They were rich in emotions, the private funeral of Jean Lapointe, Saturday morning. Couldn’t keep my eyes dry as her children and friends paid tribute to her, reminiscing about her good and bad times.
Beyond the disappearance of Jean Lapointe, it is also the end of an era that brought tears to my eyes.
- Listen to the interview with Jean-Marie Lapointe on the Sophie Durocher show via QUB radio :
I REMEMBER
I was touched by the testimony of Marie-Josée, one of Jean Lapointe’s daughters, who told the underside of a story of family reconciliation that is more moving than many television series.
I was happy to hear Francois Legault quote the famous scene from the series
Duplessis in which Jean Lapointe fervently took up the defense of Quebeckers (especially since Jean Chrétien was seated a few meters in front of the Prime Minister).
I was moved by the right words of Jean-Marie Lapointe, who recounted how his father’s vulnerability was an example.
Just for once: I even liked the priest’s speech! It took a lot of Jean Lapointe to make me appreciate the word of a man of the Church.
Actor Benoît Brière delivered such an intelligent text that I thought he should write more often.
He came to say that when he was very young, his parents took him to see shows by Quebec artists from all walks of life, including Jean Lapointe.
To speak a vocabulary that Jean Lapointe would understand, Brière said that one had to “consume” culture to create “a dependency”.
This wording struck a chord with me.
What are we doing today to make our own children “addicted” to Quebec culture? Do we expose them enough to our films, our songs, our paintings, our artists?
Benoît Brière also imagined, in his finely written text, which welcoming committee would welcome Jean Lapointe to paradise: Michèle Tisseyre, Jérôme Lemay, Olivier Guimond, Félix Leclerc, La Poune, etc.
I heard Benoît Brière going through this list and I wondered how many of these names resonated with the youngest.
I was sitting on a pew in the church next to my friend Jean-Pierre Ferland. And I wondered how many “under 20s” today know the work of the “Little King”…
MEMORY DUTY
Anne-Élizabeth Lapointe shocked the entire audience by singing a cappella The lament to my brotherwhich Jean Lapointe sang in Orders by Michel Brault.
Impossible not to feel shivers when hearing the finale “Repelling the false masters, here is freedom! / Fighting false masters is eternity! “.
And I wonder why the young reporter from Radio-Canada who covered the funeral simply said: “This song, Jean Lapointe had sung it himself in one of his roles in the cinema”.
One of his movie roles?
It’s still not an insignificant refrain that he sang in a forgotten film!
It is a song of freedom, of rebellion that he sang behind the bars of his cell, in his role as Clermont Boudreau, an imprisoned “French Canadian”, in a major film in our cinematography dealing with the arbitrary arrest of hundreds of innocent citizens in October 1970!
A little historical reminder, brothel!
If even the national broadcaster does not do its duty to remember, who will?