“It was time for me to put aside the tactics that I have always used to deflect questions,” confides Lucien about the filming of Francoeur: we are finishing the rockers, the road documentary in which his daughter Virginie desanctifies his father by paying him the most courageous of tributes, that of revealing the bruises in the heart of the sensitive man behind the myth.
In the kitchen of her condo, Virginie Francoeur casts her tender gaze on her father, who is recovering from COVID and who, despite the incredible resistance of his frame, shows several signs of wear.
Virginie who does her father’s makeup before he goes on stage, Virginie who picks him up as he leaves the CHUM, Virginie who tells him to take care of him; it’s this same look with which she graces her daddy’s bum throughout Francœur: On finnishes bien les rockers, the documentary she co-directed with Robbie Hart.
There was no question of indulging in “simple praise” of Lucien Francoeur, the writer and professor at Polytechnique, her only daughter, who admits to having feared hagiography, immediately clarifies. The fact is that, even if he signed three immaculate classics of Quebec rock with Aut’Chose, and we owe him several collections attesting to his still underestimated quality as a poet, the greatest work of Lucien d’Amérique remains the character he has constructed, and which makes access to the man difficult, if not impossible.
“I’m consumed by my myth,” he proclaimed in 1975 in Le Freak de Montréal, a prophetic sentence, the real Francoeur having gradually been buried under a thousand layers of self-mythifications.
A thousand layers that Virginie will have managed to strip away with as much love as patience, by allowing herself, under the eye of the camera, to ask him the same question again and again, as she will do during our own interview. Each time she exchanges a knowing look with the journalist, while Lucien, with his eyes closed, meditates his next attempt at dodge.
Is Lucien apprehensive about watching the documentary, which he had still not seen at the time of our meeting? “I have never feared anything in my life,” he responds first, before Virginie intervenes. “But Dad, didn’t you tell me the other time that you were anxious? » Quebec’s Jim Morrison finally gave in.
A mixture of talking heads (Jean-Paul Daoust, Biz, Michel Barrette, Mouffe), cartoons and electric archive images, Francoeur: On achève bien les rockers also tells the quest of a girl who refuses to see her father continues to deteriorate and maintain a relationship with the ghosts contained in his veins.
In one of the most moving scenes of the feature film, Virginie asks Lucien if he measures the suffering he inflicts on her each time he uses the needles again. A few days earlier, she had found him inert, on the floor of his house, with a tourniquet, syringe, bottle around him: his heroin addict’s kit.
If Lucien Francoeur’s drug consumption has never been a secret, the endless resurgence of his addiction to the hero had always, until now, been erased from the portraits devoted to him. “My father can be very clever in his interviews to avoid certain topics and I think he opened up precisely because I am his daughter and we have always been friends, never judged each other », observes Virginie. “And there is also the road, which brings confidences. »
The road, because this documentary is also a tank film, Virginie bringing her father back, for the duration of a road trip, to the California which haunts her entire work, aboard a 1967 Mustang.
Lucien will visit his sister Carole there, an enlightening meeting during which they remember the violence of their late alcoholic father, who beat his wife, as well as his children when they tried to defend their mother.
“All of this allowed me to understand his unhappiness, the oppressive environment from which he comes,” explains Virginie, who also talks on screen with her mother, the poet Claudine Bertrand, about the abuse she suffered. she suffered as an orphan from Duplessis. “Both grew up in environments where they did not have access to culture and, despite my father’s absences, they broke this cycle by surrounding me with books and love. »
How old is Lucien Francoeur? “If I hadn’t been told the last time I went to the hospital, I would have no idea,” he swears. “When the doctor told me I was 75, I almost ran away. »
But the gypsy did not run away, because he knows full well that following his heart attack and his two bypass operations, in 2022, it is in his interest to follow the advice of those who do not want him to die tomorrow. Will he listen to his daughter, who tries to cure his melancholy by constantly urging him to trade whiskey for creation? “It’s never too late to do well, but there’s always time to continue doing badly,” he replies, facetiously.
Virginie looks at him again with this mixture of affection and intransigence. Lucien continues more seriously: “When they told me my age at the hospital, I realized that I was in my final stretch. So we have to stop fooling around: there is no longer any question of flirting with this or that substance, of going to drink with friends at the bar. At the age I am, if I want to continue to see my daughter develop, I have to take it easy. »
How does Virginie explain that despite all his excesses, her father still stands tall? “He clung to poetry, to the power of words. But I think it was very much my mother and I who kept him alive. » Lucien, usually so talkative, is content to place his hand on that of his beloved daughter.
