by Despentes) and is currently being adapted by two different directors for theaters in Montreal and Paris. Thomas Ostermeier at the Théâtre de l’Odéon in Paris looks at the first volume of the trilogy, while Angela Konrad, new director of Usine C, presents her own version of the same volume in Montreal. The two have plans to adapt the entire trilogy, and for Vernon Subutex fans like me, that’s probably how a geek feels when he hears about Denis Villeneuve adapting Dune for the cinema…
But who is Vernon Subutex? A 45-year-old record store, ex-owner of the Revolver that everyone has visited, slowly slipping into homelessness as music dematerializes against the backdrop of the economic crisis. Vernon Subutex has always been swept up in life, but the world around him has completely changed. It has become economically violent. It was atomized in a mass of individual frustrations under the guise of an increasingly heavier capitalism that was destroying the conditions that made a counterculture, a different way of life, possible. Driven from his apartment, Vernon Subutex reconnects with his old friends whom he lost in his wanderings, and it is a world that is thus reborn, even corrupted.
Seeing embodied characters in front of our eyes who have almost become imaginary friends is wonderful, especially when done well. I really liked Angela Konrad’s suggestion with Vernon Subutex 1 at the Usine C – as did my colleague Stéphanie Morin, who signs the review here:
Starting with the choice in the role of David Boutin’s Vernon, who has the mouth of the job. To play Vernon you have to have the age, the seedy and vulnerable side, but also charisma and a still effective sex appeal. Vernon Subutex is a bit of a Christ figure bringing back to him the disciples of a religion that of a youth communicating through music and a way of life that placed art and friendship at the heart of existence that made community. If Vernon Subutex can sit on the couch with so many fucked up people, tidy or not, rich or not – in any case they are all unhappy and in a kind of stray – because everyone sees something specific in him, a cardinal point , underlining how far we can go from what we once believed.
In Vernon Subutex 1 by Angela Konrad, the actors stay close to Despentes’ text while maintaining the Quebec accent, even though the story takes place in Paris, and that doesn’t detract from the experience. On the contrary, it is further evidence that the author is touching on something essential with this work, as Vernon Subutexes can be found in all major urban centers. It’s not easy to condense this fresco, which many have compared to Balzac’s work (on coke and in the punk spirit), into a piece that lasts three hours here, but Angela Konrad manages to whet the appetite for reading or reading Read again, this angry Generation X testimony. I can’t wait for the sequel!
Vernon Subutex 1, based on the novel by Virginie Despentes. Adapted and directed by Angela Konrad. With David Boutin, Anne-Marie Cadieux, Dominique Quesnel and six other actors. In Plant C until June 22nd.
The complete version of Vernon Subutex, an adaptation of the three-volume work by Virginie Despentes, will be presented at Usine C from January 2024.