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.
