The French connection proved to be the key to success Monday night at the 25th annual Genie Awards honouring the best in Canadian cinema, with films from Quebec snagging the major honours, including double Academy Award nominee The Triplets of Belleville as best motion picture.
A Canada-France co-production, The Triplets of Belleville was nominated for a pair of 2004 Oscars but qualified under the rules for the 2005 Genies. Using very little language at all, it's the manic story of a young man who enters the Tour de France cycling race but gets kidnapped by some shady characters, only to have his grandmother and her faithful dog set out to rescue him.
The best actor and actress Genies went to Quebeckers for a pair of well-regarded dramas that haven't yet had an English-Canada theatrical release. Pascale Bussieres did her own singing in Ma vie en cinemascope, the tragic story of famed 1950s Quebec songstress Alys Robi who suffered a nervous breakdown and was treated with shock therapy and a lobotomy.
Best actor was Looking for Alexander's Roy Dupuis (Nikita) as a hit-and-run victim who emerges from a year-long coma with amnesia and tries to piece his memories back together. The film also won for best director (Francis Leclerc) and original screenplay (Leclerc and Marcel Beaulieu).
As most of the winners spoke only French, Leclerc made fun of his limited English.
"Look at that, do you hear? No, no I can try," he said to applause from the audience. "I'm very happy and Mary go to school with John. OK?"
Other Quebec films with little recognition in Anglo Canada also were winners. The Last Tunnel (Le Dernier tunnel) had a leading eight nominations and came away with best supporting actor (Jean Lapointe) and best sound. Machine Gun Molly (Monica la mitraille) went into Genie night with seven nominations and won for best adapted screenplay.
Head in the Clouds, a lavish international co-production that starred Charlize Theron in a story of French resistance fighters during the Second World War, took away the most Genies with four: editing, original music score, costume design and cinematography.
For the second year in a row the Genie telecast was taken over by CHUM Television, which aired the gala live in prime time on an ad hoc network of its stations that included Citytv, Star, Bravo, Access and ASN.
Former SCTV comic and actress Andrea Martin, who first appeared at the Genies in 1986, served as emcee for the show that CHUM promised would be, unlike the Oscars, a tight 90 minutes in length. Martin's sister Marcia was the show's executive producer.
"The Genie Awards have honoured Canadian films every year for a quarter of a century uninterrupted," Martin noted in her opening monologue. "That's even more reliable than hockey!"
Near the end of the show, Martin deadpanned that she had so many nice things to say about Canadian film and filmmakers.
"But this is neither the time nor the place."
The biggest surprise, perhaps, was what did not win.
Toronto producer Robert Lantos' Being Julia, which netted Annette Bening a best-actress Oscar nomination this year, was a strong contender for best picture but came away with zilch. Bening played a star of the London stage in the 1930s who fears an up-and-coming contender is after her fame and her man. Under the complex Canadian-content rules, because the director was not Canadian, Bening - an American - did not qualify in the acting category. But Jennifer Jason Leigh, also an American, was eligible and won best supporting actress for Childstar, which was directed by Canadian Don McKellar.
Another best picture contender, the sexy urban comedy Love, Sex and Eating the Bones, also came up empty.
The filmed-in-Toronto horror flick Resident Evil: Apocalypse took home a Genie for sound editing. Earlier this month it won the Golden Reel as the Canadian film with the biggest domestic box office.
Producer Don Carmody has won the award five times now, including for such past hits Meatballs and Porky's.
And Chris Landreth's Ryan, which already won the Oscar this year for best animated short, nabbed the Genie in the same category.
The Claude Jutra award for a director's first feature went to Daniel Roby for La Peau blanche.