by BERTIE MANDELBLATT

Veteran filmmaker Robert Morin’s new feature, Le Nèg’, caused an uproar in Montreal before even opening because of its title (“nigger” in English). This uproar will certainly continue when it opens, and is a well-deserved protest against this almost criminally naïve look at the explosive issue of racism in Quebec. Paradoxically, Morin is yet another self-proclaimed filmmaker “of the streets” who prides himself, according to a rash of recent interviews, on his “tough, non-mainstream” films.

The film concerns a young unnamed black man who, in the middle of the night in a small town, smashes the lawn ornament in question. The elderly woman who owns it spots him and comes into her yard with a shotgun to investigate. As she is holding him at gunpoint, a neighbour comes over and two pickup trucks holding an unholy assortment of horrifyingly drunk locals stop to see what’s happening. By morning, the woman has been shot dead, and a cop has shot the black man—he’s living, but in a coma.

The film is told through a series of flashbacks corresponding to the very inconsistent statements given by the eyewitnesses to the investigating detectives. Through these stories we slowly learn that the group lynched and tortured their captive before any shots were fired.

This classic narrative structure theoretically permits a multiplicity of perspectives. The glaring flaw in Morin’s so-called gritty realism is that, in fact, the captive never speaks. He doesn’t have one line—he doesn’t demonstrate that he even understands his tormentors until his ordeal is almost over.

This is realism? Morin has condemned this character to unchallenged victimhood, unable even to represent himself. Apparently Morin finds this trait pleasingly mysterious—it’s a device that may well have been intended to point up the voicelessness of victims of race-related violence, but backfires sorely here.

The appalling naiveté of the film is in the use of fantastically loaded scenarios (a lynching, a black man shot by a police officer) and imagery (the poster), as if there wasn’t a long, documented history of very vocal African-Canadian responses to them. Why aren’t those responses here? :

Le Nèg’ opens Friday, Oct. 25

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