Year: 1968
Language: French
Format: 35mm Colour/Black & White
Runtime: 95 min
Director: Gilles Groulx
Producer: Guy Coté
Writer: Gilles Groulx
Cinematographer: Thomas Vamos
Editor: Gilles Groulx
Sound: Claude Pelletier
Music: Stéphane Venne, Les Hou-Lops
Cast: Georges Dor, Claudine Monfette, Stéphane Venne, Les Hou-Lops, Christian Bernard, Danielle Jourdan
Production Company: National Film Board of Canada

Two artists, Georges (Georges Dor) and Christian (Christian Bernard), meet on an icy road on Quebec’s North Shore and become friends. After picking up an old, brightly coloured Jaguar in a junkyard, they set out for Montreal, stopping briefly in St-Hyacinthe on their way. Georges wants to remain free and be true to himself, but Christian has dreams of fame and fortune. He buys a guitar, begins to sing in public and becomes fairly well known. In Montreal, the two men meet Mouffe (Claudine Monfette), a young woman in despair because her husband has deserted her. Each finally follows his or her chosen path: Mouffe cruises around in a Cadillac, Christian pursues his singing and Georges continues to reject consumer society.

Oj Ltes vous donc?, director Gilles Groulx’s second feature, is perhaps his most important film. An extraordinary, complex collage of music, songs, sound, printed titles, commercials and monologues, it assaults Western materialism and espouses liberation of the self and the spirit as the first step toward liberation of the society. Like Groulx’s earlier Le Chat dans le sac (1964), Oj Ltes vous donc? (the title is taken from a Québécois pop song), combines direct cinema and Godardian methods to articulate a profoundly Québécois consciousness.

As in other Québécois features of the time, notably Jean Pierre Lefebvre’s Le Révolutionnaire (1965) and Il ne faut pas mourir pour ça (1967), the creative, free-thinking intellectual in Quebec society is shown here to be severely marginalized, isolated and incapable of implementing social reform. Like Claude in Le Chat dans le sac, Georges ends with his Personalist faith intact, but in retreat.