| 3:00 p.m. | The Times That Are Pierre Perrault (Canada, 1966) |
(Le règne du jour). Pierre Perrault's follow-up to Of Whales, the Moon and Men accompanies one of that film's most memorable characters, the voluble patriarch Alexis Tremblay, and his reluctant wife Marie on a once-in-a-lifetime journey from Île-aux-Coudres to France. This trip to "the cradle of the Ancestors" could have been an exercise in ethnic pride, but as Jerry White wrote, "far from indulging in such myth-making, The Times That Are is an example of the way Perrault has always been involved in a dialogue between tradition and modernity." The Tremblays quickly and sometimes comically discover that, in everything from the way they talk to how they kill their pigs, the gap between the French and the Quebecois is a matter of more than miles. The lesson is bittersweet, and eloquently encapsulated in M. Tremblay's raging at a broken grandfather clock brought home from the motherland.
—Juliet Clark
• Photographed by Bernard Gosselin, Jean-Claude Labrecque. (118 mins, In French with English subtitles, B&W, Beta SP, From National Film Board of Canada)
