''Being at Home with Claude'' is a 1992

Canadian Canadians () are people identified with the country of Canada. This connection may be residential, legal, historical or cultural. For most Canadians, many (or all) of these connections exist and are collectively the source of their being ''C ...

drama film In film and television, drama is a category or genre of narrative fiction (or semi-fiction) intended to be more serious than humorous in tone. The drama of this kind is usually qualified with additional terms that specify its particular ...

directed by

Jean Beaudin Jean Beaudin (6 February 1939 – 18 May 2019) was a Canadian film director and screenwriter. He directed 20 films since 1969. His film ''J.A. Martin Photographer'', was entered into the 1977 Cannes Film Festival, where Monique Mercure won the ...

and based on the play by René-Daniel Dubois. The film stars Roy Dupuis as Yves, a gay man who has just murdered his lover Claude ( Jean-François Pichette), and is attempting to explain his reasons to the police investigator ( Jacques Godin). The film premiered at the Rendez-vous du cinéma québécois in February 1992. It was also screened in the

Un Certain Regard (; 'A Certain Glance') is a section of the Cannes Film Festival's official selection. It is run at the Debussy, parallel to the competition for the . This section was introduced in 1978 by Gilles Jacob. The section presents 20 films with unusua ...

section at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival. The film was co-produced by Les Productions du Cerf and the

National Film Board of Canada The National Film Board of Canada (NFB; ) is a Canadian public film and digital media producer and distributor. An agency of the Government of Canada, the NFB produces and distributes documentary films, animation, web documentaries, and altern ...

Cast

Critical response

Ray Conlogue of ''

The Globe and Mail ''The Globe and Mail'' is a Newspapers in Canada, Canadian newspaper printed in five cities in Western Canada, western and central Canada. With a weekly readership of more than 6 million in 2024, it is Canada's most widely read newspaper on week ...

'' criticized Beaudin's decision to depict Claude's murder as the very first scene in the movie, writing that it robbed the movie of "the precious ambiguity of our feelings about Yves. Instead of letting him lead us - along with the police interrogator - slowly, carefully, with almost virginal reticence, into the interior world that dictated Claude's death, we are slapped in the face with it." He ultimately concluded that the film's success or failure "depends on whether you can persuade yourself that Dubois, self-styled 'transgressor of our fears' and gainsayer of God, succeeds in his project. If he does, then the film does. For my part, I found it a brilliant essay in moral myopia." Craig MacInnis of the ''

Toronto Star The ''Toronto Star'' is a Canadian English-language broadsheet daily newspaper. It is owned by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary of Torstar Corporation and part of Torstar's Daily News Brands (Torstar), Daily News Brands division. ...

'' criticized the casting of Dupuis in the lead role, calling him a "human side of beef" who was "not equal to the demands of the script", and compared his performance unfavourably to the performance of Lothaire Bluteau in the original stage play. Rick Groen of ''The Globe and Mail'' identified the film's religious underpinnings, writing that "it's a short jump from Romance to religion ("He transfigured me. He's alive in me"), and Beaudin adds a few Catholic fillips to the tale - the judge's chamber comes with stained-glass windows, the Inspector is clearly a father-confessor, and the murder is filmed as a blood-and-wine sacrament. But that's really only ornamental. Beneath the ornamentation, there's a sturdier reason why this work has the power to cut across different audiences and survive its different castings (here, Godin is hard-working and wonderful; Dupuis is merely hard-working). And the reason is simple. For all its seamy, aberrant, amoral exterior, what we're actually seeing is a typically Keatsian lament "half in love with easeful Death," a classically blissful tragedy complete with star-crossed duo."Rick Groen, "Star-crossed lovers". ''

'', November 6, 1992.

Awards

References

External links

*
''Being at Home with Claude''
at the NFB collection catalog {{DEFAULTSORT:Being At Home With Claude 1992 films 1990s French-language films Canadian crime drama films Canadian films based on plays Canadian LGBTQ-related films Films shot in Montreal Films set in Montreal Films directed by Jean Beaudin 1992 crime drama films National Film Board of Canada films 1992 LGBTQ-related films Gay-related films Canadian LGBTQ-related plays French-language Canadian films 1990s Canadian films LGBTQ-related crime drama films