Socioeconomics and Anti-Sovereignist Sentiment in Les bons débarras

Socioeconomics and Anti-Sovereignist Sentiment in Les bons débarras

Considering the maelstrom of sovereignist sentiment in which late 1970s Québec politics and society were immersed, it seems almost inevitable that Québec cinema emerging during that time should be examined for some evidence of nationalist ideology. Les bons débarras, directed by Francis Mankiewicz and based on a screenplay by Québécois novelist Réjean Ducharme, was written in 1977, but first saw theatrical release in 1980. Arriving as it did just as René Lévesque’s Parti Québécois ascended to power on its promise to hold a referendum on sovereignty-association, Les bons débarras is as likely a target as any for a nationalist-perspective analysis. The film demands critical attention for two additional, marginally related reasons. First, it is considered exceptional as one of only a handful of well received Québec films produced during the so-called tax shelter era. Second, it garnered attention nationally, reversing a trend which had seen Canada’s film awards and even critical attention directed traditionally to poor-quality, big-budget, English-language productions financed by the tax-shelter (Lamphier, 1981). Cumulatively, these factors make Les bons débarras an attractive film with which to argue larger issues of Canada-Québec relations and ideas of national identity.

Ian Lockerbie (1988) endeavours to construct just such an argument. Lockerbie suggests that despite the lack of any direct reference to nationalist politics in Les bons débarras, the film presents evidence of a "collective identity" which penetrates deeper than consciously revealed symbolism, and which manifests itself in individual identities and anxieties (1988: 122). The film, Lockerbie claims, offers within the cathartic emancipation of individual characters an implicit manifestation of Québec sovereignism. By basing his analysis on such deeply buried subtext, however, I think Lockerbie ignores the film’s more obvious engagement with contemporary social and economic conditions. Granted, one inevitably risks a certain degree of impudence whenever venturing to assign allegorical meaning to any film as Lockerbie has done. But I would suggest that if Les bons débarras does in fact propose any commentary on Québec nationalism, it is not sovereignist at all, as Lockerbie argues, but rather offers an admonitory refusal of Québec ambitions for independence.

The goals of the Québec sovereignism are traditionally idealized, in part, as a shift from the strength historically drawn from the domestic, familial community toward strength to be gained in achieving social and economic self-sufficiency within Canada. Les bons débarras, however, presents a community whose attempts to attain social integrity and economic self-sufficiency have utterly failed, and whose strength must be found only in retreat to the domestic sphere.