Nô (film)

Nô
Directed by	Robert Lepage
Produced by	Bruno Jobin
Written by	Robert Lepage André Morency
Starring	Anne-Marie Cadieux Marie Gignac Richard Fréchette Marie Brassard Alexis Martin Jean Leloup
Music by	Michel F. Côté Bernard Falaise
Cinematography	Pierre Mignot
Editing by	Aube Foglia
Distributed by	Alliance Atlantis New Yorker Films
Release date(s)	25 September 1998 (1998-09-25)
Running time	85 min.
Country	Canada
Language	French

Nô is a 1998 film by director Robert Lepage. It was based on one segment in Lepage's play Seven Streams of the River Ota.^[1][2]

The title is a pun which reflects the film's dramatic structure, linking the 1980 Quebec referendum (in which the "no" won) to Japanese Nō theatre.

Plot

The film is set in 1970 at the height of the FLQ bombings in Montreal, known as the October Crisis. During the Crisis, Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau instituted the War Measures Act, which resulted in martial law on the streets of Montreal. The central character, Sophie (Anne-Marie Cadieux), is an actress working in Osaka, Japan at Expo '70, while her boyfriend Michel (Alexis Martin) is an FLQ sympathizer. Sophie discovers that she is pregnant and phones Michel, but before she can tell him, two FLQ friends suddenly turn up at his apartment looking for a place to hide, and Michel has to hang up. Sophie, who is unaware of the crises happening in Montreal, is upset by Michel apparently not wanting to talk to her, and isn't even sure if he is the father. She has to decide whether to stay and get an abortion in Japan, where abortion is legal, or keep the baby and return to Montreal the next day as planned. Meanwhile, she has to avoid the advances of fellow actor François-Xavier (Éric Bernier) and survive a dinner with Canadian ambassador Walter (Richard Fréchette) and his difficult wife Patricia (Marie Gignac). Sophie's interpreter friend Hanako (Marie Brassard), a Japanese woman blinded by the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, is preparing to move to Vancouver with her Canadian interpreter boyfriend. In the meantime, in Montreal, Michel's two friends are plotting to set off a bomb, but they end up blowing up Michel's apartment by mistake.

References

Notes

1. ^ "Nô" (PDF). New Yorker Films. Archived from the original on 2006-03-26. http://web.archive.org/web/20060326150407/http://www.newyorkerfilms.com/nyf/t_elements/no/no_pk.PDF. Retrieved 2008-03-07. 
2. ^ Monk, Katherine (2001). Weird sex & snowshoes and other Canadian film phenomena (Vancouver: Rainforest Books), p. 322.

Bibliography

• Monk, Katherine (2001). Weird sex & snowshoes and other Canadian film phenomena (Vancouver: Rainforest Books) ISBN 1-55192-474-9

External links

• Nô at the Internet Movie Database