| Of all the inflammatory statements attributed to former Québec premier Jacques Parizeau, the comments he made immediately after that province’s 1995 referendum on sovereignty may go down as the most hateful.
Recall how the Parti Quebecois leader – whose pro-sovereignty "oui" side had just been narrowly defeated by anti-sovereignty "non" voters – blamed "money and ethnic votes" for the separatist loss. At the time, it seemed that Parizeau believed supporters of Québec sovereignty – the majority of whom, statistically, were (and are) francophone – were at political odds not only with rich federalists, but also with anyone who was not pure laine Québécois.
Granted, Parizeau later apologized for his remarks but, even so, his willingness to make such an ill-considered comment forced one to wonder whether his sentiments were shared by certain segments of Québec’s population. Obviously, not all Québec nationalists are bigots, so it’s not exactly fair to draw widespread conclusions about racism in the PQ and among its supporters just because Parizeau shot his mouth off. But it also can’t hurt to ask whether racial intolerance is, indeed, alive and well in la belle province.
Of course, such questions are bound to get one in trouble, as filmmaker Robert Morin discovered with the release of Le Nèg’ (Canada, 2002), a black comedy about the fictional shootings of two people – one white and one black – in small-town Québec. Many critics vilified it for its portrayal of some rural Québécois as racists, and the film subsequently earned very little money at the box office. As with the majority of films from Québec, it was not released theatrically in the rest of Canada, although it is now available on DVD.
Le Nèg’ may have some minor flaws – primarily a long, grating climactic sequence rife with hysterics – but it deserved better treatment from critics, as it is worth seeing both for its sophisticated narrative structure and for its willingness to address hot-button issues without so much as a flinch. The film opens with the aftermath of a deadly police shoot-out, which we later learn may have been instigated by a young black man’s vandalism of a "Little Black Sambo" lawn ornament. Obviously, tensions escalated sometime between the smashing of the ceramic figurine and the shootings, so the next morning, two detectives question five witnesses – only to discover that each person’s deposition contains a significantly different story about what happened the night before.
We see part of each different version of the events but, not unlike Akira Kurosawa’s classic Rashomon, we are left in the end with a puzzle that is still missing a few pieces. Le Nèg’ forces us to fill in the gaps and draw our own conclusions about what we believe to be true, which in turn makes us think hard about our own attitudes toward racism and intolerance. So it’s not just the film’s characters that are under scrutiny, but its audience as well.
Certainly, many people will resent this sort of psychoanalysis – and it is off-putting – but it also allows the story to transcend its specific characters and setting to take on a more universal significance. As each witness tries to downplay his or her complicity in the killings, Le Nèg’ shows us that bigotry often remains repressed due to ignorance, only surfacing when it is confronted by something it does not understand. Morin may be examining this ignorance as a byproduct of Québec nationalism, but it would be wrong to assume that it doesn’t exist elsewhere. Le Nèg’ suggests that when we allow bigotry to exist anywhere – even in its repressed form – we are all implicated in the violence it engenders. |
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