Nelligan

First of all, thanks Glaschu and vive Toronto too ! Seems that there's only the two of us who have seen this movie... This is a good quality film, in an intimate european style, but sometimes it's too

melodramatic. I'm sure that young Emile Nelligan was not really like that. The movie shows an idealization of a life of a poet: you know, the guy that always suffering every minute of the day... I think it's a myth. But I like the movie for the late 19th century settings. It really represents the bourgeois life in a very conservative

Quebec. Note that all the young poets dreams about Paris and

France. In fact, most of our best artists of that time had to go to Paris to learn and express themselves in a more free way. I had wish that the movie show us more of Charles Gill, a drunken friend of Nelligan, who was the most original poet of that time, after Nelligan. Charles Gill died in 1918 and, next year, he was published ! That shows you the difficuties for artists of that time to find ways to express themselves in the public sphere (And the complete work of Charles Gill will be published only in... 1999!). Note also the presence of the young Idola St-Jean, in love with Nelligan. She will be an important feminist of Quebec, fighting for the right of women to vote. She will also be one of the rare women teaching in an university. She will die in 1936, few years before Nelligan and the right for women to vote. For the facts about the Quebec of the late 19st and early 20st, it's a very fine movie.

This musical adaptation of the tragic life of 19th-century Québec poet Émile Nelligan inspired me to go out and learn more about his life and touching poetry -- surely one of North America's brightest, but brief lights as a writer.

The production's writer interweaves well the story of the tender, yet independent young artist and a nationalist message; Émile and his mother persevere in the face of an oppressive, personality-squashing father.

The theme music is still memorable for me, even nine years after seeing it. Well-acted stage performances particularly for the characters Nelligan and his mother, Émilie.

Vive le Québec _ _ _ _ _!