Bullets and bikes in la Belle Province

>> Premiering at the World Film Festival, Michel Jetté's Hochelaga is a homegrown hard-boiled crime film

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

It's not often that this writer gets excited about a film made in Quebec, about Quebec. This isn't to say that this province doesn't have an abundance of talented moviemakers, or that québécois culture doesn't have the resonance of familiarity. It's that family dramas and silly city-mouse-country-mouse comedies simply don't grab my attention.

Okay, Jésus de Montréal was pretty cool, and I gotta give props to Elvis Gratton, but the fact is, the last québécois film to really slap me awake was Un Zoo la nuit. I like crime flicks and I like them hard-boiled.

Which is why my cool-shit detector went off when I heard about director Michel Jetté's forthcoming independent production Hochelaga. It's about les motards, the biker gangs, and its Machiavellian themes of absorption and elimination are once again in the spotlight, what with the Hell's Angels' current moves toward blanket control of the biker gang milieu.



Mirror: What are the roots of Hochelaga? How did the film come into being?

Michel Jetté: I always had friends, even back in high school, who were intellectuals and very good students. I've always had tight bonds with them, but at the same time, I've always had friends who were dropouts, some who didn't even finish elementary school. That delinquent side was a part of my life. I wasn't a crook, but I lived very close to them, so it fed something inside me.

M: So it's based on particular people you know?

MJ: Hochelaga started when I was working at a Nautilus gym as a trainer. One person I trained was a guy who was involved with some shady business, a real heavy, a character. He had this sharp intelligence, but at the same time he was a monster-- 6 foot 4, 250 pounds, incredibly strong. He did the weight limits on all the machines and it wasn't enough. Anyway, he wanted to hire me as a doorman at a club, and I knew that I would be stepping into his universe. That's always fascinated me, exploring that dark side of things. But I chose not to take him up on it. So Hochelaga is my invented story of what might have happened if I'd decided differently. I invented situations in which fundamental decisions about one's life have to be made.

M: So what's the story? What happens in Hochelaga?

MJ: At the bottom of Hochelaga is a story about a young man's quest for identity, his need to belong and be acknowledged. That evolved--the quest remained, but more to feed the story from underneath. It evolved into a story about his slowly becoming involved in a biker gang, but moreover it was a story about confusion, about being unable to clearly read events around you. Whether it's because you don't know you're environment or because you're being manipulated. When you join a group based on power...

M: And on secrets--the idea that silence speaks louder than words.

MJ: Exactly. It's among all those secrets--the bikers' world is very coded and airtight--that the character Marc confronts things that he can't evaluate. All that's left to him is to develop his instincts for survival by making choices. What choices do you make in these situations? That's Hochelaga.



A time of fusion

M: Did you have technical advisors for the film?

MJ: I had two. Hochelaga took four years to write. There's been plenty of traps in writing a film about biker gangs--it's a bit like writing one about pirates. It's so easy to fall into the grotesque, painting with broad strokes, making characters who laugh while doing evil. So it took four years of writing, and my first advisor was Frederic Julien, a former critic, now a literature prof and, above all, a lover of cinema. He's got a sense of the rhythm of film storytelling that's very unique. I've worked with him since university. Then came Eric Heroux, much later. He was a doorman at a club, so I spoke to him about some of the shadier details. He'd had a lot of exposure to that side of things. Three years after I'd started, I still didn't have an ending, and I was also disappointed with certain aspects, the traps I spoke about. I decided to communicate with someone from that environment. That's when he got involved, and I was able to straighten out the script.

M: Were there any real bikers in the cast?

MJ: The bikers in the film are members of Biker Quebec. They're not criminals, but rather real bike enthusiasts, part of motorcycle culture, people who live for their bikes and build their lives around them. When I talk about biker culture, I'm talking about the more rocker side of it, the black jackets and all. They were the only bikers I approached for involvement.

M: How do you think the biker gangs will react to this film?

MJ: I really don't know--

M: Imagine a poster blurb from "Mom" Boucher!

MJ: That would be good publicity! We made a point of not identifying any real club, gang or organization. That was one of the first things we worked on. Now, it's a film that talks about, among other things, the danger of power, the push to power in that world. Hochelaga takes place during a time of fusion. One gang wants to absorb others under its colours to build a super-organization. That's what Hochelaga focuses on, the fusion, the purges, the way that hunger for power leads to schemes that are dark and hard to perceive. It gives a context where nothing is clear, and something's going on underneath. But what? Someone who's not inside the power structure can't know.



Motorcycle mythology

M: What did you learn about bikers--specifically the criminal gangs--while making Hochelaga?

MJ: What's fascinating about the bikers is the warrior aspect. We find these things in their culture that go very deep, right to our roots. We're talking about belonging, about very strong identification--from the moment you wear the colours, the moment you get the tattoos, the moment your group bestows on you a certain power and importance, and the ability to cause fear in others. It's something very tribal, something very deep that speaks to all of us. It's no surprise, therefore, that right now in Quebec there's a sort of obsession with the bikers, this sort of biker fashion. There are more and more bikes out there, and more and more normal people, yuppies even, who dress up in leather on the weekends and play the rebels. It's that urge to break the rules and take possession of oneself that people are looking for in the bikers' world. Born to be wild, but just on weekends.

M: That's a very romantic perception--the freedom of the biker, the "one percenter." It seems to me that they're actually very astute and disciplined businessmen.

MJ: First of all, that myth of the bikers' liberty, the freedom to do what they want, has its limits. These are extremely structured organizations, built in a very military way, with their hierarchies, ranks, duties to perform. When you start out, you have to do the dirty jobs, even if it's washing the bikes or keeping watch. You might be called on at any time. If you decide to enter one of these groups, your freedom has limits. There are decisions you make that have much more serious consequences than in a democratic society. The one thing you have is the prestige and power, and for some that's very valuable, something at the very heart of their life. The question to ask oneself is, "Why?"

M: It sounds to me like Hochelaga follows a pattern that's common in films about gang life, whether it's about Crips in L.A., triads in Hong Kong or what they call "faces" in the U.K. There's this universal pattern to the way criminal gangs work, grow and renew themselves.

MJ: One of the important elements throughout Hochelaga is that the characters keep their humanity. Sure, the stakes are high. Like I said, it's set during a troubled time, a time of fusion between gangs. So obviously it develops around the intrigues of such a situation. But I wanted to avoid grotesques. That's why there's characters who, despite the fact that they're very menacing, that they project danger, still hold onto a side of their humanity. You can tell they're troubled, at times, in the story. There's Tattoo, the president. At first he seems like a pretty cool guy, a sympathetic character, but as the film evolves we see him transform. We see his other side. And Popeye, a difficult character because he'd been through a gang war, got out and finds himself being dragged back in. Through him we feel the tension of the situation, and realize how much fear had been part of his life, even if it didn't show on the surface. Even Marc's mother. We see her dilemma--she's a former biker girl. Should she talk about her dark memories with her son? The trauma of her past makes this difficult, which only adds to the aura of mystery, the fascination for Marc.

Hochelaga screens in French at Salle de Maisonneuve, Place des Arts, on Monday, Aug. 28, 7:30pm as part of the World Film Festival. the English subtitled version opens Sept. 1 at L'Egyptien. Look for complete World Film Festival coverage in next week's Mirror