Bon Cop, Bad Cop and Canada's two solitudes: what a blockbuster buddy movie says about the great divide in the nation ... and its cinema.

When the Canadian bilingual film Bon Cop, Bad Cop became a success at the box office in 2006, it was seen as a landmark in Canadian cultural history. Here was a feature film, after all, that had been made in both official Canadian languages, French and English, and that had caught fire at the box office.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In less than a month after its August 2006 release, Bon Cop, Bad Cop had taken in $8.2 million in ticket sales nationally. (The sum sounds like a pittance in contrast to Hollywood studio box-office figures, but in a country of approximately thirty million people, the take was setting a record.) By year's end it had grown into the country's all-time box-office champ, earning more money than any other home-grown feature in Canadian history, finally outdoing the record for domestic take held by Porky's, Bob Clark's 1982 teen sex comedy. And at Canada's national film awards this year, Bon Cop, Bad Cop took the Best Picture statuette, as well as the Golden Reel Award, given to the biggest box-office earner of the previous year (final tally: $12.2 million, in Canadian dollars).

As a reflection of Canadian culture, and as a genre film, Bon Cop presents its own set of contradictions. The film's plot is simple: a corpse is discovered halfway across the Ontario-Quebec border. Therefore, it's never quite clear which provincial police force should be investigating the murder. The setup allows for the appropriation of the cop-buddy formula as seen in such American franchises as 48 Hours and Lethal Weapon, except instead of a Caucasian/ African-American team, an English-speaking Canadian and French-speaking Canadian combination can be applied to the equation. Here, a raunchy Quabecois cop (Patrick Huard) and an uptight, by-the-book Toronto-based cop (Colm Feore) must learn to work together despite their differences--a prime component of the cop-buddy screenplay template--in order to solve this terrible crime. Or crimes, rather, as the murderer turns out to be a serial killer obsessed with hockey. (I'm not making any of this up.)

While Bon Cop has its stylistic flourishes (a shootout-scene gag involving a bathtub was actually quite ingenious), the film is primarily a clumsy ode to the cop-buddy flick--a genre that has already been drawn upon extensively by the studios. Still, Canadian critics appeared to be reluctant to say anything too terribly negative about the film, given that box-office successes are understood to be crucial and a victory for the home team. Bon Cop is unapologetic ketaine, a Quebecois word that loosely translates as kitsch. The script itself gets messier as the murder-mystery plot unfolds, perhaps the end result of a dispute that took place between the four credited screenwriters. Ultimately, Bon Cop, Bad Cop is perhaps best likened to a big chunk of pure, unrefined fromage--it could potentially be fun if you just make sure not to take any of it very seriously.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Whatever its merits, to Canadians and Canadaphiles, the ploy was obvious: make a populist film designed to bring the country's two official linguistic cultures--or Two Solitudes--together. (Not surprisingly, Bon Cop, Bad Cop hasn't connected with audiences outside of Canada.) The phrase "Two Solitudes" was first coined by author Hugh MacLennan, whose novel, Two Solitudes, published in 1945, chronicled tensions between the English and French in Canada. The novel more specifically focussed on the French-English divide in the city of Montreal, but the term soon became associated with the entire country, given that each Solitude often had little knowledge of what was going on with the other at any given moment.

Kevin Tierney, Bon Cop's Anglophone, Montreal-based producer, who cowrote the screenplay with Francophone star Huard, made no secret of their hopes for the project. As Tierney told the Canadian industry publication Playback during the film's 2005 October shoot, Bon Cop was an attempt to connect with both a mass audience in Quebec and in the rest of Canada through their mutual, tenuous connections. "If there are two things French Canadians have an opinion on, it's hockey and English Canadians," Tierney said. "If there are two things English Canadians have an opinion on, it's hockey and French Canadians." The film's script calls for some pretty raw stereotypes to be trotted out: rough, unshaven, and libidinous, Huard plays his Bad Cop as a sexual animal, even bedding the uptight cop's sister while on a trip to Toronto. Feore plays the button-down Bon Cop as repressed and too tied to the rule of law. Tierney also made the claim that the film would be the first truly bilingual feature film in Canadian history. (In fact, it was Larry Kent's 1971 film Fleur bleue/aka The Apprentice], which starred Susan Sarandon.)

But beyond the efforts to fuse Canada's Solitudes at the box office, Tierney acknowledged that a major impetus of the film was the effort to bring to Canadians outside of Quebec what Quebec was already enjoying: a robust, popular cinema, supported enthusiastically by the public. "Quebec has been doing very well lately, in terms of attracting large audiences to the cinemas," he noted. "We want to get English Canadians in to see this movie as well."

Indeed, during the previous decade, one of the best ways to illustrate just how out of step Canada's Two Solitudes were would be to view the country through its cinematic culture. At 7.5 million, Quebec's population has indicated an overwhelming support for their film culture, taking huge pride in their art-house successes (Denys Arcand's 2004 Oscar win for The Barbarian Invasions, for example) as well as a tendency to actually go out and buy tickets to locally-created features. In March of this year, Telefilm, the Canadian government's film-funding agency, released a list of the twelve most commercially successful since 2001. To no one's surprise, all of the films were from Quebec; topping the list were Bon Cop and Barbarian Invasions; all of the films were in French, except for the bilingual Bon Cop and the gay-themed comedy Mambo Italiano (number seven), which was shot in English, but made most of its money in a dubbed version on Quebec screens.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Filmmakers in English Canada, by contrast, still suffer from a series of degrading existential crises. Very few Canadians outside of Quebec venture to see films made by their fellow citizens. The breakdown in the Rest of Canada (or ROC, as it is often affectionately referred to in Quebec) usually sits at or around the appalling one percent mark. And at the Genie Awards, it has become expected that Quebec films will sweep all of the major categories. For journalists who cover the film beat, it has presented a unique challenge: how to write the opening sentence to another article pointing out just how massive Quebec's burgeoning film scene has become, while ROC's remains so stagnant?

English-Canadian film culture has long been marked by certain recurring themes and motifs, especially around damaged, wounded male protagonists and failure. This, Canadian film scholars have long contended, has been the ongoing sense of an imperilled national psyche, beaten down by the doomed rivalry with the brash winners who populate Hollywood studio films. Canada, they correctly point out, was once a British colony and is now, for all extents and purposes, an American one. It could be argued, however, that attaching larger, collective attitudes and feelings to English-Canadian movies would be impossible, seeing as these films are not popular, and thus aren't really conducive to sociological genre analysis. All that failure we see in Canadian films, from 1964's Nobody Waved Goodbye through to 2004's Show Me, probably has more to do with the grievances of various Canadian filmmakers who don't get every government grant they feel they deserve, rather than some larger national sentiment. After all, if the table manners of any average English-speaking Canadian are any indication, most in the country are quite optimistic and happy people, not nearly so blue and suicidal as their filmic protagonists.

The reluctance of Canucks to patronize their own films is sometimes attributed to the grim preoccupations of Canadian screenwriters. Canadian films are just too depressing, some complain. Others point to Quebec's unifying factor--a distinct culture protected by the French language--which supplies an instant captive audience and means that talent is far less prone to immediately vacate the premises during lean times and bail for L.A. or New York, as Ivan Reitman, Norman Jewison, and William Shatner did. Others point out that Quebec's media machine does much more to champion local movies, designating volumes of print and hours of TV and radio time to its movie milieu, while Canada's entertainment press continues to do little more than prop up a foreign star system. This gives Canadians outside of Quebec the sense, even while watching their own news and current-affairs programs, of being outsiders in their own home. In addition, it has been noted that Quebecers have a much more European attitude towards taxpayer subsidy for film and arts culture, whereas in the still-predominantly Protestant-run ROC, "arts funding" remains widely viewed as a new and improved way of describing welfare.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Whatever the reason, ROC's film woes do look dire. Aside from David Cronenberg--whose films reportedly fare slightly better at the box office in Canada than they do in the U.S.--the country has no truly popular auteur, no household-name filmmaker. And while there are good signs--Toronto's Deepa Mehta scored an Oscar nomination for Water, a film made in neither English nor French, while, at press time, Sarah Polley is finding success with her directorial debut Away from Her--these moments seem all the more fleeting when one contrasts them with the Quebec juggernaut, a milieu where more good news seems to arrive every week. The July 1 weekend provided a telling moment at Quebec box offices: Nitro, a Quebec-made thriller, took the number one spot with a $1.2 million take, beating out both the latest in the Die Hard series and Ratatouille. Meanwhile, most Canadian filmmakers operating in English can rest assured that if their films are released, they will play for less than two weeks on a few screens and then fade into obscurity.

The Quebec-ROC divide also makes for a strange irony when one compares the Two Solitudes' film-festival culture; Montreal's World Film Festival has been mired in bad press and waning fortunes over the past decade, while the Toronto International Film Festival--in the heart of the ROC--is now regarded as one of the most important launch points for commercial and art-house movies in the world. Montreal has the burgeoning film culture, it seems, while Toronto has the kickass festival.

To make matters even worse for ROC, seeing as it has put so much faith in so-called runaway production (that is, Hollywood films that shoot north of the border to save money), the local film community now faces a severe drought, given that Canada's oil revenues are so strong that its dollar has now risen to be almost tantamount in value to an American one. Industry onlookers are already predicting calamity for the runaway sector. Not surprisingly, Quebec film types are the least anxious about such a reverse-Hollywood exodus. They have their own industry.

The mystery remains all the more nagging when one considers that Canada has had no problem competing in other cultural fields. In international stature, Canadian authors such as Margaret Atwood, Timothy Findley, and Michael Ondaatje have done extremely well, as have Bryan Adams, Anne Murray, and the Bare Naked Ladies in the musical realm. Undoubtedly, Canada has an intriguing ensemble of independent filmmakers--including Patricia Rozema, Bruce LaBruce, John Greyson, Bruce McDonald, Atom Egoyan, and Don McKellar--but none of them enjoy the public support on their home turf that Quebec filmmakers do.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Thus those in the film milieu outside of Quebec have spent a good deal of time wringing their hands about this state of affairs. How to pump up ROC's deflated fortunes? A string of government-commissioned reports have suggested that Canadian films need bigger and better promotional campaigns. Further professional development is needed--and Norman Jewison has taken action on this front, founding an advanced film school, the Canadian Film Centre, in Toronto in 1988. And the quota argument recurs every few years--a plan that would involve legislating, say, five per cent of screen space for home-grown movies--but with a Conservative government (albeit a minority) currently in place, the idea that quotas would ever even be considered is along the lines of sci-fi.

If ROC's film milieu seems troubled, the ongoing success in Quebec has led to some severe growing pains. With Telefilm under serious pressure to raise the ratio of Canadian films in Canadian cinemas, in 2001 they announced their goal: five per cent of what's on screen should be made by Canadians. It seemed a valiant plan, but it came with a price. The government agency adopted an envelope system, whereby producers who managed to attain the best box-office sums would have access to the most amount of money in future.

This, of course, meant that Quebec producers would gain access to the largest piece of the pie. But that soon led to a tremendous rift and infighting among Quebec's film producers and directors. Telefilm was so desperate to push the screen-percentage number up, their envelope system meant that the most commercial producers were gaining the largest amount of money. This was leaving government subsidy dollars in fewer and fewer hands, and was favoring what critics saw as a more commercial, less artistic cinema.

A case in point was Robert Lepage, celebrated theater and opera director, writer, and performer. In 1995, Lepage had won wide acclaim and awards on the festival circuit with his directorial debut Le Confessional. But in 2006, due to a lack of government money, Lepage was forced to shut down preproduction on his latest stage-to-screen adaptation, The Dragon's Trilogy. That an artist of Lepage's considerable reputation was forced out of production on his latest film project was particularly shocking, but it was part of a larger trend: one where Quebec's film boom was going in the direction of a Hollywood Nord (Hollywood North), a push for empty, genre films that echo the worst excesses of American studios. The very time when one might have expected Quebec's film community to be celebrating was a time when people were taking sides. Was Quebec going to produce only blockbusters, or instead support the more personal, artistic reflections of a cinema d'auteur?

The squabble soon became personal. By July of last summer, one of the most successful producers in Quebec, Denise Robert, was being singled out for hogging too much of the government dollars set aside for film production. Robert certainly comes with credentials: in 2004, she and director Denys Arcand would accept the Oscar for best foreign-language film for their collaboration, The Barbarian Invasions. But many directors felt Robert was taking up too much of the funding for too much fluff. On July 5, an open letter appeared in the French-language Montreal daily La Presse, denouncing the film-funding situation and naming Robert as one of the chief beneficiaries of a system that was wrongheaded, The letter suggested that Quebec cinema is "too locked up in a commercial logic which harms quality and diversity." The kicker was that the letter was signed by forty-three filmmakers, among them Lea Pool (Lost and Delirious), Robert Lepage, and Denis Villeneuve (Maelstrom). Both Pool and Lepage had worked with Robert, so the letter stung. "This is not a time for personal attacks or recriminations," Robert said at the time. "We know there isn't enough money in the system. This is a time for us to work together to get better funding for all of us."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The letter led to a counter-letter defending Robert. There were charges back and forth, but the clear constant in the banter around the family feud was that there was simply not enough money to keep the Quebec industry afloat. Robert and a group of Quebec's most influential producers went to Ottawa to lobby the Canadian minister for culture. To no one's surprise, the Conservative member of parliament expressed sympathy, but offered no money.

But then the Quebec film lobby did something those in ROC could only imagine doing. With a pending provincial election, they pushed and shoved the Quebec government to offer up more coin for the home team. And it worked: Premier Jean Charest, thought by many to be a fiscal conservative, clearly sensing that this was a move popular with the people, coughed up an additional ten million per year in the budget. Quebec had got the idea that Canada hadn't--that an indigenous film culture outside of the Hollywood Dream Factory requires government support. Quebec cinema had become something people might argue for during election time; it had been deemed worthwhile by a majority. The ROC could only dream: a cinema that was actually popular, that the public would fight to see more of.

Though Bon Cop, Bad Cop offers an intriguing lens through which to view the current Canadian state of affairs, there is one more telling fact about its success. While the film performed well at the box office, that popularity was known almost exclusively in Quebec. Despite a well-funded ad campaign aimed at a youthful, action-movie demographic across Canada, the idea of going to see a cop-buddy movie that wore the Canadian brand was overwhelmingly only ignited in Quebec.

But old hopes die hard in Canada. Those behind Bon Cop concede a sequel has been discussed. Perhaps next time around some of that elusive success can seep across the Quebec border into the ROC. And all of Canada, not just one province, can enjoy the kind of robust, invigorating, popular cinema that Quebec enjoys.

Although Bon Cop, Bad Cop did not get a theatrical release in the U.S., the film is readily available in DVD format, including a two-disc collector's edition, through Amazon.com and other Internet outlets.