Michel Côté

  • Les maîtres du suspense [The Masters of Suspense] (2014)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, January 2022) As someone with a much-better-than-average knowledge of the French-Canadian book publishing scene (some of my best friends are best-selling authors), there’s an additional fun factor in watching the comedy of Les maîtres du suspense and measuring it against the dull reality of a novelist’s life. Our characters are not the well-adjusted, slightly introverted writers I know—they’re either a womanizing celebrity with a lasting writer’s block, a slightly-unhinged ghost writer confronted with divorce, or an exuberant man-child with an outsized storytelling talent. The plot gets going when an editor’s increasingly insistent requests to see a new manuscript force the celebrity thriller author to ask his usual ghostwriter to get to work, except that this ghostwriter is so drained by his ongoing divorce that he ends up farming the novel to a neighbourhood daycare worker. It’s all good for a few chuckles: Michel Côté is his usual dependable self as Quebec’s foremost leading man, while everyone else does their part in keeping the film going. Writer-director Stéphane Lapointe doesn’t completely control his material, though: A third act set in La Nouvelle Orléans shifts the tone of a largely domestic comedy into something weirder and certainly more expensive, with little impact. Sure, there’s more colour to the film—but it doesn’t necessarily help the film confront its themes, and it leads to a conclusion that’s as disappointing as it perpetuates bothersome myths about novelists. (Having the protagonist “triumph” by writing… an autobiography is really not closing the loop on his inability to write fiction that precipitated the entire film.)  There’s metafictional material about a film shoot (adapted from his novels) that doesn’t really pay off other than providing a love interest to the protagonist, and the film’s comedy is simply not wild enough to accommodate the sort-of-serious issues raised by the film’s plot turns. There are many ways the same premise could have been spun, but the result seems stuck between those possibilities, awkwardly unable to really dive into the material. A disappointment more than a failure, Les maîtres du suspense is readily watchable, but doesn’t leave much of an impression. Although it is considerably funnier when you know how writing a novel works.

  • Le sens de l’humour [A Sense of Humour] (2011)

    Le sens de l’humour [A Sense of Humour] (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) One of the defining characteristics of French-Canadian society is its fondness for comedians — stand-up comedians, stage comedians, TV comedians or movie comedians, with a considerable amount of crossover between the four. The prototypical French-Canadian blockbuster often features one or two familiar comedians, plus a premise riffing off suspense tropes with a comic attitude. Le sens de l’humour is clearly in that vein, as it stars comic superstars Louis José Houde, Michel Côté and Benoit Brière in a film where a strong thriller premise is played for laughs. Here, two touring stage comedians (House and Côté) make fun of someone they shouldn’t during a show… and find themselves kidnapped by a serial killer eager for comedy lessons. Quite a bit of the film’s middle act delves into a meta-deconstruction of humour itself, as the stand-ups try to teach likability and humour principles to someone strikingly inept at it. There’s more, of course — the third act is all about absolving the “serial killer,” introducing a bigger threat and somehow defusing it while not having the rest of the film teetering into a more serious vein. Parts of it certainly work — the three leads have rapport, and the smaller-scale set-pieces can be funny. What doesn’t work quite as well is the conclusion, which has trouble resolving all of the impossible subplots it has created for itself. But those issues scarcely mattered at the film’s release: Le sens de l’humour was the second highest-grossing French-Canadian film of 2011, coming very closely behind Starbucks (which was remade in Hollywood as Delivery Man) — another lighthearted film featuring a well-known comedian.

  • De Père en flic 2 [Father and Guns 2] (2017)

    De Père en flic 2 [Father and Guns 2] (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, July 2019) As a French-Canadian cinephile who almost exclusively watches foreign movies (understandable: In good years, only half a dozen French-Canadian releases sell more than 100,000 tickets and even the local movie theatre shows maybe one French-Canadian release per month), it’s not unpleasant to go back to the homegrown stuff and watch a movie that speaks my language, takes place around here and features actors that I’ve seen over and over again. De Père en flic 2 has the distinction of being the most popular French-Canadian film of 2017, with roughly 680,000 admissions and $5M in grosses. It’s a relatively big-budget follow up to the 2009 original which was also a box-office success, and it features both veteran Québec movie superstar Michel Côté and wildly popular comedian Louis-José Houde as father and son cops who compete professionally to catch a mob boss. In an attempt to recreate the premise of the first film, the plot is shamelessly manipulated so that both protagonists find themselves at a couple’s retreat in order to get a confession out of their target. Since this is a mainstream comedy, De Père en flic 2 spends a third of its time on a passable cop thriller, and the rest on grimacing antics featuring a bunch of seasoned comedians milking the couples-therapy premise for all it’s worth. It actually works well … although I wonder how well it travels outside Québec’s border with its unapologetic French-Canadian blend of bilingual dialect, pop-culture references, familiar sights and uniquely local references. At least the film is decently paced, which is crucial for a comedy: aside from some weird editing and blurry CGI due to the film’s relatively low budget by American standards, writer-director Émile Gaudreault gets his jokes neatly lined up in a row and even manages to put together a few cinematic sequences (most clearly the dance sequence) on its way to the conclusion. I enjoyed it quite a bit, and favourably compare it to that other Québec cop comedy sequel of 2017, the far more disappointing Bon Cop Bad Cop 2.

  • Liste Noire [Black List] (1995)

    Liste Noire [Black List] (1995)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, January 2019) When it comes to Liste Noire, I definitely have mixed feelings. On the one hand, it was one of Québec’s mid-1990s attempts to ape the conventions of American-style judicial thrillers. Rather than endlessly talking around the proverbial dinner table like far too many French-Canadian movies do, Liste Noire quickly gets to the heart of its noir premise: A prostitute engineers her own arrest, and then delivers a secret list of names to a Québec High Court judge, implicating other high-ranking judges. The ensuing portrait of the backroom dealing between judges is definitely cynical, showing them as even more corrupt than the average person. Québec big-screen legend Michel Côté is quite good in a thankless role, playing the new judge with the list who soon has to deal with death threats and attempts on his life. It’s all pretty jazzy material for a thriller, and now-renowned director Jean-Marc Vallée manages his big-screen debut with some intensity. The sharp (but dated) 1990s edge is now strikingly neon and noir, with a suitably jaundiced view and sympathies on the side of prostitutes rather than judges. But then there’s the ending. If you stopped watching the film three-quarter of the way through, you would probably have a nagging feeling about where it was all going … but no proof of the insanity in store in the film’s big twist. Alas, the nagging doubt is soon realized and the film self-destructs in a violent final burst of ludicrousness and bad plotting. Some movies are improved by twist endings while others are weakened by them, and Liste Noire definitely belongs to the second category. Ultimately, it makes the movie difficult to take seriously once all is wrapped up. Too bad, because there’s roughly four fifths of a great suspense thriller in here.

  • Cruising Bar 2 (2008)

    Cruising Bar 2 (2008)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, December 2018) Michel Côté is once more back in the saddle playing four different characters in Cruising Bar 2, a sequel to the massively successful 1989 film that feel more money-driven than anything else, even though it does provide something like closure to the events of the first film. Again, the film clearly belongs to Côté, as he plays four very different characters all dealing with their own kind of relationship issues. No one else in the supporting cast comes close to making as clear an impression. Nearly twenty years after the events of the first film, the humiliation comedy once again annoyingly reigns supreme as the four characters haven’t evolved a lot. The subplots are far more scattered than the single-night-at-the-nightclub focus of the original, which may explain why the film doesn’t feel as satisfying. On the other hand, it does leave the characters with some closure, as painful as it can be for some and as comfortable as it can be for others. Cruising Bar 2 is… OK, but it’s definitely best watched as a coda to the first film.

  • Cruising Bar (1989)

    Cruising Bar (1989)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, December 2018) The first Cruising Bar movie was a minor French-Canadian classic back in the 1990s—nearly everyone had seen it, and the film was a hit with many kinds of viewers, earning spectacular box-office results. It’s easy to see why, as French-Canadian big-screen legend Michel Côté (who also co-wrote the film) plays four very different characters all out for a night on the town. He sells all of them, from the nerdy bespectacled “Earthworm” to the drug-addled mullet-wearing “Lion” to the libidinous hairy “Stallion” to the sophisticated snobbish “Peacock”. They all have their own style, and the comedy that goes with it … although you have to be ready for some heavy doses of humiliation comedy in order to appreciate the result. Côté is nothing short of terrific in the four roles, and the film certainly depends on him. Among the supporting players, Louise Marleau looks spectacular as “The Divine”—the ultimate object of desire. Despite this being a comedy and going for a lot of laughs, Cruising Bar in itself is far more sombre than you’d expect—few of the characters get what they want, and the film’s overall take on bar-hopping is nothing short of soul-crushing. It does have its funny moments, though, even if the caricatures can be wearing and the film quickly shows where it’s going. Writer/director Robert Ménard knows what he’s doing, and the result has acquired a nice period patina over the past thirty years.

  • Omertà (2012)

    Omertà (2012)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, October 2013) I have fond memories of the original “Omertà” TV series that was broadcast back in 1996: A muscular police thriller set against the backdrop of Montréal’s organized crime, it put Michel Côté on the map, brought Hollywood-like production values to Québec TV and showed that home-grown entertainment could be remarkably enjoyable.  Omertà-the-movie obviously banks on name recognition, as it purports to follow Michel Côté’s character more than a decade after the conclusion of the third series.  The links between TV series and film aren’t thicker than two common characters, though: much of the rest is original, so that viewers without any knowledge of the series won’t miss much.  What follows is a tangled, even opaque, mess of double-agents, organized crime figures, corrupt law-and-order representatives and the occasional victim.  It’s not uninteresting (even featuring a daring death midway through) and filmmaker Luc Dionne’s work is generally solid… but the script leads to a big so-what of an inconclusive ending that doesn’t show bravery as much as it elicits frustration.  While the film has its moments, it seems to lead nowhere, and mishandle its own strengths.  As Québec’s “big movie” of 2012, it offers the usual casting gags and fixtures: Michel Côté and Patrick Huard are omnipresent on the French-Canadian big screen for good reasons, while comedian Stéphane Rousseau is a revelation as a villain (sadly, his characters is repeatedly qualified as a psycho without much on-screen confirmation, and his exit is a big disappointment) while husband/manager-of-Céline-Dion René Angelil as a mob boss is just… funny.  Alas, Rachelle Lefebvre is far less interesting than she should have been in her role.  While Omertà is a decent piece of filmmaking, it’s not quite the slick crowd-pleaser that it aimed to be.  It may be worthwhile to revisit the TV series, though, and I’m still interested in whatever Luc Dionne wants to work on next.

  • De père en flic [Father and Guns] (2009)

    De père en flic [Father and Guns] (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, May 2010) For such a small market, Québec cinema has proven uncommonly adept at finding the recipes required to get audiences in theatres.  In this case, take a respected actor with a good track record (Michel Côté), pair him off with a hip comic (Louis-José Houde), put them in a situation that combines family comedy with criminal intrigue and watch the results.  As is the case with nearly any other Québec comedy hybrid, the film is first played for laughs, and then for criminal thrills.  The movie’s entire middle third is spent yakking it up at a remote camp for estranged fathers-and-sons, with mud-wrestling, Gen-X/Boomer generational complaints and occasional reminders that there is a hostage drama going on elsewhere.  Only De père en flic‘s first and last minutes are concerned with the cops-versus-criminals premise, which is just as well given how it’s the comedy rather than the thrills that made this film such a success at the French-Canadian box-office.  It actually works pretty well: The script may occasionally indulge its stars in going for the cheap laughs, but the generational conflicts have more substance that you’d expect from a light summer comedy, and actually have something to say about today’s Québec.  De père en flic may be a far better farce than a criminal thriller, but that’s not much of a problem.