Jesus Of Montreal [Koch Lorber]

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You could call it a revisionist Passion play or an alternate, art-house version of "The Passion of The Christ," because the story of Jesus' suffering and sacrifice gets an edgy, contemporary face-lift by Quebec director Denys Arcand.

"Jesus of Montreal" was nominated for Best Foreign Film at the 1989 Academy Awards and won both the Jury Prize at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival and a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film. It's hip, it's sophisticated, and it's provocative in every sense of the word. And yes, some will find it irreverent.

The film begins with a priest from a Montreal shrine talking about their annual Passion play. After 35 years, the play needs an injection of new blood to shake it from its doldrums. He enlists a promising young actor-director named Daniel Coloumbe (Lothaire Bluteau), whose hair, stubble, and piercing-yet-calm eyes mark him as a natural to play Jesus.

From the minute that Coloumbe is recruited, Arcand (who also wrote the screenplay) begins to structure this modern-day recreation as a parallel to events described in the Bible, so that the idea of the Passion spills over into everyday life, with Coloumbe being a Christ-figure not only on-stage, but off as well. Just as Jesus found his disciples one or two at a time, and, once called, they followed their master to the next potential recruit, we see Coloumbe as he first goes to a woman who's working at a soup kitchen. "I've come for you," he says, a line that could have come out of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible. Once Constance (Johanne Marie Tremblay) is onboard, the two of them next walk onto a dubbing set where on-screen there's a porn video of a female twosome that expands into a threesome, then a two-couple scene. The disciple-to-be, Martin (Remy Girard), is in the booth, the lone male who's needing to ad lib because the other male failed to show for the session. As he shifts voices, literally breathless because of having to jump back and forth between two microphones, he utters pornspeak in a subtly but absurdly comic scene that's worthy of a Woody Allen film.

There is much sophisticated humor in this film, some of it broad, and some of it flat. Coloumbe is secretly approached by one of the academics who says he's representing other scholars connected to the shrine, wanting to influence the script the young actor has been given carte blanche to write. As he sits in the library doing further research, a librarian looks over his shoulder and asks, "Looking for Jesus?" Yes, he says. "It is He who will find you," she says. And when he goes to Constance's apartment and finds her with a lover, the man emerging sheepishly from the bedroom turns out to be a man of the cloth. "I'm not a very good priest," he says, with great understatement. Later, a near-shrugging Constance explains, "It gives him so much pleasure, and me so little pain."

One of the recruits, pulled off the stage from a triumphant performance, says he will come onboard only if he's allowed to recite Hamlet's soliloquy. And guess what? Coloumbe finds a way to work that Hamlet monologue into his new Passion play, so that Rene (Robert Lepage) also comes joins their troupe. For the fifth wheel on this revisionist ride, Coloumbe plucks a model from a perfume shoot who's fed up being nothing more than T&A. She will play Mary Magdalene, a woman Jesus rescued by casting out seven demons. In this film, that comes to mind, as well as the biblical story of Jesus casting the moneychangers out of the temple, when an enraged Coloumbe destroys equipment at an audition where Mireille (Catherine Wilkening) is asked to take off her clothes so financial backers can cop a peek.

During the group's rehearsal, we see just how radical their approach is: just the facts. That the one we call Jesus was known as Yeshu Ben Panthera, a Jewish prophet virtually ignored by historians of the day: Tacitus, Suetonius, Pliny, and Flavius Josephus. Of course, Roman historians were just as inclined to devote space to Jesus and other "rebels" about as much as U.S. historians were to accurately report on the Native Americans who resisted westward expansion. Still, we're reminded that according to biblical scholars, what we know of Jesus is pieced together by his disciples a century later. "Disciples lie," one of them says. "They embellish." Those lines are spoken at the play itself, an interactive, moving play where the audience follows the players from station to station, the way a golf gallery follows the players. As the Sermon on the Mount is reenacted, Coloumbe/Jesus speaks to the crowd as if they were on the Mount, handing each a crust of bread and looking deeply into their eyes.

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