Les Ordres

One of the great engaged movie of the seventies. This a real drama with its atmosphere from such a Kafka. The filming is very simple and precise. The actors are convincing and sincere. This particular way of sharing movie and documentary is very interesting and powerful. Michel Brault gave us once a cinema lesson in the University of Québec in Montréal. He told us to direct movie with the stomach, not only with the head. So I realized that even a great director like him could create through emotions more than spirit. So feel the movie and you'll discover soon enough what you understood through the movie. For every person who loved this movie, I recommend "Punishment Park" directed the same year by an English guy in USA, Peter Watkins. You can find this rare movie on IMDb.

It really happened. it was October 1970. Wartime law was voted in Canada. Not Bosnia, not Congo, not Cosovo, not Albania. Canada. At dawn, 400 individuals were arrested in Montréal and held in jail for weeks without charges nor explanation. This masterpiece by Michel Brault tells about it. Wether you see it to understand current canadian news or to reflect on freedom or to see an excellent thriller, I doubt you'll regret it. A must for communication students.

Les Ordres: made in the infancy of Canadian cinema, as far as feature films go. Canada's official submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film for 1974, and not nominated. It's easy to see why, and indeed, I imagine a country putting this up against the cinema of the entire non-English speaking world would have raised a few eyebrows in the Academy. Okay, so you have a historically significant event (at least significant to Canada). But that's all you have. The direction has all the creativity, imagination and style of a TV movie. That's all it looks like, it never rises above that level for the entirety of the film. The sole "innovation" you have is interviewing the actors about the characters in the film itself- but that's a stunt just ripped off from Ingmar Bergman's The Passion of Anna (1969). I didn't particularly care for it there, either, but at least Max von Sydow had something to say. None of these television actors know what they're doing here, except to say "My name is X, and I play Y..." It would have been more accurate to say "I'm nobody, and the 'character' I play is barely a character at all."

It's not enough to have a human rights violation as a subject matter (and as far as world history goes, a few days in prison is small potatoes). You have to *do* something with it to have a film.

I can see why this would have made the Toronto International Film Festival's Top 10 Canadian Films of All Time when that list was first assembled in 1984. There were a lot less good films to choose from then, and Les Ordres having inexplicably won Best Director at Cannes in 1974, I might have felt obligated to write the film in, too, for its strictly historic interest. Whether it deserved to stay on the Top 10 in the 1993 update is more debatable. Why it didn't fall off in 2004 is puzzling. The fact that it's still wasting space on the list in 2015 is laughable, especially when far worthier films like Les Bons Debarras fell off and Incendies and Mommy didn't make it at all. If this, and Mon oncle Antoine, were really the best we could do as a country, that's not inspiring- that's embarrassing.

This film takes place in the infamous 1970 October crisis in Québec. After a separatist movement kidnapped a minister of the government, the army is in the streets of Montreal and makes hundreds and hundreds of arrest, with the help of the police. The arrested are students, activists, syndicalists, but also people who ''look'' strange, are at the wrong place at the wrong time and really don't have anything to do with the situation..... This film shows the complete lost of control of the Canadian government (Pierre.E. Trudeau) and how they orchestrated their plan of making all separatist look like terrorist...

The acting of 'Jean Lapointe' as a textile worker and taxi driver is incredible...

In my opinion, this film ranks with Costa-Gavras's ''Z'' and the infamous 'Battaglia di Algeri' of Gillo Pontecorvo, as the top 3 best political movies of all times..... A must see!

This would be a compelling and scary film if it were fiction. But it is in fact, a docudrama based on the worrisome events of the Quebec crisis of 1970. Canadians adulate Pierre Trudeau but forget that he was the one who unleashed a police state on a free country. (We never learn, do we? We did it to the Ukranians in World War I, to the Japanese in World War II and now to Arabs and Muslims. But I digress.) "Les Ordres" captures the gritty reality of working class Montreal with stark black and white footage, punctuated with occasional but effective colour. It takes the unusual but also effective step of having the actors discuss the people they play within the body of the film.

I was left with an understanding of how something like the Gestapo can come about in a civilized society if police are given unfettered powers. The Quebec police and the RCMP came very close to the Gestapo model. Although there were no significant abuses outside Quebec, the law applied to all of Canada. I was a broadcaster in Toronto at the time and it was frightening to realize that for a time freedom of the press did not exist in Canada. This is a powerful and compelling work that deserves wider exposure. It also should be shown in schools as a fundamental example and a discussion starter on the importance of civil rights and the fragility of freedom.