Five memorable fathers of Quebec cinema

They shocked us, moved us, made us laugh but also sometimes made us angry with their clumsiness and their inability to express their emotions. To mark Father’s Day, The newspaper pays tribute to five notable father figures in our cinema.

Gervais in CRAZY

During his beautiful and long career, the late Michel Côté offered us several beautiful father characters, whether in police comedy From father to cop or in the thriller My daughter, my angel. But the most unforgettable of them undoubtedly remains Gervais Beaulieu, whom he played in the cult film CRAZY (by Jean-Marc Vallée), an authoritarian father who has difficulty accepting the homosexuality of his son (played by Marc-André Grondin), in Quebec in the 1970s. Impossible not to shed a tear when finally seeing him reconciling with his son at the end of the film.

Remy in Barbarian invasions

Rémy Girard made the whole of Quebec cry about twenty years ago with his memorable interpretation of Rémy, a university professor and womanizer who reconnects with his son (Stéphane Rousseau) while he faces cancer in terminal phase. Awarded the Oscar for best foreign language film in 2004, this masterpiece by Denys Arcand allowed the filmmaker’s favorite actor to shine all over the world and even to be praised in the pages of the New York Times.

David in Starbucks

With this successful comedy released in 2011, director Ken Scott and his co-writer Martin Petit found a funnily original way to approach the theme of fatherhood! Patrick Huard plays an eternal 42-year-old teenager who discovers that he is the father of 533 children conceived from his sperm donations and that 142 of them want to know his identity. This idea for a scenario has itself spawned since Starbucks was the subject of a French “remake” entitled Fonzy and a Hollywood version directed by Scott himself and produced by none other than Steven Spielberg.

Francis in Gas Bar Blues

The filmmaker Louis Bélanger has never hidden that the moving character of François Brochu, known as “The Boss”, played by Serge Thériault in Gas Bar Blues, was a tribute to his own father who owned a gas station in the Limoilou district of Quebec. Masterful in the skin of this widowed father suffering from Parkinson’s disease, Thériault won the Jutra prize for best actor in 2004 for this performance, beating to the finish line Rémy Girard, nominated that year for his role in Barbarian invasions.

Germain in Truck

Filmmaker Rafaël Ouellet also pays tribute to his father – who was a truck driver for 40 years – in this tender and moving portrait of a widower (moving Julien Poulin) who has just abandoned his job after being traumatized by an accident of the road which cost the life of a woman. Consumed by guilt, he will try to rebuild bridges with his two thirty-year-old sons (Patrice Dubois and Stéphane Breton) whom he has lost sight of for years.