Maria Chapdelaine (1934)

(On TV, November 2020) The 1934 version of Maria Chapdelaine opens on the worse possible note. The story of Maria Chapdelaine is a French-Canadian classic for a few reasons, but keep in mind a few things: The original novel on which the film was based was written by a French immigrant, describing a rural Québec largely for European audiences. (In a twist of fate, he died before the novel became a runaway success.) This 1934 film was made by French filmmakers who came to Québec to shoot the film. (There was no significant French-Canadian film industry before the 1950s and even that is stretching the truth quite a bit.) The film was also made for French-European audiences, something that its opening scrawls underline heavily: first, it feels compelled to point out that despite the film’s rural setting, Québec also had bustling cities; second, it felt compelled to point out that the filmmakers toned down the “rough” Québec accent for intelligibility. With an incredibly patronizing opening text like that, anyone would be justified in expecting a condescending grab bag of cultural appropriation and dismissiveness. Fortunately, the film does much better once it gets going. It clearly relishes the colourful French-Canadian patois, with dialogue clearly showcasing rural expressions without repetition. The non-Québecois mid-Atlantic accent actually works in the film’s favour, clearly letting the words speak for themselves rather than the inflection—after a while, you simply stop noticing it. The film works even better visually: a lot of work was invested in capturing images of rural Québec at a time where very few filmmakers did, and the result is an amazing document of 1930s Québec looking like the 1910s. There’s a lot of enthusiasm and not as much condescension in how rural Québec is presented: the soundtrack of the film is crammed with traditional French-Canadian songs, images of farms and logging camps, and delightful turns of phrase that are impossible to translate in any other language (or any other French dialect). From mild loathing, I actually grew to like the result quite a bit, and see it as a very worthy precursor to Québec’s own film industry. Keep in mind that this Maris Chapdelaine was made before Québec’s secular Révolution tranquille and that it predates the turbulent history of Québec’s separatist movement, lending it a different quality than later versions meant to promote Québec’s rural roots. Also keep in mind that Maria Chapdelaine has been shot four times: this 1930s French version, a 1950s French version, a (rather good) 1983 version made in Québec and, as I write these lines, is slated to be Québec’s next homegrown blockbuster. The universal nature of the story (which features three suitors to a beautiful young woman, each of them representing a facet of the French-Canadian experience) and terroir appeal make it a natural for generational reinterpretation. I frankly think that we all lucked out with the 1930s version: opening scrawl aside, it’s about as good an adaptation that could be made at the time.