Don't Let It Kill You
| Don't Let It Kill You | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | Jean Pierre Lefebvre |
| Written by | Jean Pierre Lefebvre Marcel Sabourin |
| Produced by | Jean Pierre Lefebvre |
| Starring | Marcel Sabourin Monique Champagne Suzanne Grossman Claudine Monfette Fleur-Ange Laplante |
| Cinematography | Jacques Leduc |
| Edited by | Marguerite Duparc |
| Music by | Andrée Paul |
| Distributed by | Les Films J.P. Lefebvre |
Release dates | 1967 (Montreal, Festival du Cinéma Canadien, Festival International du Film) |
Running time | 75 minutes |
| Country | Canada |
| Language | French |
| Budget | $35,000 |
Don't Let It Kill You (French: Il ne faut pas mourir pour ça) is a 1967 French-Canadian feature from Jean Pierre Lefebvre.[1] First in the ‘Abel trilogy’.
Synopsis
The story concerns a day in the life of Abel (Marcel Sabourin), the Québécois Everyman who reappears in Jean Pierre Lefebvre’s 1977 Le Vieux pays où Rimbaud est mort. Self-absorbed to the point of existential withdrawal, the gentle and mildly eccentric Abel confers upon all events a kind of mystical grandeur and perplexity. (The film opens with a slogan on a blackboard: "I want to change the course of things – but it is things which change me.")[2]
One day he makes breakfast, behaving in a somewhat odd manner as he prepares to go out. He visits his dying mother (Monique Champagne) in hospital and learns that his father (who had left them and is living in Brazil) has sent him $10,000. Later, by chance, he meets Mary (Suzanne Grossman), an old girlfriend he has no seen for five years. She is about to be married in Paris. He returns home to wait for Madeleine (Claudine Monfette), his current girlfriend, and the hospital calls to tell him his mother has died.
This intimate, gently comic, ironic and poetic meditation on individualism and fatalism is the third feature from Lefebvre, the first to win him international praise, and is one of his most appealing.[3]
References
- ^ "Il ne faut pas mourir pour ça". Variety (review): 24. July 17, 1968.
- ^ Harcourt, Peter (1981). Jean Pierre Lefebvre. Ottawa: Canadian Film Institute. pp. 16–22.
- ^ Morris, Peter (1984). The Film Companion. Toronto: Irwin Publishing. pp. 150–151. ISBN 0 7725 1505 0.
External links
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