Film review: Dark and light combine as Ababouiné looks back on 1950s struggle for secular Quebec
Opening La Tournée Québec Cinéma, nostalgic comedy mixes with church abuse of power in a Montreal neighbourhood
Ababouiné takes place in Montreal’s storied working-class neighbourhood of Faubourg à m'lasse.
Visions Ouest screens Ababouiné at La Tournée Québec Cinéma on February 12 at the Alliance Française de Vancouver
VETERAN QUEBEC FILMMAKER André Forcier transports us back to the “Great Darkness” with a surprising amount of levity in the new movie Ababouiné.
Set in 1957, a few years before Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, the film works on one hand as a nostalgic, raucously funny tribute to Montreal’s storied working-class neighbourhood of Faubourg à m’lasse. Forcier sets all the action amid its atmospheric alleyways, lined by board fences and brick houses, with laundry fluttering on lines overhead.
It centres on Michel Paquette (a beyond-charming Rémi Brideau), a boy who wears polio braces and uses crutches, who lives with his adoptive grandmère, and who prefers rereading secular manifesto Le Refus global and hanging out at the local print shop to going to Mass. He’s surrounded by colourful, comically exaggerated characters—including a pious student who tattles to the priest on her classmates; a baseball umpire who takes swigs from a bottle in a paper bag; and an eccentric, progressive French teacher (Martin Dubreuil) who’s obsessing over a dictionary of forgotten words (inspiring the Ababouiné title). There are even a few of Forcier’s signature surreal touches: a high-school hunk named Tom Cat has furry paws for hands—a detail that seems to fit in a slightly absurd world.
On the flipside, Ababouiné is a bitter reminder of the power the Catholic church once held over every aspect of Quebec life. It’s a chapter of Canadian history that feels like it’s slipping out of memory beyond La Belle Province, and this story serves as a potent reminder of why it still embraces such secular laws as banning religious symbols.
Ababouiné.
In the film, everything stops as bells start ringing—not for for children to rush home for dinner but for the mandatory family prayers that happen each late afternoon, to gather on their knees in front of the radio. When the cardinal visits, his speech is played over loudspeakers—in one rambunctious scene, drowned out by Michel calling the play-by-play on the local baseball diamond. At first the oppression is played for laughs: the cardinal (Rémy Girard) has a motorcycle-riding gang of costumed “zouaves” running interference for him, and the stern local priest Cotnoir (Éric Bruneau) gets a little too excited kissing his cardinal’s feet. For the most part, they’re buffoons that are the butt of jokes for Michel and his pals—a found family that defies the traditional one prescribed by the church.
Of course, Michel’s disability puts him in loaded territory with a religion known in Quebec for dangling crutches like his from the rafters; the running, blackly comic joke here is that if he were less of a heathen, he might be able to walk. That’s a hint that Forcier will take his film in a more biting direction—and in his last act, he bluntly addresses the violence that lurks behind closed doors as a direct result of the Catholic church’s corrupting power. It’s dark, shocking, and feels at odds with the subversive laughter and nostalgic feel of the rest of the film.
But perhaps Forcier wants to catch us offguard—to laugh at the abuse of power until it isn’t funny anymore. That bracing reality check gives way to Ababouiné’s strong finale, a flight of satirical fantasy, meatballs, and miracles that is pure, absurdist Forcier—the dark and the light combining in a big, final thumbing of the nose to religious dogma. 
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