Premier juillet, le film [Moving] (2004)
(On Cable TV, August 2020) It’s good, from time to time, to take a step away from your own culture and realize how some accepted aspects of it are, in fact, completely insane when seen from farther away. Such as the moving frenzy that culminates around July 1st in Québec – for historical reasons, the traditional end date for Québec rents is July 1st, meaning that roughly 150,000 people will move on that day. As a Franco-Ontarian suburban home owner, I was never directly involved in the madness (which mostly afflicts Québec-based urban renters) until fairly late in life when –despite my best efforts! — I ended up moving twice in Québec in mid-to-late June, with the July 1st deadline looming large in both cases. In any case, I’m glad that there’s at least one movie to take this bit of Québec culture and memorialize it, even if the result doesn’t quite make the most of the opportunities at its disposal. An ensemble comedy, Premier juillet follows a chain of three moving groups on July 1st – a young couple moving into an apartment vacated by a small family that’s moving from Montréal to a small village house where the son is moving away to Montréal to be with his sister, who has just been evicted by a landlord fed up with her behaviour and non-payment. It’s not an overly comic comedy, if you’ll pardon the expression: it ends well for everyone, but there are sombre moments and less-than-admirable characters along the way. The interlinked nature of the three specific stories sometimes takes away as much as it gives, in that I didn’t quite get a sense of climax to the stories, nor a really representative depiction of the moving madness of July 1st. Oh, some bits and pieces are likable and universal enough – the time-lapses of rooms being emptied or decorated hit hard for some reason. The very cute Sabine Karsenti plays perhaps the most level-headed character in the film, as she and her boyfriend start navigating the difficult give-and-take of living together. Featuring some Montréal-based actors who feel familiar but not overexposed, director Philippe Gagnon’s first full-length feature is watchable enough… but somehow not quite up to the comic mayhem that it could have been.