[REVIEW] Four movies

Three of these films are GLBT-related; the fourth isn't. FYI I suppose, though if you've any issues with my choice of filmed entertainment you probably shouldn't be reading this blog. (Go here instead.)

• At a friend's prompting, I went with him to the reelout queer film and video festival here in Kingston, to see the French film A cause d'un garçon (2002). The film was a standard coming-out story, concerning a high school swim team and academic star who was closeted until a chance encounter reveals everything--to his classmates, his teammates, his best friend, his girlfriend, his family . . . Of all of the televisual descriptions of the coming-out process I've seen, I think Buffy did the best job in the second-season "Becoming, Part 2" and the fourth-season "New Moon Rising." A cause d'un garçon was an enjoyable treatment of this situation, though, and not only because of the cute actors.


• Friday night, again at reelout, I saw Tipping the Velvet, based on Sarah Waters's first novel of the same name, was a three-part description of five formative years in the life of a young lesbian in 1890s London, beginning with her first attraction to a male impersonator, continuing through a sordid life as the "tart" of a female dominatrix, ending with her rehabilitation as the lover of a social reformer with a revived stage career (and even as a surrogate parent). It was entertaining, and the cinematography was quite good. I just wish that the film didn't carry an aura of historical authenticity about it.


• Saturday night, I saw Mambo Italiano on DVD with a friend. It left me flat, truth be told. The story just didn't seem to be well-constructed--the storyline seemed rushed in some places and drawn out in others, the characters weren't developed so as to make the view feel much sympathy with them, and at the end I felt dissatisfied with a conclusion composed of an unsatisfied aggregate of events. The quality of shooting didn't impress me either, given how the colours seemed too intense. I didn't mind seeing Mambo Italiano; then again, I wasn't doing anything of note Saturday night.


• I saw Les invasions barbares this afternoon with a friend at The Screening Room. Denys Arcand definitely deserved that Oscar for best foreign-language film. Rémy Girard's performance stood out, as did those of Stéphane Rousseau (his capitalist barbarian son, fresh from London's futures markets) and Marie-Josée Croze (the drug addict daughter of a former mistress, procuress of his heroin). It paints an interesting picture of a Québécois society transformed utterly, beyond its mythologized pre-Quiet Revolution state and beyond the original social-democratic of this film's elder generation. I really want to see Le déclin de l'empire américain now.

[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] Québec and the Anglosphere

This posting was inspired by Russell Arben Fox's posting "Networks and Language in Europe (and More)". It's an interesting exploration of the relationship between language with its associated cultures, and a given society's interactions with its neighbours and the wider world.

I agree that language can play an important role in coalition-building and connection-making, though it hardly plays a dominant role. I've major questions regarding the ways in which language is used--Bennett, in his Anglosphere Primer and other documents, doesn't distinguish adequately between languages where English is a first language or a second language, or where English is a colonially-implanted minority language and where English is a language spoken by majority populations of British (and generally European) descent.

One question that I don't think people have considered is whether Québec is part of the Anglosphere. Perhaps people have overlooked this issue in light of Québec's strongly stated Francophone character, Québécois opposition to the war in Iraq, and perhaps (for only some) out of anti-Francophone sentiment. This is quite wrong, though, given that according to the latest data from Statistics Canada, 40% of Québec's population has some degree of fluency in English. That's only three million people out of a total provincial population in excess of seven million. Québec has had a major role in influencing the culture of the nominal Anglosphere, apart from English Canada--remember "O Canada"'s origins, after all. Remember the origins of Celine Dion, Cirque du Soleil, and Robert Lepage.

Yet, despite these links with the Anglosphere, and the weight of three centuries of war, trade, migration, and two-way cultural permeability Québec is generally considered by Anglosphere theorists to belong to a separate Francophone cultural sphere. This isn't entirely without foundation, given Québec's prominent role in founding la francophonie and its increasingly Francophone face; yet, given how India's small Anglophone minority and diaspora in Anglophone nations is seen as qualifying it for membership in the Anglosphere, one can't help but think that Québec is being left out for some odd reason. (And if India has its diaspora, Québec has Franco-Americans.)

What does it mean? For starters, it means (as I wrote last February) that "the Anglosphere" is a term still used loosely and unsystematically. The failure to include Québec doesn't destroy the hypothesis; it does, though, demonstrate the existence of alternative allegiances which supplement and in some cases override whatever pan-Anglospheric tendencies might exist. It shows that world patterns won't follow simple lines of language, not least given Québec's historically strong embrace of American pop culture (translated into French, certainly) and American trade in contrast to English Canada's historic reluctance. It shows that the Anglosphere is not now and never has been a unity.

And that's enough for now.