Return to tiff.’s home page

Canadian Film Encyclopedia

Shopping Cart
 

Les Vautours

(The Vultures)

Year: 1975
Language: French
Format: 35mm Black & White
Runtime: 91 min
Director: Jean-Claude Labrecque
Producer: Louise Ranger
Executive Producer: Louise Ranger
Writer: Robert Gurik, Jacques Jacob
Cinematographer: Alain Dostie
Editor: Jean-Claude Labrecque
Sound: Serge Beauchemin
Music: Dominique Tremblay
Cast: Paule Baillargeon, Amulette Garneau, Jacques Bilodeau, Jean Duceppe, Monique Mercure, Gilbert Sicotte, Gabriel Arcand, Raymond Cloutier, Carmen Tremblay
Production Company: Les Filmes Jean-Claude Labrecque Inc.
  In Quebec City in 1959, fatherless Louis Pelletier (Gilbert Sicotte) leaves the seminary and applies for a civil service job through Premier Maurice Duplessis (Jean Duceppe). When his mother dies, his three aunts – Yvette (Monique Mercure), Marie (Carmen Tremblay) and AdPle (Amulette Garneau) – arrive from as far away as Boston and Alberta. They join the neighbours and priests for the funeral in the small family house and quarrel over the inheritance. Louis treats the arguments with indifference since his dreams lie elsewhere, in pop music. His aunts decide he wouldn’t know what to do with the money and, in the end, he is left with nothing, not even his civil service job – which evaporates with the death of Duplessis.

A political allegory that functions as a penetrating study of greed, Jean-Claude Labrecque’s second fiction film offers an eloquent and evocative meditation on the state of Quebec at the end of the Duplessis era and the birth of the Quiet Revolution. A shadowy and thoughtful work, it captures perfectly the selfishness and complacency of the adults and the innocent, fruitless dreams of the young. The film was popular in Quebec upon its release and was followed by a sequel, Les Années de rLves (1984).