Nô
Canada 1998
Reviewed by Richard Falcon
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
1970. At the French-Canadian pavilion for the Osaka World's Fair, Sophie Maltais is performing in a Feydeau farce. She learns she's two months' pregnant and rings her political-playwright boyfriend Michel to say she's staying in Japan to have an abortion. But when she discovers he is receiving a visitor even though it is 4:00 am Quebec time, she doesn't tell him. Imagining Michel is having an affair, Sophie rebuffs her besotted co-star François-Xavier but accepts a dinner invitation from Canadian cultural attaché Walter and his wife Patricia. Sophie gets drunk and sleeps with Walter, but Patricia catches them in flagrante delicto.
Michel's visitors in Quebec are members of a radical separatist theatre troupe hiding from the police. They plan to plant a bomb to protest against the introduction of repressive anti-terrorist measures. The plans go disastrously wrong when Michel sets the bomb on Osaka time. The group just make it to safety before it detonates. Sophie learns about the imposition of martial law at home, abandons her plan to abort the baby and returns to the devastated apartment where she is arrested and immediately miscarries.
1980. Sophie and Michel watch the results of the referendum on Quebec's independence. After the 'No'-to-independence lobby wins, Michel starts to persuade Sophie to have a child with him.
Review
Robert Lepage's first feature Le Confessionnal informed us that, "Quebec carries its past on its shoulders like a baby." Nô, the theatrical maestro's third feature (after The Polygraph), extends his preoccupation with Quebecois cultural identity by setting itself at perhaps its most difficult historical juncture. In 1970, then Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau responded to separatist terrorists' kidnapping and murder of a government minister by instituting martial law, stationing armed forces on the streets of the province. Given the seriousness of Lepage's first two features, what surprises here is the sly and absurd humour he deploys to tell the story against this backdrop.
As he did with Le Confessionnal , Lepage interlinks two complementary narratives in Nô, although far less intricately. In the Japanese sequences, he also introduces an overt theatricality, a contrast with the earlier films' self-conscious meditations on cinema and reality. Derived from the final section of his seven-hour play The Seven Branches of the River Ota, Nô contrasts the controlled elegance of a Noh play - with the measured tread of its performers, the impassively elegant masks and costumes - with the garish, frenetic Feydeau farce Sophie is performing in, chosen to represent French-Canadian culture to the world. In the dinner scene with the genially lecherous Canadian cultural attaché Walter and his loquacious, vinegary wife Patricia, a preoccupied Sophie responds to Patricia's needling with a drunken outburst about the awfulness of the play that turns into a rant about the liberation of Quebec. Patricia provokes this outburst by favourably commenting on the play's Victorian costumes, a clear code for saying it stinks.
Lepage foregrounds the kitsch 70s fashions worn by Sophie and makes us aware of Walter's outrageous sideburns and his suit, both of which could pass muster in the Feydeau farce. These deliberately colourful and stagy Japanese sequences build to a not entirely successful coup de cinéma: after Patricia discovers Walter has slept with Sophie, the film space morphs into the stage of the French farce and the characters take a bow before a rapturous audience. This is audacious and fun stuff, but does little more than overemphasise one central idea: that official attempts to sell French-Canadian culture abroad at this time were farcical.
The real farce, though, occurs in the film's black-and-white Montreal scenes with Sophie's boyfriend Michel and his would-be separatist-terrorist theatrical friends. While Michel bickers with his comrades about the syntax in their communiqué, in another room two policemen on a stakeout argue about whether there are three or four terrorists in the room on the basis of their takeaway order. The absurdity of these sequences makes for entertaining and appealing comedy, with Lepage and his performers maintaining the same dominant tone of indulgent mockery informing the Japanese scenes.
Although the visual coding here is blunter than in Lepage's screen debut (Le Confessionnal employed different film stocks to distinguish sequences set in Quebec in 1952 and 1989; here we alternate between colour and black and white), the transitions between the two narratives are still visually flamboyant. This is particularly the case in the shock cut from actor François-Xavier, sitting in a photo booth and lashing out at the glass in front of the lens, to Michel's bomb shattering the window of his apartment.
Colour enters the Quebec scenes with Sophie's return to Michel's wrecked apartment where she loses the baby, the camera tilting to show the blood running down her legs. Is Lepage suggesting that the abortive conclusion to this farcical quest for cultural identity and self-determination is the endangering of the future? Or is he saying the opposite? It's deliberately vague, but points to tragedy behind the farce just as Alfred Hitchcock in Le Confessionnal finally declares film's narrative to be not suspense but tragedy.
Behind the impressive facade of the Noh play also lies the reality of a Japanese culture in which Sophie's blind Japanese translator Hanako is ostracised for being an ibakusha - a person disabled by the Hiroshima bomb. At this point, Lepage inserts a shot of an atomic mushroom, drawing vague comparisons with the Quebec bomb. This must have been clearer in Lepage's original theatre version, inspired by a visit to Japan in 1994, just before the fiftieth anniversary of the Hiroshima bomb. Here, the weight of the image and its connotations exceed Nô's design and prompt a fleeting, unfavourable comparison with the most famous movie about a Francophone actress' brush with Japanese history, Alain Resnais' Hiroshima mon amour (1959).
Nô's coda is an affirmative one. The title also stands for the result of the 1980 referendum on Quebecois independence. It resolves the two narratives by uniting the couple for the first time on the screen together, but leaves us ultimately perplexed about the film's wider perspective on the issues it has alluded to. Nô is witty, always intriguing and amusing, and maintains the director's reputation as an inventive cinematic stylist. But set against the visual and creative richness of Le Confessionnal, Nô can't help looking both insubstantial and claustrophobic.
Credits
- Producer
- Bruno Jobin
- Screenplay
- Robert Lepage
- André Morency
- Based on Les Mots taken from the play Les Sept branches de la rivière Ota by
- Éric Bernier
- Gérard Bibeou
- Normand Bissonnette
- Rebecca Blankenship
- Marie Brassard
- Anne-Marie Cadieux
- Normand Daneau
- Richard Fréchette
- Marie Gignac
- Patrick Gayette
- Robert Lepage
- Macha Limonchik
- Ghislaine Vincent
- Director of Photography
- Pierre Mignot
- Editor
- Aube Foglia
- Art Director
- Monique Dion
- Music
- Michel F. Côté
- Bernard Falaise
- ©In Extremis Images Inc.
- Production Companies
- Alliance Vivafilm presents an In Extremis Images production
- Produced with the financial participation of Téléfilm Canada/SODEC Société de développement des entreprises culturelles (Québec)/Crédit d'impôt du Québec/Alliance
- Vivafilm/Gouvernement du Canada [programme de crédit d'impôt pour production cinématographique ou magnétoscopique canadienne]/Fonds de la Radiodiffusion et des nouveaux médias de Bell
- In Extremis Images Production Executive
- Céline Lessard
- Production Executives
- Jean-Marc Casanova
- Sylvie Desrosiers
- Production Co-ordinator
- Francine Garneau
- Production Manager
- Michèle St-Arnaud
- Studio Manager
- Alain Labrosse
- Post-production Supervisor
- Francine Garneau
- Assistant Directors
- Jacques W. Benoît
- Buck Deachman
- Lisa Sfriso
- Jean-Sébastien Lord
- Nathalie Poulin
- Script Supervisor
- Catherine Veaux-Logeat
- Casting
- Paul Cauffopé
- Script Collaborators
- Marie Brassard
- Anne-Marie Cadieux
- Richard Fréchette
- Marie Gignac
- Special Effects
- Productions de l'Intrigue
- Technicians:
- Jacques Langlois
- Yvon Charbonneau
- Jean-Marc Cyr
- Graphics
- Véronique Couturier
- Julie Lé
- Éric Châteauvert
- Elena Fragasso
- Artistic Co-ordinator
- Fanfan Boudreau
- Set Decorators
- Claude Jacques
- Frédérique Bolté
- Costume Designer
- Marie-Chantale Vaillancourt
- Wardrobe
- Carole Munger
- Make-up
- Key:
- Marie-Angèle Breitner-Protat
- Additional:
- Chantal Dubois
- Nathalie Girard
- Hairstylists
- Key:
- Réjean Goderre
- Additional:
- Patrick Vincent
- Madeleine Bourassa
- Titles/Animation
- Mangouste
- Ciné-Titres
- Musicians
- Percussion:
- Michel F. Côté
- Guitar:
- Bernard Falaise
- Flute:
- Jean Derome
- Clarinet:
- Simon Aldrich
- Oboe:
- Normand Forget
- Horn:
- Jean-Marc Dugré
- Bassoon:
- Carmelle Préfontaine
- Flute:
- Danièle Bourget
- Music Editor/Mixer
- Robert Langlois
- Soundtrack
- "Tout écartillé" by Marcel Sabourin, Robert Charlebois, performed by Robert Charlebois; "Sukiyaki" by Hochidoi Nakamura, Rokusuke Ei, performed by Marie Brassard; "Sealed with a Kiss" by Gary Geld, Peter Udell, performed by Normand Bissonnette
- Sound Design
- Raymond Vermette
- Sound Recording
- Véronique Gabillaud
- Mixer
- Pierre Labbé
- Post-synchronization Editor
- Nathalie Fleurant
- Post-synchronization Engineer
- John Nestorowich
- Dialogue Editor
- Jean-Pierre Pinard
- Sound Effects
- Monique Vézina
- Sound Effects Recording
- Pierre Bourcier
- Effects Editors
- Serge Fortin
- Mario Rodrigue
- Stéphane Larivière
- Extract
- Urutoraman/Ultraman
(1966)- Cast
- Anne-Marie Cadieux
- Sophie Maltais
- Marie Gignac
- Patricia Hébert
- Richard Fréchette
- Walter Lapointe
- Alexis Martin
- Michel
- Éric Bernier
- François-Xavier
- Marie Brassard
- Hanako
- Patrice Godin
- René
- Jules Philip
- cop 1
- Jean Charest
- Claude
- Tony Conté
- cop 2
- Normand Bissonnette
- Harold Buchanan
- Ghislaine Vincent
- Madame Petypon
- Jean Leloup
- delivery man
- Walter T. Cassidy
- Nô actor
- Ron Korb
- Darren Hitoshi Miyasaki
- Gary Kiyoshi Nagata
- Nô musicians
- Jim Asano Akira
- Milton Tanaka
- Nô assistants
- Hitomi Asahata
- Nô saleswoman
- Yosh Tagushi
- doctor
- Michel Lee
- Étienne
- Robert Bellefeuille
- Feydeau priest
- Lynda Lepage-Beaulieu
- Feydeau lady
- Noriko Hisatomi
- Expo Osaka hostess
- Katia Bassanoff
- ghost
- Julie Shimotakahara
- waitress
- Nathalie d' Anjou
- concierge
- Denis Gaudreault
- Denys Lefebvre
- apartment visitors
- Abdul Aziz Rasuli
- Aziz
- Yoshihisa Shimazu
- karaoke announcer
- France Larochelle
- Annie Larochelle
- air hostesses from Québec
- Robert Norman
- SQ cop
- Pierre Auger
- Sophie Faucher
- Manuel Moglia
- Pierre Drolet
- voices
- Certificate
- 15
- Distributor
- Alliance Releasing (UK)
- 7,621 feet
- 84 minutes 41 seconds
- Dolby
- In Colour
- Subtitles