Film
Electric Shadows: Jesus of Montreal
- Director
- Denys Arcand
- Certificate
- 18
- Running Time
- 119 mins
If Quebecois director Denys Arcand’s dinner party comedies leave you cold, you’ll be pleased to find that this 1989 satire is rather more ambitious. It’s a superbly realised tragi-comedy containing each of the requisite elements for whipping arthouse audiences and critics into unseemly lathers of excitement: a rottweiler-subtle savaging of philistinism, a meditation on the sanctity of pure art, and a somewhat rusty but serviceable allegory to hold the whole thing together.
Stubbly, unemployed actor Daniel (Lothaire Bluteau) lands the job of playing Jesus in a tourist recreation of the Passion at a church overlooking Montreal. His first task is to set off in search of thespian disciples who are prepared to drop everything and follow him. These he finds variously baring their breasts for eau de cologne TV ads and providing voiceovers (or, more accurately, ‘grunt-overs’) for seedy porn flicks. Troupe assembled, the show takes shape. But by the time of its premiere, Daniel’s obsession with his subject has moulded it into something rather more radical and questioning than the Church expects. Ecstatic responses from increasingly bohemian audiences who clearly perceive Daniel as a prophet railing against the modern-day sins of mammon don’t go down a treat with the orthodoxy either. Confrontation, martyrdom and resurrection loom on the horizon.
In the title role, Lothaire Bluteau glides ethereally through the film with that slightly exaggerated detachment those of a religious disposition find so inspiring in their mentors. His mesmeric performance is backed by Arcand’s playful script, which is coded to overloading point with religious cyphers but succeeds most dramatically when it shifts away from the dafter, mystical aspects of faith towards the intriguing technofix denouement. There’s more than a whiff of pomposity about the whole enterprise, which tends to neuter its intended message, but a healthy dose of irony does much to make amends. There’s also one classic movie moment when the cops come to arrest Jesus and have to peel him from his cross after reading him his rights.
is needed now More than ever
It’s back on screen in Bristol Cathedral’s monthly Electric Shadows series of films deemed to have a “theological aspect”. There’s also an introduction by Dr Carol O’Sullivan, Director of Translation Studies in the School of Modern Languages at the University of Bristol
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