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Patrick Whittaker

The Gospel According to Denys:


Reflections on Jesus of
Montreal.
Patrick Whittaker

The Gospel According to Denys: Reflections


on Jesus of Montreal.

Denys Arcand's Jesus of Montreal (Canada, 1989), tells


the story of a group of actors in Montreal who are hired to
put on a Passion Play. As they do so, events in their lives
begin to parallel events described in the Gospels.
When Father Leclerc (Gilles Pelletier), a theatre-loving
priest decides to mount a contemporary Passion Play in
the grounds of a hillside shrine overlooking Montreal, he
approaches Daniel Coloumbe (Lothaire Bluteau) to play
the part of Jesus and to recruit a cast. Daniel embraces
the task rather more enthusiastically than Father Leclerc
has anticipated and, armed with recent discoveries
regarding Jesus and the Holy Land, he creates a
revisionist Christ which offends the Church but dazzles the
audiences who flock to Mount Royal to see the play.
This inevitably brings Daniel and his troupe into conflict
with the Church authorities who order them to mount no
further performances. Daniel's refusal to do so results in
his death and a resurrection of sorts in that his organs are
transplanted into other bodies.
Jesus of Montreal is not a religious film in the strictest
sense of the term. Arcand is avowedly agnostic so his
intention cannot be to spread the word of the Lord nor
even to cast light upon the events of the New Testament.
There are no supernatural occurrences in JoM nor any
promises of salvation or life eternal.
In Daniel's Passion Play, it is put to the audience that
far from being the Son of God, Jesus might well have
been the illegitimate offspring of a Roman soldier. If
Arcand isn't quite saying Jesus wasn't divine, he certainly
isn't saying that he was.
Bryan Stone points out: 'Jesus of Montreal does not
attempt to portray the relationship between Jesus and
God in any explicit way. Whether this happens on a
figurative level, however, is open to interpretation,
especially given the fact that director Arcand is a non-
believer who is nonetheless interested in asking about
Jesus' significance for us today.'i
For all its determined secularism, Jesus is basically a
film about spiritual values. As Arcand himself puts it:
'Even though religion is at the heart of modern life we
tend not to talk about it, tend not to recognize its
influence on us. What I discovered in making this film was
the magic of a story which we all know and which we need
to tell ourselves over and over again.'ii
When analysing Jesus of Montreal, it is useful to begin
by placing it within the context of religious films in
general.
William Telfordiii argues that films about Christ occupy
a distinct sub-genre of religious films – the Jesus film -
and that JoM fits neatly into this sub-genre alongside such
odd bed-fellows as Cecil B. DeMille's The King of Kings
(USA, 1927), The Gospel According to St Matthew
(Pasolini, Italy, 1964), Jesus Christ Superstar (Norman
Jewison, UK, 1973) and even Monty Python's Life of Brian
(Terry Jones, UK, 1979).
Bryan P. Stone agrees with Telford:

Of course, not all films about Jesus share the same


structure or approach. Some attempt to retell Jesus' life
based more or less literally on the gospel accounts of the
New Testament. They may vary in style, orthodoxy,
reverence and perspective, but insofar as they all attempt
to express the significance of Jesus through an explicit
retelling of his life, they form a class of film known as the
“Jesus film.”iv

Although Christ himself does not appear in Jesus of


Montreal, this by no means makes it unique amongst
Jesus films. Telford lists several other movies in the sub-
genre that are similarly devoid of an actual Jesus. These
include Cool Hand Luke (Stuart Rosenberg, USA, 1967),
Monty Python's Life of Brian, Superman: The Movie
(Richard Donner, USA, 1979) and E.T. the Extra-
Terrestrial (Steven Speilberg, USA, 1982). What these
films have in common – and what makes them all Jesus
films – is that they have protagonists whose lives or deeds
in some way parallel that of Jesus.
As Bryan Stone says: 'In film, as in other art forms, it is
also possible to express the significance of Christ without
a direct or literal telling of his life story. The meaning of
Christ may instead be portrayed figuratively, as in a
parable, through the use of a “Christ figure.”'v
Telford quotes Gaye Ortiz as saying: '[m]any film
heroes are in fact Christ figures, who experience the kinds
of things Christ did or who personify the righteous, loving,
self-sacrificing Christ.'vi Daniel Coloumbe is very nearly
the epitome of such a Christ figure, falling down only (as
we shall see) on the self-sacrificing front.vi
Films about Jesus generally have to tackle two
subjects: What sort of Man was Jesus? And are his
teachings relevant to us today?
Arcand is aware that Jesus is different things to
different people. Referring to a scene where a librarian
tells Daniel, 'It's he [Jesus] who will find you', Stone
points out: 'Arcand is here, as throughout the film,
relativizing the various portraits of Jesus – whether they
are popular or scholarly, conservative or liberal, secular or
religious. In this and countless other ways, Jesus of
Montreal keeps the question burning before us, “Who is
Jesus, really?”vii
There are, according to Telford, 'seven personae or
Christ-types that the cinema has offered the moviegoers
of this century'viii. He lists them as the patriarchal Christ,
the adolescent Christ, the pacific Christ, the subversive
Christ, the mystical Christ, the musical Christ and the
human Christ.
Denys Arcand's Christ it seems is the subversive Christ,
a figure previously seen in Pasolini's The Gospel According
to St Matthew . Pasolini's Jesus 'is a conspiratorial Jesus
(some have even said a Marxist Jesus) who goes around
Palestine like “a revolutionary whirlwind”, gathering
disciples, spitting out sermons and defending the poor
against the priestly aristocracy'.ix Daniel is - for the most
part - somewhat less fierce than Pasolini's Jesus. He is
more like the eye of a storm than a 'revolutionary
whirlwind'. Nonetheless, he does pit himself against the
system - or at least some part of it - albeit on a minor
scale.
Of course, the events described in the New Testament
unfolded two millennia ago, so any filmmaker wanting to
use them as a basis for a film has to make them seem
relevant to a modern day audience. Arcand solves this
problem by placing 'the story and message of Jesus within
the context of the modern mass media, especially
advertising, and exploring its degrading and corrupting
influences'x.
The media landscape is far more familiar and
comprehensible to the average film-goer than the politics
of the 1st century Holy Land. So by transporting the Jesus
of ancient Israel into twentieth-century Montreal and
'through the use of a nonliteral Christ-figure, Jesus of
Montreal is able to convey to us the sociopolitical and
economic dimensions of what it means to be the Christ of
the Jews more powerfully, perhaps, than a straight-
forward historical portrayal of Jesus [...]' xi
There are several scenes in the film that are modern-
day reinterpretations of Biblical events and which take a
swipe at the world of advertising. Most notable is the
scene where Daniel creates havoc at an audition for an
advert because one of the actresses is asked to remove
her top. This, of course, parallels Jesus's attack upon the
money lenders in the Jerusalem temple.
Parallels between Daniel's final days on Earth and
Jesus's form the back bone of the film. From the moment
Daniel is asked to put on a Passion Play by the local
church, he becomes an archetypal Christ figure on two
levels. Firstly - and most obviously - he plays the part of
Jesus in the Passion Play. Then somehow his fictional role
bleeds into reality and - seemingly without him realising it
- his life starts to imitate his art and he finds himself living
out his own version of the gospels.
This blurring of Daniel and Jesus however begins before
he takes on the task of recreating the Stations of the
Cross. The film opens at the performance of a play – an
adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor
Dostoevsky. In the audience is a lady advertising
executive who is so captivated with the lead actor she
says, 'I want his head' in much the same way as Salome
demanded the head of John the Baptist.
Backstage after the show, the actor is bombarded with
praise – much of it gushing and over the top. He is
obviously uncomfortable with being hailed as 'the greatest
actor of your generation'. Spotting Daniel, he points to
him and says 'There is an actor.'
The two actors embrace. Daniel, our secular Christ-
figure, has just been handed the torch by his John the
Baptist. His ministry can now begin.
As Daniel goes about “calling” four other actors to join
him and through repeated performances of the play, his
life becomes an allegory of Christ's, and he even begins
actually to take on Characteristics of Christ.xii
This transformation does not effect him alone however
as Ken Dancyger points out:
When the cast has been assembled and the Passion
play is performed, the roles ennoble the actors and they
become the characters they are portraying. “Jesus”
becomes the radical critic of all things materialistic. He
disrupts the production of a commercial (an attack on the
Temple clerics and their activities), and the actresses
become Mary and Mary Magdalene. They have found
grace and they turn against the lives they have led.xiii
The actors in effect become Daniel's disciples. Many of
them give up safe, lucrative jobs to take part in the play
just as certain apostles turned their back on comfortable
lives for the sake of following their new master.
Ken Dancyger:
As in “The Barbarian Invasions,” [(Denys Arcand,
Canada, 2003)] it is difficult to distinguish between a play
being performed by actors and the actors who become
the characters they are portraying, and Arcand speaks
directly to us about values. In “Jesus of Montreal”, he
gives us a classic and modern passion play in which
“Jesus”/Arcand, the character/voice of the writer/director,
forces us to question our values.xiv
There are other parallels between the life of Daniel in
modern day Montreal and that of Jesus in the days leading
up to his crucifixion and eventual resurrection.
As Jesus was tempted by the Devil, so Daniel finds
himself being courted by a lawyer who lays before him a
grand scheme to cash in on the popularity of his Passion
Play. They are standing beside a window in a tall building
which affords them a perfect view of Montreal. 'I'm just
trying to show you,' says the lawyer, 'that with your talent
this city is yours.'
And the devil, taking him up into an high mountain,
shewed unto him all the kingdoms of the world in a
moment of time. And the devil said unto him, All this
power will I give thee, and the glory of them: for that is
delivered unto me; and to whomsoever I will I give it. If
thou therefore wilt worship me, all shall be thine.xv
At the end of Jesus of Montreal, Daniel dies on the
cross – or rather he dies as a result of an accident that
occurs on a cross – and is figuratively resurrected by
having his organs transplanted into other people.
(Perhaps it's unintentional, but this spreading and
assimilation of Daniel's corporeal substance has echoes of
the Eucharist.)
Through the character of Daniel, Denys Arcand
constructs a Jesus for today, one which chimes with his
left wing notions. As he says, ' the film is not a literal
reconstruction of the Jesus myth'; it is rather a critique of
modern day values, especially consumerism.
'Consumerism may be the legacy of the eighties but
there has got to be more to life than that. Jesus of
Montreal is about a yearning for something else, a search
for a sort of meaning.'xvi
For Arcand, the choice is clear: Modern material values
must be seen as transient and and as less important than
deeper communal values and spiritual values. It is telling
that Arcand positions a priest, society's bearer of spiritual
values, as one the the antagonists in this film. Once
again, the organizations of society have failed the
individual. The artist as radical voice upholds the spiritual
values that Arcand associates with Jesus in “Jesus of
Montreal”xvii

Ultimately, Jesus of Montreal is an unsatisfying film. Its


shoe-horning of the Passion into a modern setting is less
than subtle and tells us nothing we don't already know
about today's society. It is partially an attack on the
advertising industry but to what end? Is there anyone
anywhere who doesn't know already that it is full of
Philistines who are more interested in money than art?
And surely there are worst crimes than making
commercials.
The film's criticism of the Catholic Church's
conservatism would have been daring and cutting edge
when people were being burnt at the stake for questioning
Papal authority, but these days it is hardly headline news.
Worse still, Daniel Coloumbe is a poor excuse for a
Christ. Jesus did what he did knowing that it would lead to
a painful death by crucifixion, whereas Daniel has nothing
to lose by putting on his Passion Play in defiance of the
Church. In fact it gives him the acclaim and recognition
every actor craves. His death, it must be remembered, is
unforeseen and accidental (not to mention contrived); it is
not the death of a martyr.
In Jesus of Montreal, Denys Arcand attempts to
deconstruct Christianity by placing it in a modern setting.
As a recontextualisation of the Gospel story, it is quite
interesting – especially on a conceptual level – but it
offers few, if any, fresh insights into the subjects it
touches upon.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dancyger, Ken. The Director's Idea: The Path to Great


Directing. Focal Press: Massachusetts. 2006.

Marsh, C. & Ortiz, G (eds.). Explorations in Theology and


Film: Movies and Meaning. Blackwell: Oxon. 1997.

Stone, Bryan P. Faith & Film: Theological Themes at the


Cinema. Chalice Press: Atlanta. 2000.

REFERENCES
i Stone, Bryan P. Faith & Film: Theological Themes at the
Cinema, Atlanta: Chalice Press, 2000. p. 61

ii 'DENYS ARCAND - JESUS OF MONTREAL: A


DISCUSSION', Melbourne Sunday Herald (29th June,
1990).

iii Marsh, C. & Ortiz, G (eds.). Explorations in Theology


and Film: Movies and Meaning, Oxford: Blackwell, 1997.
p.125

iv Stone. pp.50-51

v Stone. p.51

vi Marsh & Ortiz. p.123

vii Stone. p.56

viii Marsh & Ortiz..p.133-135

ix Marsh & Ortiz. p.135

x Marsh & Ortiz. p.125

xi Stone p.59

xii Stone. p.53

xiii Dancyger, Ken. The Director's Idea: The Path to Great


Directing,, Woburn, Massachusetts: Focal Press, 2006.
p.68

xivDancyger. p.68

xv Luke 4:5-7. King James Version.


xvi 'DENYS ARCAND - JESUS OF MONTREAL: A
DISCUSSION', Melbourne Sunday Herald (29th June,
1990).

xvii Dancyger. pp.68-69

© Patrick Whittaker
www.coldfusion.freewebtools.com
trashman97@hotmail.com

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