That '70s man

>> Catherine Annau explores Trudeaumania in the NFB's Just Watch Me

by MATTHEW HAYS

Photo by Gunther Gamper

In this period of post-Meech, post-referendum style détente between the federal and Quebec governments, it's hard to remember a time of true idealism in Canada. Both Jean Chrétien and Lucien Bouchard appear waiting for the other to blink (or better yet, screw up completely).

But filmmaker Catherine Annau remembers way back when Canada had a prime minister with vision, a man who wanted to keep the Two Solitudes together under the auspices of official bilingualism. And when she decided she wanted to hear the memories of other 30-somethings affected by Trudeau's vision, a documentary seemed the perfect way to do it.

"Basically, I've chosen eight people to tell my own story," says Annau of the finished product, a feature NFB doc titled Just Watch Me: Trudeau and the '70s Generation. The filmmaker, a producer who directs here for the first time, says the chosen eight came after extensive interviews with over 400 people.

Annau says Trudeau's belief in a united Canada was infectious. "Trudeau was around when my generation was coming of age. By the time we'd come of age, he was gone. In the late '80s, the agenda was money under Mulroney. By the '90s, it was like, 'What happened? Can we get Trudeau on the line?'"

Annau's subjects are a varied bunch, a carefully picked concoction of male/female, federalist/separatist and franco-/anglophone. One anglo describes Trudeau as our own Kennedy who never got shot. The political is carefully interwoven with the personal, as interviewees discuss shagging members of the other Solitude, emotional bonds across linguistic lines and their own rather messy notions of cultural identity.

Annau says one of the main tricks of the film was to be able to convey the variations on truth found in human memory. "I wanted to represent memory in a visual way. Whenever people would recall things, we would use a colour filter, an anamorphic image, or a lens that would slightly elongate the person, or Super 8 footage. I always wanted the sense that people were telling a story. Time distorts things, after all. And these are eight different stories that don't always meet."

The French version of Just Watch Me, titled French Kiss, screens at the World Film Festival on Wednesday, Sept. 1 at 9am and Thursday, Sept. 2 at 10:10pm at the Parisien