Claude Jutra | À tout prendre (All Things Considered, aka Take It All) / 1963

the real and what it forgets

by Douglas Messerli

 

Claude Jutra (screenwriter and director) À tout prendre (All Things Considered, aka Take It All) / 1963

 

Renowned filmmaker Claude Jutra, having worked with French director Jean Rouch, was one of the central figures of the Québécois film movement direct cinema, which employed lightweight filmmaking equipment, hand-held cameras, and synchronous sound in order to get to the heart of things in the early 1960s film directors’ attempts to both “capture reality” and to question its relationship with the reality of cinema. What makes a film seem “real” or, more importantly, how can the director bring the “real” into his or her work of cinema.

     Analogous, in some respects, to the French New Wave in the 1950s and early 60s, which also questioned how to bring a sense of the real into filmmaking—the movement would affect the works of US directors Richard Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker, Terence Macartney-Filgate, and Albert and David Maysles—Jutra filled his film with self-conscious representations of reality, large subtitles (to remind us of one of the major character’s name, Johanne), and even discussions about the subject, as when his character Victor (Victor Désy) quotes Marcel Proust in this film, arguing that since experience consists mostly of aural, gustatory, and olfactory sensations, there is no way cinema, focused on the visual, can truly capture reality.

      While most of the direct cinema works were documentaries, Jutra’s semi-autobiographical film presents itself almost as a document with the assistance of metaphorical and imaginative representations of experience. His film even keeps many of the same first names of the characters involved, the central figure for example being called Claude, played by the director himself and Johanne (Johanne Harrelle) the black self-designated Haitian Creole woman with whom he had an affair during this period.

      Most of film focuses on Claude’s relationship with Johanne, who he meets at a party which he hasn’t planned on attending. Intrigued with her beauty and, probably—although he later denies it—the exoticism of her singing a Creole song from her alleged homeland, he drags her back to his apartment, where they meet up with his next door neighbor, Victor who is sleeping in Claude’s bed due to the fact that his apartment is being repainted.

       So begins the long voyage into love between the two, despite his sexual relationships with other women such as Barbara (Monique Mercure) and the woman currently acting in a movie he is currently directing, Monique (Monique Joly). Victor, an actor, has his own affairs.

       What doesn’t get spoken or even hinted at until half-way through the film, is that Claude is also struggling with his latent homosexuality, the issue brought up in passing when Johanne asks him, out of blue, “Have you ever wanted a man?” a question to which he never replies, in that fact clearly admitting it is an issue with him.

       Johanne, in turn, attempts to shed her mendacities by admitting that she is not at all Haitian but was born to a poor Canadian black woman who gave her up for adoption. Sent to a school for homeless children, because of her color they were never able to find a couple able to adopt her. Her solution to being a poor Canadian girl with no history was to create one for herself. And obviously it worked, allowing her a career as a fashion model (Harrelle was one of the first black models of the Montreal and New York City fashion scene) and perhaps finding a man who might marry her in Claude.

       Indeed, sometime soon after her confession, as they spend a time deeply involved with each other, sharing a life together in what the narrative voice describes as their little “prison,” she discovers herself pregnant, bringing with it a far more complex series of events.

       Even before Johanne’s pregnancy, there have been further suggestions that Claude has not yet been able to tame his attractions to the same sex. From the beginning he describes it was a kind of “longing,” a “dissatisfaction that taken the form of hope.”

       And throughout the film his same-sex urges are played out metaphorically through sudden encounters with what appear to be a violent motorcycle stud, thugs who beat him, and gangsters who chase him down with guns and shoot him dead. These figures haunt the last half of the film, interrupting even moments when he is sitting beside her in the cold snow of a park.

       Moreover, once they discover her pregnancy, he is forced both by her and his own self-doubts—as they prepare to obtain a divorce from her husband and arrange for their own marriage as well as imagining his needed career changes in order to support his new family—to consult others, Johanne’s earlier boyfriend, Nicholas (Patrick Straram), still in love with her; Claude’s wealthy but distant mother; and a priest who befriended Claude during another crisis in his life.

      Suddenly what appeared to be a pean to Johanne’s independent and self-defined identity, turns the film into a kind of misogynistic and outright sexist work, in which his mother covertly dismissed the relationship by arguing about the impossible changes Claude would have to make and the priest who suggests that all woman are secret manipulators of men and that the woman of his dreams perhaps has had other men on the side, the child being the product of such affairs, accordingly arguing that she may be simply taking advantage of Claude’s desires. Even Nicholas sees it his role to protect and save her, instead of supporting and advocating for her decisions.

       By the time Claude has made the rounds, he has determined not only to break off entirely with the woman he claimed to love, but to borrow money in order to pay for an abortion. Shocked and emotionally devastated by his utter dismissal of her, Johanne attempts to see him (he will not even open his apartment door when she attempts a visit), to write him (he throws away her letters), and even threatens suicide (which he callously ignores), all the while intimating that his “hands are clean.”

       Nothing is spoken, of course, about the increased encounters with the “gangsters” for which he buys a machine-gun to destroy in his imaginary battles, successful except that one finally gets him with a last shot.

       Obviously, Claude cannot escape his desires, which perhaps have been at the heart of his inability to commit to marriage and certainly are related to his misogynism. Finally, he realizes that there is only one way to still the voices, as we walks off a pier into the cold waters of The St. Lawrence River.

      The 1963 film was a shocking for its self-revelations and open representation of the creators’ own lives, and helped, along with his 1971 masterwork Mon oncle Antoine, his cinema vérité shorts such as Wrestling and The Devil's Toy, his collaboration with the noted Canadian filmmaker Norman McLaren, A Chairy Tale, and his big budget film, Kamouraska (1973), to make Jutra one of the most acclaimed figures of Québécois culture.

 

     As director and writer Pierre Jutras observes of the 1963 film:

 

      “At the height of the Quiet Revolution, Claude Jutra brought Quebec cinema directly into  modernity.

     Take It All (1963) is the first autobiographical feature film made in Quebec using direct cinema methods and techniques. With its unusual aesthetics focusing on the free and intimate expression of the main protagonists, Claude and Johanne, the film was received with a mix of astonished admiration and righteous indignation. Jutra had dared to recreate on screen his own love story with Johanne Harrelle, one of the first black models on the Montreal and New York fashion scene. It was the first time in America that a bed scene was filmed with a white man and a black woman. Both freely engage in mutual confession, and the game of truth leads Johanne to inquire about Claude’s possible homosexuality. They also have to face the agonizing dilemma of abortion when Johanne gets pregnant.

     In this independent production, the actors improvise from their own memories. The film’s whimsical tone, with laughter and the pleasure of confiding ever present, even in the most difficult moments, give it a fresh and enduring artistic vitality.”

 

     Jutra’s involvement with the Québécois separatist movement and LGBTQ rights in Montreal and Québec helped to make him an even more beloved citizen. When, after being diagnosed for early-onset Alzheimer’s disease in the early 1980s, Jutra chose in 1986 to repeat precisely what the Claude of this movie chooses, to jump from a pier into the St. Lawrence River, note in his pocket “Je m'appelle Claude Jutra" with the recovery of the body in 1987.

     An annual film award for a first-time director and the Prix Jutra awarded annually for Québec cinema, were named in his honor as were several streets, parks, and other locations throughout Montreal and province.

     In 2016, 30 years after the director’s death, the author of a biographical study of Jutra, Yves Lever, uncovered the fact, evidently well-known among his peers, that Jutra was attracted to young teenage boys, and had apparently had affairs with 14- and 15-year-old boys. Numerous individuals and government agencies rose up in terror, describing him as a pedophile, although none of the victims were willing to speak publicly and the legal age of sexually activity during the period in which Jutra was said to have these affairs was 14, which would disqualify that word from being applied to him. However, soon after, a man did permit an interview in which he admitted that Jutra had begun touching him at age 6, abuse which escalated over the next 10 years, suggesting that Jutra had indeed been a pedophile.

     Suddenly the Prix Jutra was forced to change its name and the mayor of Montreal erased most street and park names associated with him. Several articles in The Guardian, MacLeans magazine, The Globe and Mail, and elsewhere outlining the hypocrisy and pointlessness of these acts appeared, but the most thorough and reasoned essay about the issue that I have read is Matthew Hays’ “The Man Who Wasn’t There: The Claude Jutra Legacy, a Year After the Scandal,” published in Canadian Notes and Queries, issue 99 (Spring 2017)

 

Los Angeles, October 8, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2022).