Out of the past and Maxime Bernier
In 1947, Robert Mitchum starred in Out of the Past, one of the best pieces of film noir Hollywood created. Film Noir was the genre of post-war filmmaking that frequently featured dark, wet, streets and urban shadows that exposed characters – people trapped by circumstance, by themselves, by forces outside their control triggered by a fatal flaw from their own character.
In Out of the Past, Robert Mitchum plays a small town Californian gas station owner who is in love with a local girl and who has his mysterious past catch up to him when a criminal comes to town, played by Kirk Douglas.
The past does return. The past is the present.
For Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier, he is surrounded this day by his girlfriend, Julie Couillard, and the criminal associations of her family (her former husband) and her steamy sexual past: married to someone named Stephane Sirois, who belonged to The Rockers biker gang in Quebec, and then later common-law married to another small-time criminal named Gilles Giguere, a Hells Angel biker who was later murdered.
The story is so unsavory and Couillard’s links to crime so ingrained, so absolute, that even she herself was actively targeted for murder by Hells Angel boss Maurice Boucher during the biker wars of the 1990s. She was targeted because she was a community member.
Having a biker boyfriend in High school is bad enough. Marrying a biker is another thing; but living with yet another? Then there are the many people (quasi-bikers) that surround them – the associates, the businessmen, the hangers-on. It is a culture. It is a culture that Julie Couillard bought into, married into twice and supported.
Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier says it is in the past – she says it happened a long time ago.
Now, to move even further into the past, Maxime Bernier declares she is an “ex” girlfriend. Prior to her alleged dismissal Bernier had trotted her out while visiting the United Nations in New York. The photo of Julie reminded me of what Peter C. Newman said to me about Barbara Amiell, “she was the kind of woman who would fall out of her dress and blame the dress”.
This makes me think of another thing: you can take the biker out of the girl, but can you take the girl out of the biker?
I guess it is all in the past.
The queston is, given Maxime Bernier’s low sexual standards, could Julie Couillard have done better?