The Films of Denys Arcand by Jim Leach (review)

This is a book we need. It is a full survey of Denys Arcand’s career, with a generous discussion of each film in sequence. James Leach has previously published a book on another Quebec director, Claude Jutra Filmmaker (1999), and a solid historical survey, Film in Canada (2011). Leach knows how to work through the tangle of Quebec film criticism—a must with a much-debated director like Arcand— and he acts as a judicious mediator for the anglophone academic reader. Arcand’s career has been unusual. He became one of the mostly widely known Canadian directors, comparable in fame to Cronenberg and Egoyan, but Arcand’s recognition rests really on just three films, beginning with Le Déclin de l’empire américain (The Decline of the American Empire, 1986). It was released some fifteen years after Arcand’s first feature-length documentary, On est au coton (Cotton Mill, Treadmill, 1970), famously suppressed by its production company, the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). Reaching back into Arcand’s seven preceding shorts that made up the director’s apprenticeship, and following through his whole filmography, Leach strives to find a consistent through line. He almost gets all the way, until Arcand’s most recent films, Le Règne de la beauté (An Eye for Beauty, 2014) and La Chute de l’empire américain (The Fall of the American Empire, 2018). Leach begins his book with a discussion of Arcand’s education, which he takes to be fundamental. Born in 1941 in a small Quebec town, Deschambault, and the product of a Jesuit-Catholic education, Arcand sees himself as a child of the “Great Darkness,” referring to the long era of the Duplessis regime (1936– 1960) and of clerical dominance over Catholic Quebec’s culture. Arcand’s intellectual and artistic life began, however, when he entered the Université de Montréal in 1960. This was at the very start of the Quiet Revolution, which would rapidly secularize and modernize Quebec society. Quickly politicized, Arcand was an eager participant and was already making films by 1962. For his generation of Québécois filmmakers, the Quiet Revolution was the opening. Leach claims, “Arcand’s entire career as a filmmaker can be seen as a recurring commentary on the impact of these social changes.” However, his ambivalent and complex response, and his eventual disappointment, rendered some of his films jagged and dissonant, unlike those of other major Quebec filmmakers who 10.3138/cjfs-2021-0060