Screenwriter Jefferson Lewis wants to clear a few things up. On the set of French Immersion, the bilingual comedy being shot outside of Montreal, Lewis and director Kevin Tierney are getting asked a series of questions about what it means to be anglophones writing socio-political satire about the language divide.
“I don’t really consider myself an anglo writer as such,” Lewis says, correcting a question. “Some of the first scripts I ever wrote were in French. I see myself as Québécois.”
Questions of linguistic identity are bound to come up on the set of French Immersion. Lewis and Tierney, a producer who is directing for the first time, are taking shots at every ethnic and linguistic stereotype imaginable in the $6.3-million feature, which aims to unite the two solitudes in laughter.
“The other option was to have another royal commission on language,” Lewis says. “We decided to write a comedy instead.”
The plot of French Immersion has four anglo Canucks and a New Yorker heading into a fictional northern Quebec town to immerse themselves in the langue française. A barrage of culture clashes ensue, with Canadians from various walks of life from the rest of Canada (ROC as it’s referred to in Quebec) learning the basics of Quebec rural life from the locals.
Tierney jokes that his shift from producer to director has been an easy one: “When you’re a producer you think you’re god, but when you’re a director, you really are god. I love it! I don’t know why I waited so long.”
Québécois singer Robert Charlebois, who plays a sleazy senator in French Immersion, on set with the director, Kevin Tierney.
But this project is not entirely new for the seasoned producer. He co-wrote and produced Bon Cop, Bad Cop, the 2006 cop-buddy flick which tapped into the anglo-franco divide and, most importantly, transported some of Quebec’s box-office momentum into the less robust ROC market. Bon Cop earned more than $12.5-million domestically, nudging aside the 1982 teen comedy Porky’s to become the country’s all-time box-office champ. (Critics were quick to point out that, adjusted for inflation, Porky’s is still on top.)
“If there are two things French Canadians have an opinion on, it’s hockey and English Canadians,” Tierney told me on the set of Bon Cop. “If there are two things English Canadians have an opinion on, it’s hockey and French Canadians.”
Tierney now returns to the language fracas, but focusing on the rural immersion programs that tens of thousands of Canadians have signed up for over the past four decades. Given these two film projects, Tierney could well be dubbed the father of his own sub-genre, the comédie franglais. Which prompts a series of questions, the paramount one being about the intricate connection between language and comedy: What some view as utterly hilarious, others view as downright appalling (witness Jerry Lewis). Can franco and anglo comedy co-exist in one feature film?
“The experience of Bon Cop was really revelatory to me,” Tierney says. “The francophones said that while the French characters were a bit clichéd, we had really got the anglo characters down. Yeah, everyone in English Canada wears a turtleneck and is constipated. In English Canada, people said we had overused anglo stereotypes, but congrats on getting those French characters down. To me, it’s not like you want to piss everyone off, but I think you must treat everyone with the same tone. I mean, there’s so much lunacy in these characters, but I also happen to love them.”
Casting, Tierney notes, is key. In Bon Cop, his lead characters were portrayed by Quebec sensation Patrick Huard and one of English Canada’s most respected thespians, Colm Feore. Tierney says that getting star traction in English Canada is much trickier because it doesn’t really have a big-screen star system.
But what it does have is popular TV, so in French Immersion he’s including as many names from ROC TV as possible. The cast boasts Feore, Fred Ewanuick (Corner Gas), Laurence Leboeuf (Durham County), Olunike Adeliyi (Flashpoint), Martha Burns (Slings and Arrows) and Gavin Crawford (This Hour Has 22 Minutes) along with Quebec stars such as Dorothée Berryman (The Barbarian Invasions), Karine Vanasse (Polytechnique) and Amélie Grenier (Bon Cop).
Crawford agrees that comedy reads differently in different languages. He plays a Newfoundland politician who aspires to national office, and thus must learn French.
“I liked it from the first moment I read it,” he says of the script. “Some of it was broader than I expected, but then I thought about French comedies, and they have a slightly different edge to them. The French and English comic elements seem to be mixing pretty well so far. French comedy tends to be a bit more slapsticky. We tend to be a bit more politically correct in English Canada, which I don’t like. It’s not good for comedy.”
Tierney has also cast Robert Charlebois, the famed Quebec joual-rocker, as a sleazy senator. “I thought this was a brilliant social and political satire,” Charlebois says. “I laughed like hell when I read it. We’re the last country on Earth who can treat this subject with humour. Don’t try this in Belgium. And in the U.S., with the English-Spanish divide? Forget it. Let’s continue to have fun with the hatred English and French have for each other.
“As my character says, ‘I love Canada. I hate English-Canadians, but I love Canada.’ It’s important to be able to laugh together.”
Special to The Globe and Mail
