Don't Let It Kill You

Synopsis: Abel, a child-like man of 30, dreams of being able to transform the course of events while living in his own little world with a motley collection of insects, comic book cut-outs, miniature planes in birdcages and books in the fridge. However, it is the course of events in a single day that will transform Abel. While he waits in vain for his girlfriend, Madeleine, he meets by chance a former love, Mary, who is leaving Quebec for Europe that same night. When he visits his gravely ill mother in hospital, he receives news, after 10 years of silence, from his father Napoleon, who has made a new life in Brazil... Abel will soon have to deal with his feelings of abandonment and despair behind his light-hearted absurdist humor and his melancholic eccentricity.

An existential and softly poetic movie, yet very simple and accurate about the characters’ minds and feelings, with a script who subtly mirrors them on the theme of leaving one another. A sort of synthesis between a certain North American realistic approach and Europe’s New Wave of that time, with an overall singular touch that includes unexpected breaches of slapstick and slow tempo moments of deadpan wittiness. An unfairly unknown and forgotten little jewel of the sixties, who dealt with great dexterity with his low budget. The great documentary director Pierre Perrault wrote: “Lefebvre’s movie reveals an extraordinary mastery of the visual material and of the invisible substance. He then persists to denounce the secret, without any means other than the intelligence of the viewer.”

This is the first Canadian feature fiction to ever be screened at Cannes by a pioneer of Quebec cinema, Jean Pierre Lefebvre, who was the biggest influence of the early Atom Egoyan and the Canadian filmmaker who got the most movies selected at Cannes (where he won the International Critics’ Prize in 1982 for Wild Flowers).

The film was in the Top Ten of Les Cahiers du Cinéma for the year 1968, like many Lefebvre’s movies of that era, and was awarded with the Best Foreign Film at the Hyères Film Festival in France.

Screened last spring for a special retrospective tribute by the Winnipeg Film Group.