EIFF: Filmmaker’s ode to the métro contains a McGarrigle track, an animated Céline Dion

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One in every of Kate and Anna McGarrigle’s most well-known songs, Complainte pour Ste-Catherine, just isn’t about strolling on Montreal’s Ste-Catherine St., however underneath it.

Because the title suggests, “It’s a lament for Ste-Catherine,” Anna McGarrigle explains on the telephone from her dwelling in Alexandria, Ont.

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The track, which appeared on the sisters’ 1975 debut album Kate & Anna McGarrigle, is ready in winter, when Montreal’s above-ground is a foreboding and desolate place, and the underground is the place to be.

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“The entire thing takes place underneath Ste-Catherine, within the métro,” McGarrigle says. “There’s no person exterior on the road, so it’s forgotten.”

Inflected with a reggae lilt, Cajun stylings and a cool beat, the track is a celebration of the ironies of life in Quebec, with wry nods to politics, mosquitoes, faith, Saturday night time hockey, the Laurentians and Terre des hommes.

McGarrigle credit the track’s sense of humour to her longtime co-writer Philippe Tatartcheff.

“I believe it took him 15 or 20 minutes,” she says. “He got here up with 4 verses. I bear in mind writing it. I used to be dwelling on Sherbrooke close to St-Mathieu. I had an upright piano in my condo. I can nonetheless see us doing that, having enjoyable. We have been actually having fun with it. It wasn’t meant to be a heavy, severe factor.”

That playfulness inhabits NFB filmmaker Janet Perlman’s new animated brief movie The Woman With The Purple Beret, which contains a re-recorded model of Complainte pour Ste-Catherine as its soundtrack and thematic thread. The movie screens as a part of the Edmonton Worldwide Movie Pageant on Sept. 27 at 12:10 p.m. within the Muttart Theatre on the Stanley Milner Library.

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Drawn in what Perlman describes as a “naive fashion, like previous naive work of youngsters taking part in hockey within the streets,” the movie is an ode to the Montreal métro and all of the characters who inhabit it.

“There are extra characters per scene per minute than every other animated movie, possibly. It’s enjoyable to take a look at. There are many individuals on the métro,” says Perlman, who hung out driving the métro and surreptitiously sketching and photographing her fellow commuters in the course of the analysis course of.

Maintain your eyes peeled for cameos by illustrious Quebecers together with Leonard Cohen, William Shatner, Alanis Obomsawin, Maurice Richard, Céline Dion and Maurice “Mad Canine” Vachon.

McGarrigle takes over accordion duties (performed by her late sister Kate on the unique recording) for the brand new model of the track, which options lead vocals by her daughter Lily Lanken and niece Martha Wainwright, with violin and harmonica performed by veteran collaborators Joel Zifkin and Chaim Tannenbaum. She additionally sings within the refrain of household and associates alongside her sister Jane McGarrigle, son Sylvan and her husband Dane Lanken, who died in March.

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Perlman created a lumberjack character for the movie, whom she referred to as Dane, resulting in an emotional second for McGarrigle throughout an early viewing.

“My husband was sick on the time,” McGarrigle says. “(Within the movie) he has a lumberjack shirt and a humorous hat, and he’s within the métro as nicely, coming and going with the completely different characters. The entire film takes place within the métro, and it’s wintertime.

“On the finish of the track, she goes up the escalator and comes out and it’s springtime, within the sq. the place St. John the Evangelist Church is. There are birds and butterflies and clowns clowning. When the lumberjack got here out, I began crying. It was the church bells and the music. It was unhappy. I didn’t know if Dane would reside lengthy sufficient to see it, and he was singing on it too. I didn’t count on to really feel that manner.”

Maybe fittingly, Perlman was considering of the transitional nature of driving the métro whereas making her movie.

“On the métro, you’re on a voyage,” she mentioned, “travelling with strangers who you’re going to see only for that second. You’re going the place they’re going, in the identical route, and also you’re simply alongside for the journey. Then they disappear, by no means to be seen once more.”

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