Mai en decembre . - Godard en Abitibi - Review - movie review

TAKE ONE, May, 2001 by Tom Mcsorley

2000 25m, prod NFB, p Andre Gladu, d Julie Perron

In a darkroom floating in a bath of developer an image slowly materializes. It is a photograph of a small man with dark-rimmed glasses on the snowy December streets of Abitibi, Quebec. Expanding upon this unlikely image, Julie Perron constructs an engaging film about the visit of French nouvelle vague icon/iconoclast, Jean-Luc Godard, to a small town in Quebec. In the wake of the May 1968 student protests in France, Godard visited Montreal and accepted an invitation to go to Abitibi. Though overly awed by the very fact of Godard actually being there, the film offers a fascinating glimpse of his ability to reorient thought processes and detonate established paradigms. In this case, while being interviewed on a local television show he gets up and moves behind the camera talking about the relationship between what is and what is not in the frame. The local crew and interviewer alike are both flummoxed and impressed. Less obviously, Perron suggests the uneasy nature of the political relationship between emergent nationalist Quebecois artists and the former imperial motherland, la France. Intelligently constructed and with enough humour to moderate its overly earnest tone, Mai en decembre (Godard en Abitibi) marks the arrival of a promising filmmaker.