A tribute to Jean-Marc-Vallée? It is rather a tribute to the music that his friends had imagined with Mixtape, presented Thursday evening at the opening of the 44th edition of the Montreal International Jazz Festival.
It is the voice of Jean-Marc Vallée that we hear first over the speakers, because it will be he, even in his absence, who will play the role of master of ceremonies. “Music makes you want to love, to dream, to do something, to step on the accelerator,” he says, before explaining that he wanted, from one film to another, to offer a playlist to moviegoers .
The director had barely finished speaking when Joseph Marchand burst into a very Floydian guitar solo, carried by very Great Gig in the Sky choirs. Jean-Marc Vallée was a child of rock and this evening would not only be a celebration of the filmmaker’s legacy, but above all an ode to the transformative power of this music of indocility and distortion, which has invested so many young people, like this was his case, of the conviction that the world belongs to them.
Beyries would be the first invited on stage, for two songs, including Harvest Moon, about which Jean-Marc Vallée has already said that if it had to be music, it would be the chorus which, at the 51st second, illuminate this Neil Young classic. We understand this and the voice of the one who co-signed (with Alex Vallée) the artistic direction of the show also invited us to snuggle up there.
Although a musical career will not be in store for Alex Vallée, the son of the tribute, following his interpretation of I’m Losing You by John Lennon, the intimate images of a Jean-Marc Vallée who rocks her boy, still a baby, will have given this moment the right amount of tenderness so that the emotion quietly surfaces, then never leaves us again.
Images like this, of Jean-Marc Vallée with his family or on a trip, would reappear throughout the evening, as if to remind us that the loss of a major artist is first and foremost, for those close to him, the loss of a being without whom he Existence, momentarily, seems as absurd as a life without music.
The first big stir of the show will belong to Pierre-Philippe Côté, alias Pilou, thanks to a stripped-down version of the redemptive River by Leon Bridges, which appeared on the soundtrack of the series Big Little Lies. “We could spend hours talking about the song Cold Little Heart” by Michael Kiwanuka, we then heard Jean-Marc Vallée exclaim, and the same could be said of Pilou’s masterful rereading of River.
When directing, Marc-André Grondin made the bet of only sparingly evoking his friend’s cinema, a judicious decision insofar as even if some of these songs will remain forever associated with certain great moments of the seventh art , they belong first and foremost to our own cinema, to the cinema of our hearts and our most precious memories.
Sitting behind her instrument, the pianist recalled sharing a fattouch salad with the director during their first meeting, before playing Earlier and Leaving. It was very beautiful and it was too short, like when the credits appear without us being ready for the view to end.
Then, because Vallée knew better than anyone how to make songs say new things about which we thought we knew every seam, the Petits Chanteurs du Mont-Royal sang, with the help of Stréliski, the most improbable rereading of Creep by Radiohead. The quintessential anthem of adolescent self-loathing could hardly have been more beautifully disturbing.
Patrick Watson for his part revealed, before The Great Escape, that during his last conversation with Jean-Marc Vallée, they had promised to write a musical comedy together, a happiness of which fate deprived us by taking away the director December 25, 2021 at the age of 58.
Then Elisapie embraced with all her usual grace the obligatory Crazy by Patsy Cline, and it was also a bit of Michel Côté that we thought of while all the heads were nodding. Beyries offered Vallée, taken from her most recent album Du feu dans les lilas, in which she mourns a friend “never again around, never again here, leaving for the clouds”, which can only be described as a lie, so much so that on Thursday Jean-Marc Vallée was there, everywhere.
And as if that wasn’t enough, Elisapie was already back with Qaisimalaurittuq, her Inuktitut adaptation of Wish You Were Here, because many of us regret that this crazy diamond who was the creator of Café de Flore and Dallas Buyers Club has stopped shining.
A tribute to Jean-Marc-Vallée? It is rather a tribute to the music that his friends had imagined, time to warm their hearts and warm ours too. Saying thank you to music is perhaps, ultimately, just a more modest, and less tacky, way of saying thank you to life.