Caramel and Hockey

A couple of nights ago we went out (on our bikes! for the first time since winter!) and rode over to the Forum to see a movie. Now, for those who don't know Essential Montreal Facts (like me, formerly), the Forum is where the Montreal Canadiens used to play. It's now a multiplex movie theater, and a bizarre space at that. Embedded in the sidewalk outside the main entrance are bronze stars engraved with the names of Montreal's hockey greats, and when you go inside you're soon standing where the ice once was. One section of original seats remains, and there are always a few people sitting in the uncomfortable red fold-up chairs, looking nostalgic. Elsewhere in the building, there are restaurants, fast food stands, a gym, a video arcade, a bar...the smell of popcorn permeates the air and music and noise reverberate off the walls. There's nothing particularly warm about the space, nor is it well organized - it's just a big, open, round, multi-story arena that's been put rather awkwardly to a different use, still colored, like the team's jerseys, mostly red, white, and blue.

On Thursday night we walked into the building and heard banging and cheers, as if a ghost crowd were present for a game. We looked up, and on three sides were huge projections of a live hockey game - the first game of the Stanley Cup, Montreal against Boston, being played a few blocks away at the new hockey arena, the Centre Bell. We were early for our movie so we sat down in the old seats, and watched for a while, thinking how odd it all was.

Then it was time for our movie, in which we became totally absorbed. It was a new Lebanese film, in Arabic and French, called Sukkar banat, or "Caramel." It's about the lives of four women, close friends, who run a beauty salon in Beirut; the title refers to the hot sugar candy they use instead of wax for hair removal. One of the women is Muslim, several are Christian, and none are very conservative; a major point of the story is the multi-culturalism of the people's lives and the city. My favourite character was actually a beautiful elderly woman who also runs a business on the street, as a seamstress. She has a mentally-deficient sister who she cares for - everyone knows her and looks out for her - but the sister creates some problems when the seamstress meets a potential suitor. The film, directed and written by Nadine Labaki, who plays the salon owner, is beautifully photographed and immensely human; we loved it.

When we walked out of the theatre and down the narrow hallway toward the lobby, we heard roars. On the projection screens hockey players embraced and fans were screaming; it sounded as if the Forum had come alive again. Apparently Montreal had won the game: it was bizarre. We went outside, unlocked our bikes and headed back down the new Maisonneuve bike path toward the center of the city, into a town that was going wild. Crowds of people who'd been at the game streamed up from the south, while drivers of cars festooned with the team banners cruised up and down the main streets, waving, yelling, and honking horns in a good-natured city-wide celebration. We rode on, carefully, smiling, wondering what it will be like if they win the Cup, for the first time since the early 1990s.

Comments

[Lorianne]

Depending upon when the Canadiens moved out & the movie theatre moved in, I think I saw one of my first hockey games there, during a trip to Montreal with my ex. I remember there being women in fur coats, dresses, and heels: far fancier dress than you'd find at a Boston Bruins game! It seemed quintessentially European (or at least radically un-American) to get dressed up for a hockey game as if it were a high-brow cultural event versus the kind of working-class beer bath hockey games tend to be here in the States. It sounds like your experience corroborates mine, which suggests my assumption about "high" versus "low" brands of culture does not hold water outside of the States. In Montreal, I suspect, hockey is high culture.

[Bonnie]

"Caramel" sounds very appealing indeed. In case you haven't seen it, I'd like to recommend "Since Otar Left." It takes place mostly in Tbilisi, Georgia, and focuses on three women: mother, daughter, and granddaughter. But the heart of the film, and the story, is the grandmother who's played by a completely winning, Polish actress who was 95 when the film was made. I think you'd both enjoy it.

[dale]

(o)

[Lucy]

'Caramel' came up as a hot recommendation with my students recently, along with 'La graine et le mulet' - they both sound good.

[mare]

The Forum is apparently owned by an American company and there are always two (real) policeman/women on guard, supposedly to protect it and us against terrorist attacks. That always seems strange to me, especially since I don't feel like there is much of a threat of terrorism in Quebec.

The cinema in the Forum is an AMC theatre. In other Canadian cities AMC theatres only show Hollywood blockbusters, but since there aren't enough of those in Montreal and they mostly go to another chain of theatres the AMC shows quite a lot of art house movies. Another reason is that according to Quebec law you can only show non-French spoken movies for a couple of weeks when there isn't a French dubbed version of it available. Which means those movies don't have long runs and need to be replaced by other movies regularly, resulting in a very good supply of fresh content that isn't made in Hollywood.

We still have to see 'Caramel'. We went to see it last Tuesday, but I was too late due to a slow metro and we missed the start of the screening. So we went to see another movie, 'The Unknown Woman', which had only one woman in it and she wasn't treated very nice. My wife can't stand that (she wants to see movies that score high on the Bechdel/Wallace rule) so she left the theatre after an hour and we had a fight afterwards about my bad pick of movies...

[Sorry that this comment turned into a sort of blog post.]