Next week, the 2012 edition of Le Festival d’été de Québec gets underway. The 10-day musicfest brings out some big names nowadays, with the likes of Sting, KISS, Iron Maiden, Rammstein, Metallica and Elton John having graced the stage in the past few years–and Bon Jovi, Aerosmith and The Offspring on board this time around. But back in 1999, the biggest band at le Festival was Les Colocs, who won that year’s Prix Miroir for the most popular performance. Less than a year later, their iconic frontman Dédé Fortin would be dead at 37, having taken his own life through self-inflicted seppuku. It would be almost a decade before his life-story was captured on film in the form of Dédé, à travers les brumes, starring sovereigntist rapper Sébastien Ricard (from Loco Locass) in the principal role.
Although he does have a few film and TV credits to his name, it’s likely that Ricard won the role for both his musical and political connections. Fortin himself was a fervent Quebec nationalist; in fact his band was slated to launch their second CD, Atrocetomique, at a rally for the “Oui” campaign on the eve of the 1995 referendum–although the results of said survey sorta put a damper on things. Formed in 1990 by Fortin and Louis Léger, Les Colocs scored a hit in ’93 with “Passe-moé la puck” off their self-titled album. Having already generated some buzz with their live gigs and an appearance on L’empire des futurs stars, the debut sold several thousand copies, allowing them to clean up at that year’s Félix awards. They quickly became one of the biggest bands in Quebec, with their insightful lyrics written in joual and their happy-go-lucky, danceable rhythms.
The film picks things up in 1997, during the recording of Dehors novembre, their final album with Fortin, a record that would take several months to make as the band’s singer and chief songwriter dealt with depression. The time spent in isolation in Estrie gives Fortin several flashbacks that inspire the song-writing process, and allows him to take us back in time. As with many movies based on true stories, the chronology doesn’t always synch up with reality. For one thing, the movie leads us to believe that Fortin formed the band with harmonica player Patrick Esposito di Napoli, who he met as a busker on the subway, and Mike Sawatzky, a fellow street musician–and an anglophone Indian from Saskatchewan, no less. Alas, the band was already established before those two came along.
Likewise, while Sawatzky did get into a car accident that left him in a coma for a couple months, it apparently wasn’t during the recording of the album, as the film portrays. But that certainly does make for better cinema…
Meanwhile, Fortin’s depression doesn’t really become apparent until the latter part of the film. It’s only after he suffers a bit of a breakdown in the studio that the movie flashes back to his hospitalization in 1985, but by the time he’s scheduled to play Le Festival d’été, you can tell he’s not well–though that didn’t stop him from putting on a dynamite performance. Alas, the narrative structure of Dédé, à travers les brumes is such that the overall story seems somewhat incomplete–and I almost feel that it paints less than a full portrait of the tortured artist. Mind you, that didn’t stop it from topping the Quebec box-office upon its release in March 2009…
To give you some idea of how big Fortin and his band was, their former bassist Mononc’ Serge, who’s gone on to a successful shock-rock solo career, still gets asked about Les Colocs in TV interviews as recently as last November. For the record, he’s never seen the film–but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t.
