Cynical Cinema

“You’ll have another chance [to see an Expos game].  A baseball team’s there for life.” 

Once again, I am confused by the translation of a French title into English.  Un Ete Sans Point Ni Coup Sur becomes A No-Hit No-Run Summer.  Which seems fine, it’s a literal translation, and makes for a decent title.  However, in French there is no single word for “no-hitter”.  So when a pitcher throws a no-hitter, the French translate it as a “no-hit, no-run game”.  Which is the basic title of this movie.  But when it gets translated into English, shouldn’t it be called, once again, a “no-hitter”?  Summer of the No-Hitter, or something?  I suppose the current English title has a better ring to it, though, so I probably shouldn’t complain.

And anyway, this movie is pretty darn good.  In fact, I would say it’s almost great.  It’s the summer of 1969 in Montreal, and the Expos have just been added to the Major League Baseball roster.  Young Martin, much like all the other kids in the city, is excited about the Expos.  And, like all the other kids, he wants to play baseball in the summer.  The Expos were not a very good team (they were, after all, an expansion team), but the imagination of the kids gets fired up when Bill Stoneman pitches a no-hitter in the ninth game of the franchise’s existence.  (Trivia note - Stoneman threw both of his career no-hitters as an Expo, both 7-0 scores, before he blew out his arm in 1973.  His second no-hitter, against the Mets, was the first ever thrown in Canada.)  Even with a losing team, there is always something to cheer about for Expo fans.

Throughout this film, characters wax eloquent about baseball.  Near the beginning, a young boy in French class stands up to make an argument for watching the first Expos game as a homework assignment, talking about how baseball is “not just the national sport of Americans, it’s the bond that holds them together”.  Martin is desperate to attend the first ever Expos home game at Jarry Park in Montreal, but his father isn’t going to pull him out of school.  By contrast, his friend Sophie is going to the game - her father has pulled her out of school to see history made.  Throughout the movie, the best speeches about baseball are made by Sophie’s father, an enigmatic man whose history (and his relationship with is daughter) are shrouded in mystery.  All we really know about him is that he sure loves his baseball.

When the coach of the local youth-league baseball team (Roy Dupuis) cuts Martin and his friends, leaving them with nowhere to play for the summer, Martin’s father begins to come around to the idea that Martin wants to play baseball, and he organizes a team himself.  It’s a B-squad team, who play for the local parish against other parishes.  They play on a dirt field with a bunch of lamp-posts in the middle of it.  They have old, used hockey sweaters for uniforms.  And they are not terribly good.  But they are playing baseball for the love of it, and the team Martin’s father is coaching is, at the very least, having fun.

But Martin’s father, still not entirely committed to the idea of baseball, is desperate to find another coach for the team.  Sophie is bugging her father to do it, since he knows more about baseball than anyone, but he continues to be enigmatic, and refuses.  Eventually, another father shows up, with his son, and begins to take over a little.  His son, “Stretch”, is the best player on the team, maybe in the city, and his talent as a pitcher and batter make this team into winners.  But his father is a boorish bully, and “Stretch” becomes the only player on the team that matters - he pitches every game, he knocks in all the runs, and he becomes a fan favourite.  (Among the thirty or so “fans” that come to the park to drink beer.)

News of Stretch’s prowess reaches Roy Dupuis, the coach of the A-level youth team in town, and he sets up an exhibition match with this B-team so he can scout the big kid.  (Of course, there are a few scenes where Dupuis does certain things so that we know he’s a jerk, and we can root for Martin’s team against Dupuis.)  But Stretch’s father has over-worked him, and he can’t play in that game.  So it’s up to Martin and Sophie and the rest of the B-team to take on the big guys on their own, in the defining game of the 1969 youth league baseball season.

A No-Hit No Run Summer is a wonderful movie.  It made me nostalgic for the days I had as a youth in the Fisher Park  community baseball league, where I lived through the summer solely for the moments when I would get to put on my Red Sox shirt and take the mound against the Blue Jays or the Pirates, and lose myself in baseball for a couple of hours.  The advice given in the movie is the same my coaches had - don’t throw a curveball at that age because it can screw up your arm.  A twelve-year-old can’t pitch every day, because that can screw up his arm.

Of course, the movie is predictable.  We know that Sophie’s dad will show up at the end of the film to lend his baseball expertise.  We know that the bond between Martin and his father will strengthen through baseball.  And we know that this little B-team of charming and scrappy kids will play their best game of the year without their star player against the big-time little league team.  But it’s the journey that counts.  And there is so much more going on in the film than just this stuff.  There is a moment, during the final game, where Roy Dupuis looks at Sophie’s father, and her dad looks back at him, and we get the sense that they know each other somehow.  We never find out what’s going on there, but we get the sense, as we do throughout the film, that something deeper is at work.

Martin’s father and mother have a unique relationship, one we see through the eyes of the young boy.  He says that his mother is constantly changing (and that she likes the music of the Rolling Stones) while his father spends all of his time not changing at all.  Patrice Robitaille and Jacinthe Lague are fantastic as those parents, especially Lague.  She plays Martin’s mother as a caring, subtly wise woman, who wants to spread her wings, while trying not to step on her husband’s toes.  Lague is a magnificent actor, and Pier-Luc Funk is excellent as Martin.

A No-Hit No-Run Summer is a great coming-of-age story, a terrific movie about a child’s relationship with his parents, and a genuinely charming and sweet, multi-layered movie.  But most of all, it’s a movie about the transformative, unifying power of baseball, and about kids being kids.  And I love that.  I watched it in French, with the English subtitles, which is the best way to see it.  But even if your kids speak no French at all, it’s worth showing them in the dubbed English simply to show them a great movie about kids and baseball.  Un Ete Sans Point Ni Coup Sur is the French-language equivalent of The Sandlot.  Only deeper and more insightful.  That’s a good thing.

A No-Hit No-Run Summer comes out December 2nd from Alliance Films.

I have long said that Roy Dupuis is the French Canadian version of Colm Feore. When you have a big Canadian icon that you want to immortalize on film or TV, you pick one or the other. Anglophone icon? Feore. (Pierre Trudeau, Glenn Gould.) A Francophone icon? Dupuis. (Maurice Richard, Romeo Dallaire.) And so there was no question in my mind when I heard that Shake Hands With The Devil was going to be made into a feature film as to who would play Dallaire. It was Dupuis, or the film would not have been made. By the way, in order to avoid those “do your research” and “get your facts straight” emails, I would like to state right now that I am indeed aware that Pierre Trudeau was a Francophone. But that movie was mostly English.

Dallaire’s book was a sensation in Canada when it came out. A tragic and devastating look at the genocide in Rwanda. It was later made into a documentary film, which helped make people aware of the horror a little more, and now this movie, which might help even a little more. The thing that made me saddest in watching this film was the fact that it came out so many years after the genocide was over. Same for the documentary and the book. Now, it’s not like Dallaire could have written his book while things were going on. But it’s sad to think that so many people pay attention now, and watch other films like Hotel Rwanda, and feel sad and mourn the tragedy and get enraged over things like “why didn’t somebody do something”. And yet, when we see those things on TV, on the news, in the papers, and we are aware it is taking place RIGHT NOW, we don’t do much. As Joaquin Phoenix says in Hotel Rwanda, we go back to our TV dinners and turn on the hockey game when the news is over.

Part of this, I feel, is because of the nature of the media. When genocide is taking place in Darfur, in Africa, way across the sea, it is treated as simply a news story. A two-minute piece on the horrors in Darfur gets as much importance as a two-minute piece on the possibility of the defeat of the budget in the House of Commons. Very often, it gets less. A school shooting is big news, front page on every paper, lead story in every newscast. That is a tragedy that hits close to home. But more people died in thirty seconds during the genocide in Rwanda than have died in all school shootings in North America combined. It doesn’t affect us. It is reported as “here’s what’s going on in a country that isn’t ours”, and is followed up with “a small town in France has outlawed public toilets!” and we forget all about it. Toilets! That’s hilarious! I think it’s safe to say that most of us know (myself included) know more about Columbine and Dawson College and Virginia Tech than we do about Darfur. Really, this isn’t exactly the fault of the media. This is really the way we want to be fed our news, and they are just complying with the wishes of the general population - you wouldn’t get many ratings if you showed machete massacres every night.

And so we get Shake Hands With the Devil, a movie that has been made only when it could be made, many years after the fact. And hopefully, it makes people aware that such things are still going on, or curious enough to find out. (Steven Spielberg has just pulled out of the Olympics in Beijing to protest China, feeling that they haven’t done enough to stop the genocide in Darfur.) And the movie is pretty good, as a movie. Dupuis is steely and tough as Dallaire, a man who carries himself with the utmost dignity and commands respect as a lifelong soldier. His supporting cast is for the most part excellent. Having just finished the book, I recognized most of the characters being protrayed just as I had imagined them. Especially James Gallanders as Major Brent Beardsley, who has a few tough scenes. This is a fascinating story, and that alone makes the movie worth watching.

But there is a little problem with the movie, looking at it solely in the context of a movie. It is a dramatization of real events, but somehow, it doesn’t feel dramatized enough. There are scenes taken directly from the book - a scene where Beardsley is confronted by a mob of machete-weilding Interahmwe, as he tries to get a wounded woman to safety, and he punches the man who stands in his way. In the book, the scene is tense, dramatic and poignant. In the film, it’s tough to tell what you’re seeing. Is that guy standing in his way…or not…or OK it’s over. Another scene where Dallaire and Beardsley are blockaded from a portion of the city and must get out of the car and walk through the barricade, as weapons are cocked and the bad guys say they will shoot. Again, in the book, this scene made me pretty nervous. In the movie, it is treated as a matter of course.

Doc hated Gone Baby Gone because he had read the book first, and he couldn’t reconcile what he saw on the screen with what he had imagined in his head when reading. I had the same problem with Shake Hands With the Devil, seeing scenes that were so familiar to me and yet not feeling their poignancy as much as I had while reading. But at the same time, I’m not sure anyone would understand this movie without having read the book first. There are so many factions and institutions - the RPF, the RGF, the Interahmwe, the president, prime minister, interim government, and countless others. Each with their own politics, their own attitudes, their own enemies and their own clandestine secrets. It is such a complicated picture that the movie can’t hope for a moment to make sense of it all in less than two hours. In the end, this film should be watched, and is certainly good, but if you had to make a choice, read the book.