Muscle Morphs Hot

Inside Quebec - July 2011

Maurie Alioff is a film journalist, critic, screenwriter and media columnist. He has written for radio and television and taught screenwriting at Montreal’s Vanier College. A former editor for Cinema Canada and Take One, as well as other magazines, he is affiliated with the Quebec media industry publication, CTVM.Info. His articles have appeared in various publications, including Canadian Cinematographer, POV Magazine, and The New York Times. For Quebeckers, especially Baby Boomers, the late Gerry Boulet (1946-1990) is a music legend. Those who still hanker for Quebec’s sovereignty embrace him as a symbol of nationalist passion that burns far less brightly than it did during the heyday of Boulet’s band, Offenbach. Like many pictures about music icons, Alain DesRocher’s Gerry Newspaper columnist and author Nathalie Petrowski’s screenplay yields a minutely detailed, energetic, but conventional and somewhat plodding movie. Played convincingly, if not always engagingly, by Mario Saint-Amand, Gerry morphs the British-style pop rock of his group, Les Gants blancs, into blues-based, operatic Offenbach. Along the way, he lives out various defeats and victories (Offenbach was the first francophone band to play Montreal’s Forum), trips out on acid and sex, skyrockets over-the-top, pays the price, fights with bandmates, and faces the biggest tragedy of his life. Along the way Gerry woos earthy Denise Croteau (Madeleine Péloquin), the first big love of his life, then dumps her for Françoise Faraldo (Capucine Delaby) while shooting a documentary with the ethereal blonde’s director brother in France. Like the Johnny Cash biopic, Walk the Line, the film opens through the legend’s eyes. We see what he sees before we see him, a mythologizing effect conveying god-like stature. Gerry is in his backstage dressing room before a show, a bottle of Wild Turkey and a pack of Gitanes prominently displayed. Booze and ciggies, and of course other drugs, loom large. And this visual shorthand also clues us into the fact that while the story is about a performer, who while steeped in American rhythms and idioms, is very French. In the movie’s evocation of Gerry’s childhood, destiny’s child appears as a drum major in a small town marching band right out of Born on the Fourth of July. The little girls of St.