Working on Screen PDF

4 Work It Girl! Sex, Labour, and Nationalism in Valérie rebecca sullivan Quebec national cinema is often hailed for its challenging and provoca- tive films about women’s social status. Pioneer filmmakers such as Anne Claire Poirier and Mireille Dansereau and later artists such as Léa Pool began...

4 Work It Girl! Sex, Labour, and Nationalism in Valérie rebecca sullivan Quebec national cinema is often hailed for its challenging and provoca- tive films about women’s social status. Pioneer filmmakers such as Anne Claire Poirier and Mireille Dansereau and later artists such as Léa Pool began in the early 1970s to make inroads into the burgeoning film community, creating works that utilize themes of women’s subordi- nation and struggle for equality in Quebec society. Their efforts, under the rubric of government-sponsored programs such as the Groupe de recherches sociale and En tant que femmes constitute a major chapter in the history of Quebec film and of feminist cultural politics in Canada generally.1 Yet there is a clear and distinct line between ‘important films’ and popular films. While the latter enjoy box-office success and widespread media attention at the time of their release, they tend to fall by the wayside once the heady work of canon formation begins. In the case of cinematic representations of women, these early feminist films from Quebec may tell us much about the state of second-wave femi- nism as a social movement in Quebec, but the story of mainstream acceptance of women’s liberation and the reconfiguration of women’s social value remain hidden. At a time when even the word ‘feminism’ is under attack as outmoded, unfashionable, and overly strident, it is helpful to look beyond those cultural texts that claimed an affiliation with the movement, and focus on those that sought to represent femi- nist values and mores in a popularized context. Valérie, released in 1968 with great fanfare to record audiences, claimed to be a film about modern Quebec and liberated women. Yet, its rela- tionship to the aims of feminism appears tangential at best. The adven- tures of a convent-school runaway who enters the sex trade before finding true love amidst symbols of urban Quebec nationalism is obvi- 96 Rebecca Sullivan ously influenced by the cultural explosion of the Quiet Revolution. It would be easy to dismiss the film as exploitative of women and their struggles for greater political, economic, and social freedom. To claim it as merely a form of false consciousness or pseudo-feminist pap for the masses is to miss a broader point. The shift in women’s roles and representations in Quebec society in the 1960s and the radical edge of second-wave feminism provided the foundation for soft-core films like Valérie to play in local theatres. Upon entering the mainstream through popular culture, however, they tended to privilege questions of sexual- ity over those of labour, and the relations of the body over the politics of education. As Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs argue, the emphasis on sexual liberation as the defining feature of women’s liberation in popular culture made feminism palatable to a mainstream audience, while pushing to the backburner issues of eco- nomic and social equality.2 André Loiselle contends that while early Quebec popular cinema had nationalist elements, it was not as concerned with language as it was with the body.3 This trend is quite clear in Valérie, which has a minimal use of dialogue, probably to enhance its marketability in the burgeon- ing foreign film industry. In fact, the lead character doesn’t speak for the first ten minutes, preferring to let her breasts handle the introduc- tion. The opening sequence, played over a jazzy-pop soundtrack, has Valérie in front of a vanity mirror in an otherwise stark room. She is topless and is applying heavy eye makeup while smoking a cigarette. A crucifix hangs on the wall, watching her almost as closely as the nun hiding behind the door. Caught, she is then taken to the Mother Supe- rior, who castigates her for her wanton, wayward behaviour. Unrepen- tant, Valérie arranges her escape on motorcycle. After a rebaptismal skinny dip, she and her Easy Rider boyfriend head to the big city, where she promptly dumps him in search of her own adventures. She eventu- ally finds a job as a topless go-go dancer in one of the many new dance clubs opening on Rue Ste Catherine, and bunks in with a sexy but predatory lesbian. Her evening job leaves her tired and listless so she spends her days in Parc Mont Royal, where she meets a dashing artist, Patrick, and his young son. They begin a love affair, but Valérie keeps her way of life a secret from him. It becomes an even darker secret when she gives up the hard labour of topless dancing for the relatively easy life of a high-priced call girl. Eventually things start to unravel when she attends a gallery opening with her new boyfriend and is recognized by some of her regulars, who noticeably shun her. Later, after Patrick discovers her secret life and leaves her, she is brutalized by a particu-  Sex, Labour, and Nationalism in Valérie 97 larly wealthy but grotesquely ugly client. She realizes that she cannot be a wife and mother by day and whore by night, so decides to leave the city to forget all her mistakes. She makes one last trip to the park to say goodbye, but Patrick decides that he must forgive her. He chases after her as she walks away towards the lookout. On the plaza, against a backdrop of the Montreal skyline and a ring of Quebec flags, he em- braces her. His son runs after him and they all join hands, the family unit triumphant. ‘Our cinema will be mature when we dare to undress the girl next door,’ announced Denys Héroux, the director of Valérie, in the Quebec edition of Maclean’s.4 This rallying cry and his later proclamation that it was high time to undress ‘la petite Québécoise,’ as a political gesture against the old order caused outrage in the fledgling film community. Denouncing Valérie as ‘antiquébécois,’ Yves Lever complained not only about its sexism but also the media hype surrounding it and its comely star, Danielle Ouimet. Insisting that for Quebec to evolve culturally, it must abandon the bourgeois values promoted in Valérie, he also argued that the film’s success could lead to an industry dangerously based on a star system and sex appeal rather than authentic experience, as befitted a national cinema: ‘The star, this woman-object, available but inacces- sible, no longer corresponds to the modern liberated woman, who sees herself as an authentic person, respected for her subjectivity and ca- pable of establishing honest interpersonal relationships.’5 By labelling the film ‘antiquébécois,’ Lever established an antagonistic relationship between authentic art cinema and crass and exploitative popular cin- ema. Certainly this dichotomy is nothing new, but the added elements of nationalist fervour and the clamouring over the soul of Québécois women cemented a link between class, gender, and nationalism in public debates about the appropriate direction for a liberated Quebec culture. While politically oriented artists fumed, new ‘films de fesse’ or ‘maple syrup pornos’ like Valérie, its follow-up L’Initiation (1970), and Deux femmes en or (1970), chalked up big profits and became lucrative exports.6 Valérie was the first Quebec film to gross more than one million dollars. It appeared across Canada and in twenty-six other countries. Finland and Yugoslavia selected it as their first-ever Cana- dian film purchase.7 With its anti-religious stance, its celebration of the city, and the strategic use of Quebec flags, the film toyed with the serious political issues of the Quiet Revolution and the province’s late entrance into modernity, but did so through the figure of a naked, sexually available young woman. The dominant theory of Quebec film argues for a tradition that blends 98 Rebecca Sullivan documentary and social commentary into realist narratives about the actual living conditions of its people. Cinéma direct is generally consid- ered ‘the forte of Quebec film.’8 This characterization has been sanc- tioned by the Quebec government in its official overview of the province’s film history. As Pierre Jutras claims, by the sixties filmmakers ‘began to associate cinema with social intervention and preferred to make films that more closely reflected the realities of the socio-economic condition in Quebec.’9 He skims over the films, like Valérie, that attracted huge Québécois audiences. Calling them ‘une vague érotico-comique’ (‘an erotic-comic wave’), he complains about audience’s early gullibility for such fare before returning to the canonical work of filmmakers in the 1970s whose work he praises for successfully blending elements of popular and auteur cinema.10 Yet, as Loiselle argues, there needs to be greater acknowledgment of the films that the general public was actu- ally more likely to see; we need to reflect on their value as social and historical documents rather than simply dismiss them on aesthetic grounds, as Lever and Jutras have done.11 On the one hand, it is not surprising to note that popular cinema succeeds with less intellectual exegesis from the characters and more physical and sexual display. However, the underlying gender distinctions between high and low cinema cannot pass unnoticed here, especially as they are linked to notions of nationalism. Chantal Nadeau claims that nation and masculinity are unproblem- atically associated with the state of ‘l’identitaire’ in Quebec cinema, while women’s cinema is marginalized as personal and not national in consequence. It is reduced to ‘a cinema of the body,’ rather than a preferred cinema of the mind, with a foregrounded concern for a poli- tics of language.12 Thus, women’s cinema unwillingly shares a space with a popular cinema that usurps, undermines, and subverts potential feminist praxis. As Denyse Therrien critically observes, the efforts of popular-cinema producers to capitalize on the new-found liberation and artistic daring in Quebec led to ‘increasingly virile, misogynous and violent’ films in the 1960s that audiences thoroughly enjoyed.13 The taking up of feminist, or at least woman-centred, themes by popular cinema in the late 1960s did little to promote women’s independence or sovereignty over their bodies, as was the aim of second-wave feminism. It is not enough to suggest simply that they got it wrong. Rather, it calls into question the changing role of women as a class while Quebec was reorienting itself into a modern, industrial, and secular state. Thus, the significance of Valérie can be understood not so much through the  Sex, Labour, and Nationalism in Valérie 99 framework of film studies, with its emphasis on the text and aesthetics. Rather, popular cinema is more productively explored when placed in a social and historical context and examined for its role in mediating certain anxieties or ambivalences embedded in the culture. The postwar independence movement in Quebec was not a clean break from the past but rather was rooted in values derived from prior nationalist sentiments. Under Maurice Duplessis and the Union Nationale, Quebec maintained its sense of distinction through religion more so than language. The ultramontane French-Canadian Catholic Church enjoyed an elaborate power base as the centre of social, cultural, and educational life. It supported a vision of Quebec as a rural, agrarian economy where the principles of hard work, sacrifice, and humility guided the people. It further fostered an analogy between this distinct French-Catholic society and the traditional family unit so that the aims and goals of the people should be precisely in step with those of the (church-controlled) state, thus undermining any notion of individual- ism or emancipation in the modern sense.14 Rewards came later, but they were more spiritual or heavenly than materialistic and earth- bound. In this ideological milieu, the sort of indigenous films produced had to meet the strict edicts of the church – which was never a big supporter of cinema – and elaborate on the nationalist myth of a proud and noble peasantry. It therefore comes as no surprise that the most successful filmmakers of the Duplessis era were in fact priests. From the 1930s to the 1950s Père Albert Tessier and Père Maurice Proulx pro- duced a number of documentary films that were exhibited across the province.15 Featuring images of people scraping together a subsistence off the land while looking to the church for guidance, their films pro- moted an idealized image of the traditional working class – uncom- plaining, pious, family oriented, and willing to sacrifice personal success for the good of the whole. In many ways, as René Bouchard argues, the work of Tessier, Proulx, and others anticipated both the cinéma-direct style and the nationalist identity politics of the 1960s, but with a signifi- cantly different ideological perspective.16 Despite the obvious problems with the conservative ideology of the humble habitant, it did recognize and value women’s work in main- taining this society and carrying the bulk of religious and familial duty. The popular culture of rural Quebec earlier in the century seemed to acclaim working women far better than its modern counterpart, albeit within the tightly controlled framework of maternal feminism. Yvette Cohen offers an alternative theory in the history of Quebec feminism 100 Rebecca Sullivan that bridges the divide between the traditional and the modern in the discourses of nationalism. Her argument can help shed some light on the problematic representations of women as sexual object at a time when they were purportedly experiencing liberation. In popular maga- zines from the first half of the twentieth century, farm wives were treated as far more than sexual appendages and endowed with a sense of community. In a 1920 issue of Terre et Foyer, the farm wife was described as someone who ‘pledges to concern herself exclusively with her natural domain, which is the welfare of rural women as a class.’17 The separation of public and private spheres is not easy outside major cities, in rural communities where everyone must contribute just to survive. Thus the farm wife was an economic force to be reckoned with, and could not be treated along the same lines as the postwar urban housewife. While discourses of pious maternalism prevailed, there was also a deeply held belief in women as productive agents of their own survival and self-worth. Magazines encouraged women to improve their job skills through government-supported programs and treated the role of the farm wife/mother as a legitimate profession or even a vocational calling.18 What’s more, in the alliance of church, state, and family, women’s roles were not merely housebound but took on a vitality and importance to the maintenance of authentic Quebec society. Nestled between eternal images of sacrificial maternalism, best per- sonified by the Virgin Mother, were challenges to women as a labouring class to produce and reproduce for the suffering and unacknowledged nation.19 There were initial forays into popular narrative film during the 1950s that sought to express that same sense of humility and devotion to the church in the face of suffering and that incorporated this contradictory view of Quebec women as the bastions of suffering and sacrifice for a greater cause. The most prominent among these is the 1951 melodrama La petite Aurore l’enfant martyre. It is the story of a young innocent who is beaten by her stepmother while her widowed father stands by help- lessly. Eventually the local parish priest discovers the abuse and urges Aurore to pray to her real mother and her supernatural mother, Mary, for assistance. Promising to return with help, he leaves her alone in the house. The stepmother, realizing that her crimes have been discovered, kills the child. When the priest returns, he has both parents arrested, and they are ultimately sentenced to hang. The sacrifice of Aurore reasserts the importance of family and faith to the maintenance of Quebec society. Although some might rightly think that the torture and  Sex, Labour, and Nationalism in Valérie 101 murder of a child is asking too much, it is this deep sense of suffering for the collective good that marked Catholic piety at the time. Further- more, it was representative of a popular belief that the Québécois were a suffering people seeking deliverance through trust in God, the state, and the idealized family.20 Some might argue that the Quiet Revolution swept away such moralizing ideologies in favour of political realism, supported cinematically through the direct style. However, while there were some noticeable cosmetic changes in popular cinema – most obvi- ously the marginalization of the church – elements from this earlier, conservative era resonated well into the Quiet Revolution and are on display in Valérie. How the church began to relinquish power over everyday life, and how nationalist rhetoric switched from religion to language, is a long- standing debate that can never be satisfactorily resolved. Certainly the death of Duplessis in 1959 and the subsequent election of the Parti Libéral after twenty-four years of Union Nationale leadership had a major role in sparking the Quiet Revolution. It is generally assumed that the creation of a francophone middle class created the impetus that led to sweeping reforms in economic, political, and social policy, which led in turn to an outburst of creative energy trying to capture the ‘épanouissement’ of modern Quebec.21 Movements like Refus Global, which joined artists and intellectuals in demanding aesthetic indepen- dence from a stultifying society that feared modernity, have become hallmarks of Quebec’s cultural history, important precursors that an- ticipated a full-scale cultural revolution in the 1960s. Certainly there is no doubt that the politically tinged, nationalistic cinéma-direct move- ment shares an affinity with these earlier artistic rebellions. However, I’m not convinced that the same can be said for popular cinema, which sought commercial rather than artistic success. Rather, coming to terms with films like Valérie as more than an ‘erotic-comic wave’ that hap- pened in a moment of folly or weakness means realizing that Quebec’s cultural awakening was as much a result of socio-economic shifts that made possible a francophone middle class, as it was an autonomous, spontaneous groundswell of artistic and intellectual rebels from the margins. The rejection of traditional working-class values, grounded in piety and humility and the view that rural life was Quebec’s ordained destiny, could happen only if there was an alternative way of life to replace it. Scholars such as William Coleman claim that new modes of thought and action were less the products of a motivated and conscien- tious new class than of policy initiatives based on government and 102 Rebecca Sullivan industry partnerships.22 By turning away from arts and culture and examining shifts in social policy, films like Valérie cannot be easily dismissed as cultural roadkill on the way to real art. Coleman argues that at the time of the Quiet Revolution, education and labour were still tightly controlled by either the church or the state.23 However, by the 1960s, the Catholic Church was in the throes of massive reforms on a global scale, with the convening of the Second Vatican Council from 1959 to 1963. Under the principle of aggiornamento, the modernizing and updating of all facets of Catholic religiosity, church leaders promoted a greater sense of individuality and personal con- science in matters of faith. They also took measures to devolve their massive institutional network in favour of a grass-roots approach to social services. In Quebec, the reaction to the Second Vatican Council was not as dramatic as in other places, most notably the United States. Still, with the demise of the Union Nationale’s power and the death of Duplessis, it was clear that the Catholic Church would have to reassess its role in public life. Common sentiment likes to present a picture of an intransigent, corrupt, and dictatorial church grasping for power against the inevitable. That is, however, not entirely the case. As Gregory Baum points out, even members of the clergy were calling for change before the widespread reforms of the 1960s. Activists such as Père Gérard Dion and Père Louis O’Neil championed Catholic political progressivism and a modernization of social services. An anonymous tract from 1960 entitled Les Insolences du Frère Untel, later credited to Frère John-Paul Desbiens of the Marist Brothers, called for the church to assist in the formation of a better-educated, individualistic, and modern Quebec society.24 It can only be speculated how successful any kind of social revolution would have been without the cooperation of the church, but it is still important to recognize the degree of acceptance and even sup- port that it offered. Beginning in the 1960s, then, the educational strangle- hold of the church was relaxed, with at least its partial consent, paving the road for a new model based on industrial and technological progress in contrast to the old ways of cultural and spiritual belonging.25 In the meantime, other changes were occurring in economic and political life as the Parti Libéral sought to reform the government. The Duplessis ideology of a peasant society served nationalist ends by promoting Quebec isolationism as an issue of cultural survival. There were two competing versions of Quebec national history that sup- ported the exaltation of the peasant. The clerical model cherished the earliest days of the founding of New France and claimed its people as a  Sex, Labour, and Nationalism in Valérie 103 kind of ‘rural race’ destined to work the land and resist modernity. The political model viewed the conquest of New France as the origin of a distinct Quebec rural society. Having lost economic and political power to the English elite who controlled the urban centres, the pure laine French people had no choice but to retreat and reinforce the bulwark of rural society in order to save themselves.26 Regardless of the differences between these two perspectives, the outcome was the same: the cultural preservation of Quebec lay in a rural agrarian society and not in the cities. It was the ideology of the peasantry, and not the actual material conditions of French working-class life, that the Union Nationale fos- tered and the Parti Libéral sought to undo. Theories of the Quiet Revolution almost inevitably rest on questions of class and the reorganization of business and labour. The most popu- lar is of a grassroots movement led by an urbanized, educated, and newly bourgeois francophone public. This version, which makes no distinction between liberators and liberated, assumes an easy over- throw of state and religious institutions that had, not long before, seemed permanently fixed. However, it fails to take into consideration how this new middle class attained a secular-progressive education or entered into industrial and business life in the expanding cities. The ideology of the francophone peasantry, so cherished by the Duplessis government, reflected more an anxiety than a reality. Quebec, like everywhere else in the postwar era, was lurching towards industrialization and rationalist business principles along the lines of scientific management. The noble peasant image may have existed in the films of Tessier and Proulx as a self-preservation strategy, but it was not reflected in the economic reali- ties of the state. Later educational and cultural reforms of the Parti Libéral were a response to the economic and social status of the prov- ince as an urban, industrial society. This is in direct contrast to the dominant culturalist version of the Quiet Revolution, which, as some prefer to view it, credits the cultural awakening for spearheading changes to everyday life and the organization of social classes.27 In order to improve their chances of expansion and market domination, small- and medium-sized francophone business-owners lobbied the Quebec state to reform education to produce workers better suited for the techno- logically driven bureaucratic economy. This trend reverses the relation- ship between class and society in 1960s Quebec. Rather than claiming the new middle class as the proponents of widespread social and cul- tural reform, they are perhaps more likely the products of reforms implemented at the behest of modern industry. The distinction is cru- 104 Rebecca Sullivan cial in the consideration of popular cultural accounts of Quebec’s mod- ernization, as well as in understanding the gendered power relations that underscore them. The celebration of the urbanized middle class and the demise of the old representations of noble peasantry were not direct challenges to state controls, but rather were in step with their goals for a modern Quebec. As such, they are riddled with ambivalent images that seem unwilling to let go of the past. The fact that this ambivalence is mediated through the feminine body transforms the idea of the productive, female labourer envisioned by old orders of nationalism into a passive consumer of urban frivolity. In this new society, Valérie seemed to express all the excitement of the era, just before things exploded into righteous anger and conflict. Its release was not so much a challenge to the cultural order as a culmina- tion of changes in governmental cultural policies to support both a sophisticated artistic community and a thoroughly modern audience. Right from the earliest days of cinema, Quebec had sought to curtail the distribution of films and discourage people from attending. In 1912 it established a Bureau of Censorship and passed laws to enforce its power. Catholic dioceses were welcome to assist in the maintenance of the censorship system and could make interventions into the film in- dustry if they saw fit.28 Films were not allowed to be shown on Sun- days, and until 1967 children under the age of sixteen were prevented from seeing anything that could not claim educational value. There were the usual edicts against sex and violence, although Loiselle sug- gests that they seemed much more lenient towards violence compared to a near-hysterical level of censorship against even the mildest kind of sexual content.29 There were additional safeguards in the laws to pro- tect the ideology of the habitant, which both church and state exploited to justify their overbearing control over society. Any kind of negative connotation of the church or its clergy was deemed unacceptable. Also listed as reasons for censorship were disrespect for social and civic responsibility, undermining the prestige or authority of parents, and promoting a generalized sense of fear and anxiety. This suggests the degree to which both church and state were concerned with limiting any kind of voice that dissented with their own vision of a distinct Quebec society. In terms of sexuality, the conditions were laid out quite clearly: no ‘improper’ clothing, no lascivious kisses, no impropriety, and certainly no indication of sexual excitement.30 This status quo for film continued until well into the 1960s despite calls from the media and the new breed of modern Quebec intellectuals  Sex, Labour, and Nationalism in Valérie 105 for a more progressive cultural framework. Frustrated by the extent of cultural institution-building undertaken by the federal government in the years following the Massey Commission (1951), organizations in Quebec’s urban centres demanded that Duplessis start paying closer attention to the question of culture. Around the time of his death, the Montreal Junior Chamber of Commerce recommended a provincial arts council to support theatre and films that represented French-Canadian culture, while the opposition Parti Libéral recommended the appoint- ment of a minister of cultural affairs.31 It is not that Duplessis was completely unwilling to consider culture an important bulwark for Quebec nationalism, but he wanted to modernize the industry to in- crease the province’s financial stability while continuing to promote traditional ideals in its productions. The report of the Tremblay Com- mission in 1956 blended together concerns about Quebec’s economic strength with educational reforms and a vision of a distinct culture along the lines of the traditional pious model.32 That the government believed there was a way to modernize in some areas while retaining the ideology of a pure laine peasantry exposes the level of anxiety felt by traditionalists. It is evident in the conclusions of the commission, which complained that the industrialized working class was displaying char- acteristics more in line with anglophone, Protestant culture than with their rightful heritage.33 The commission’s recommendations that the political and economic infrastructure be changed to fit the cultural and spiritual ideals appear incredibly naive and suggest deep divisions in Quebec culture between traditional values and the changing realities of everyday society. Inevitably, of course, the efforts of the commission to put faith before commerce failed, paving the way for a relaxation of censorship controls and a promotion of indigenous culture not shackled to the church. In 1961, the newly elected Parti Libéral introduced the Department of Cultural Affairs into the government, promising to revitalize and reori- ent culture to meet the challenges of a modern Quebec. Its early years were a constant struggle for legitimation, and tended to emphasize the high arts, leaving mass media with its presumed lower-class audience to the foreign cultural industries.34 It was not until 1967 that film came to the attention of political leaders. The Office du Film du Quebec was transferred out of the hands of the clergy and into the Department of Cultural Affairs. At the same time, the censorship bureau was replaced by a ratings system, loosening the restrictions on depictions of sex, violence, and the mocking of once-sacred Quebec values. This move, 106 Rebecca Sullivan coupled with a new federal policy to promote the production of popu- lar cinema through the Canadian Film Development Corporation, con- siderably changed the conditions of Quebec filmmaking.35 As Loiselle argues: ‘Quebec audiences willing to encourage indigenous production but also eager to enjoy their viewing experience naturally flocked to comedic “films de fesses,” whether subversive or not, for what they wanted was to see themselves not as troubled young intellectuals in search of an identity but as bons vivants enjoying the many pleasures of life.’36 This was the new culture of épanouissement, which eagerly em- braced films like Valérie. Its immediate and unprecedented popularity flies in the face of canonical claims of aesthetic authenticity, but it also suggests that audiences were primed for a film so irreverent of both traditional piety and modern cultural politics. It apparently had every- thing that modern Quebec could ask for: easily shocked nuns, expan- sive cityscapes, a vibrant counterculture, avant garde artists, and a half-naked woman at the centre of it all. Reviews for the film tended along the lines of bemusement. Although few could call it a good film in the aesthetic or artistic sense, some did argue that it reflected the conflictual morality of Quebec society as it contended with such movements as second-wave feminism, the sexual revolution, and the Quiet Revolution. While nationalists like Lever fumed over the false consciousness of the film, other more mainstream critics remarked on its amazing verité when it came to the problem of Quebec. One critic commented that Valérie ‘was Aurore’s big sister,’ a reference to the 1951 melodramatic film.37 This was certainly not the kind of association that the filmmakers were going for, with their thor- oughly modern take on ‘la petite Québécoise.’ Yet it shows how popular cinema had yet to shake off the conservativism of earlier forms of cultural nationalism, at least as it concerned the representation of women. Both films exploit the female body to signify the plight of Quebec and its possible redemption; both films put conventional domestic morality in conflict but end with its reinforcement after ensuring that the female lead suffers appropriately (one murdered, one raped). Other critics picked up on the ultimately moralizing tone of Valérie, bare breasts notwithstanding. Le Devoir stated that the film ‘gives us a good image, vague but justifiable, of contemporary Quebec society. Not in the psy- chology of the characters, who remain almost always opaque, but in the moral standards one can discover in them.38 English Canada also iden- tified the similarities between past and present. Robert Fulford, writing under his pen name of Marshall Delaney, noted in Saturday Night maga-  Sex, Labour, and Nationalism in Valérie 107 zine that ‘Valérie doesn’t just describe Quebec morality, it embodies it.’ Further, ‘what is so beautiful and so historic about Valérie is the way it defines, in 1969 terms, the traditional morality of Roman Catholic French Canada.’39 The soft-core elements of the film, extremely radical at the time, obviously drew critics to comment on the changing morality of Quebec society and to see the lead character as little more than a trope. Yet, as many noted even at the time, this was a deeply conservative film that continued to insist on a domestic role for women. The difference was that in this modern conception, women were no longer being represented as productive members of society but as seductive consumers. It is perhaps worth acknowledging that Valérie does not merely give up on the church and traditional morality when she motors out of the convent. As the Mother Superior reminds her, she is abandoning educa- tion and the possibility of a respectable teaching job. It is apparent right from the start that she is looking for the good life without having to work too hard for it. Her first job, selling newspapers on the street (shades of Jean Seberg in Breathless), leaves her too tired to enjoy herself at nights so she decides to find different work. After lying about her experience, she lands a job as a go-go dancer. As a brief Maclean’s report from 1969 noted, such a job was highly lucrative for young women. Marie, a single mother on welfare, recalled her four-month stint in a club, working for ten to twenty-five dollars an hour. ‘Where else could I get that money with my grade six? And no stripping, either. I made myself those cute costumes and I really felt good.’40 It is interesting that even a conservative magazine like Maclean’s looked to the sex trade and its peripherals as a way out of poverty for working-class women. They were not alone, as it seemed that even social services, rather than offering programs for adult education and skills training, recommended to their female clients that they begin selling sex. A married mother seeking social assistance complained in Maclean’s that welfare workers told her ‘You have a nice body, why don’t you make use of it?’41 This idea of putting the working-class female body to good use as a sexual toy may have appeared liberating and modern to some, but it high- lights the deep ambivalences of second-wave feminism as it gained momentum at the same time as the sexual revolution. This is evident in Valérie as the lead character becomes a greedy consumer, offering her body in exchange for the pleasures of modern Montreal. In one very telling scene, Valérie boards the métro for the first time. Inside the subway car, she is inundated with advertisements extolling women’s desirability. As the camera moves frantically between shots of 108 Rebecca Sullivan the ads and back to Valérie, she begins to writhe seductively along the walls, aglow in a frenzy of consumerism. A pantyhose ad urges her, ‘pour l’amour, épilez-vous’ (‘shave your legs for love’). Another fea- tures ‘Les Scandaleuses’ and ‘The Look’ with glamour images of highly seductive-looking women. There are bra ads and panty ads, the latter an image of a woman’s torso with a pair of daisy-patterned panties and a flower in her navel. It is little wonder that, after this epiphany, Valérie decides to join the ranks of ‘les scandaleuses’ and become a topless dancer. However, even that demands too much of her, so she decides to become a prostitute because ‘it pays better, is less tiring, and more amusing.’ Now a successful sex worker, she enjoys decorating her new apart- ment and, after meeting her artist lover, decides to indulge in some art. She purchases some books on classic paintings, sharing them with one of her johns. They then play a game with her imitating the poses, the film flashing between the original paintings and the mock dress-up by Valérie. Her foray into art continues to take a consumerist position as she agrees to pose for her boyfriend. Whereas all his other paintings are more modern expressionist, this one is a traditional nude study. Such representations problematize the relationship between sexuality and modernity, signaling that even with their shirts off, women might al- ways be left behind with the traditional and the passive. These scenes also contain a not so subtle condemnation of Valérie’s crass bourgeois aspirations, which are so easily purchased but are ultimately meaning- less to her when she realizes that they may cost her the chance for a traditional home life. However, in this modern, consumerist, and highly sexualized model of women’s liberation, the way forward appears to actually be leading her back to traditional notions of Quebec maternal- ism. Though she may have escaped the church when she hightailed it out of the convent, Valérie is repatriated into the domestic family order through the forgiveness and acceptance of Patrick, a new-style Québécois: modern, intellectual, and artistic. To complicate matters further, this decision, which harkens so clearly back to old orders of pious peasantry represented in women’s magazines like Terre et Foyer, is represented as the culmination of new Quebec nationalism. In the longshot of Valérie and Patrick’s reconciliation, his son races to join them as a ring of Quebec flags flutter wildly before the cityscape. Together they rush to the edge of the lookout and stand staring out towards the future. As the music swells, the camera closes in on Valérie’s hand reaching for the boy. It is on that shot that the film freezes and the credits roll.  Sex, Labour, and Nationalism in Valérie 109 Could there have been another option for Valérie in this new nation- alist order? Certainly by the late sixties, education rates for women were rising. The Report of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women claimed a rise in women university enrolment from 26 per cent at the beginning of the sixties to 36 per cent by 1967/8. Quebec was also the only province to legally recognize ‘sex’ as a category of discrimina- tion in the workplace.42 From the onset of the Quiet Revolution, the rate of women working in Quebec doubled in twenty years, from 26 per cent in 1960 to 48 per cent by the time of the first referendum on sovereignty. Also, motherhood was on the decline, with fertility rates dropping precipitously in the 1970s to one of the lowest in the world.43 Of course, there is no doubt that the film would have been much less popular if Valérie had returned to school, got her law degree, and went to work with the poor and marginalized of the city. Nonetheless, by perpetuat- ing a whore/madonna stereotype, the film did very little to promote the liberation of women as part of the nationalist dream for Quebec, though it does call into question conventional associations of conserva- tive, traditional attitudes with the subjugation of women and modern, liberal attitudes with efforts to emancipate them. As Cohen argues, it is perhaps within the darkest, most archaic days of Quebec culture that working-class women received the most recogni- tion as important contributors to society. With the bougeoisification of Quebec during the 1960s, women may have actually lost ground, which it would take years to recover. Her somewhat controversial claim is that when the women’s liberation movement in the late sixties and early seventies rejected all old forms of feminism as retrograde, particularly due to their affiliation with Catholic values, the alliance between mater- nal feminism and pietic nationalism collapsed, leaving a sense of confu- sion and anxiety about the role women played in the new configuration of Quebec society.44 Domesticity was not really challenged: it was sexu- alized rather than spiritualized, in keeping with postwar discourses of women as objects of consumption. Increasingly, the modern, liberated woman was represented in sexual rather than economic terms. This problem was at the core of criticisms of Valérie by radical nationalists such as Lever, but was not acknowledged to be a reality in either Quebec society or its culture. By denying it as antithetical to the agenda of Quebec identity, the result was that films that explored body poli- tics and women’s culture were dismissed as tangential to the goal of sovereignty. Dealing with images of class and labour in cinema reminds us of their 110 Rebecca Sullivan masculinist underpinnings. The working-class hero is rarely a woman unless a helpmate or source of inspiration. Thus, the portrayal of women who are seeking to stand alone collapses under the weight of hege- monic expectations that they remain passive and pliant. Valérie exem- plified this ambivalence towards women once their value as productive, working members of society was undermined and their options lim- ited. The fun-loving whore who finds redemption through the family may have been ‘antiquébécois,’ as Lever charged. She certainly did not fit the mould of the old forms of nationalism, but she also highlighted a missing element in the new: the recognition and value of women’s labour and their potential to contribute to a reconfiguration of the public sphere. Lever claimed with a manifesto-like bravado: ‘If we are to evolve, it will be in the abandonment of those bourgeois “values” proposed by Valérie, in the authenticity of expression, in social activity, investigation and in the clear effort to refuse the easy path, such values that we have held true since Jean-Pierre [sic] Lefebvre and others showed us that in cinema there is possibility.’45 While it may have been possible to realize such a vision through popular cinema, it is hard to come up with a film that celebrated women’s role in this new society without resorting to crude sexual imagery. From productive worker to con- sumer-driven slut, the first modern Quebec woman on film cemented a link between bourgeois values and effeminacy but could not offer a way out of the conundrum. There were only the ‘good’ middle-class values of heterosexual domesticity versus the ‘bad’ values of sexual decadence. Both are ultimately concerned with the control of women’s bodies and their utility to men. It was left to avant-garde or art cinema to challenge these representations, but they lacked the widespread audience appeal to make a significant social impact. As feminism still struggles to be depicted on the screen as a vibrant and liberating possi- bility, we can see this legacy of the body in the celebration of high kicks and sexy tricks over critiques of the challenging working conditions women still face. NOTES Special thanks to Kate Sullivan for assistance with translations. 1 J. Pallister, The Cinema Of Québec: Masters In Their Own House (London: Associated University Presses, 1995), 94.  Sex, Labour, and Nationalism in Valérie 111 2 B. Ehrenreich, E. Hess, and G. Jacobs, Re-Making Love: The Feminization of Sex (New York: Anchor Press, 1986), 72. 3 A. Loiselle, ‘Subtly Subversive or Simply Stupid: Notes on Popular Québec Cinema,’ Postscript 15, no. 3 (Winter/Spring 1999): 76. 4 Denys Héroux: ‘Déshabiller la petite voisine …’ Maclean’s, January 1969, 45. 5 Y. Lever, ‘Valérie, film antiquébécois,’ Relations, October 1969, 281. ‘La star, cette femme-objet à la fois offerte à tous et inaccessible pour tous, ne correspond plus du tout au type de la femme moderne libérée, qui se veut authentique, respectée dans sa subjectivité et capable d’établir de vérita- bles relations inter-personnelles.’ 6 Loiselle, ‘Subtly Subversive,’ 79. 7 K. Dzeguze, ‘Ottawa Gambled Some of Our Money on a Naughty Film – And Won,’ Maclean’s, August 1970, 60–1. 8 Pallister, The Cinema of Quebec, 35. 9 P. Jutras, Une brève histoire du cinéma québécois, http://www.mri.gouv.qc.ca/ le_québec_un_profil/culture/cinema_fr.html: ‘associent cinéma et inter- vention sociale, favorise la production de films encore plus proches des réalités socio-économiques québécoises.’ My translation. 10 Ibid. 11 Loiselle, ‘Subtly Subversive,’ 76. 12 C. Nadeau, ‘Barbaras en Québec: Variations on Identity’ in Gendering the Nation: Canadian Women’s Cinema, ed. K. Armatage, K. Banning, B. Long- fellow, and J. Marchessault (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 197. 13 Denyse Therrien, cited in P. Reines, ‘The Emergence of Québec Cinema: A Historical Overview,’ in Essays on Québec Cinema, ed. J.I. Donohue Jr (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1991), 23. 14 Y. Cohen, ‘From Feminine to Feminism in Québec,’ in A History of Women: Toward a Cultural Identity in the Twentieth Century, vol. 5, ed. F. Thébaud (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 555. 15 Reines, ‘The Emergence,’ 17. 16 Bouchard, cited in Pallister, The Cinema of Quebec, 24. 17 Cohen, ‘From Feminine to Feminism,’ 551. 18 Ibid., 559. 19 Ibid., 557. 20 G. Baum, The Church in Québec (Ottawa: Novalis, 1991), 22. 21 W. Coleman, The Independence Movement in Quebec, 1945–1980 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), 6. 22 Coleman, Independence Movement. 112 Rebecca Sullivan 23 Ibid. 24 Baum, The Church in Québec, 23. 25 Ibid., 20. 26 R. Handler, Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 66 27 Coleman, The Independence Movement, 6. 28 Pallister, The Cinema of Québec, 18. 29 Loiselle, ‘Subtly Subversive,’ 79. 30 Pallister, The Cinema of Québec, 18. 31 Handler, Nationalism, 88. 32 Coleman, The Independence Movement, 67. 33 Ibid., 83. 34 Ibid., 141. 35 Loiselle, ‘Subtly Subversive,’ 79. 36 Ibid., 80. 37 Y. Lever, Les Films de la Revolution Tranquille, http://www.CAM.ORG/ ~lever/Films/films.html 38 Quoted in ibid. ‘Valérie donne une bonne image, obscure mais juste, de la société québécoise actuelle. Non pas dans la psychologie des personnages, qui nous demeurent presque toujours opaques, mais dans le niveau de valeurs qu’on peut y découvrir.’ My translation. 39 M. Delaney, ‘When It Comes from Quebec, Even a Skin Flick May Echo Jansenist Catholic Morals: You Must Be Either Very Good or Very Bad,’ Saturday Night, September 1969, 40–1. 40 ‘They Won’t Even Let a Mother Earn Some Money Go-Go Dancing,’ Maclean’s, November 1969, 7. 41 ‘You Have A Nice Body. Why Not Use It?’ Maclean’s, November 1969, 7. 42 B. Freeman, The Satellite Sex: The Media and Women’s Issues in English Canada, 1966–1971 (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2000), 106. 43 Cohen, ‘From Feminine to Feminism,’ 550. 44 Ibid., 562. 45 Lever, ‘Valérie, film antiquébécois,’ 281. ‘Si nous évoluons, c’est précisé- ment dans la ligne de l’abandon des ‘valeurs’ bourgeoises proposées par Valérie, dans la ligne de l’authenticité des témoignages, de l’animation sociale, d’une recherche et d’un effort de lucidité dans le refus de la facilité, valeurs sûres auquelles on croit depuis que Jean-Pierre Lefebvre et d’autres nous en ont montré, au cinéma, la possibilité.’ My translation.