The saving of appearances: Denys Arcand’s Jesus of Montreal

Abstract

The film Jesus of Montreal consists of an overlayering of stories presenting in a postmodern way the story (S1) of a group of actors’ attempt at an interpretation (S2) of an old story, the story of Jesus’ life and death (S3). In line with a typical postmodern approach the borders between these parallel narratives are blurred, the various texts become intertexts, the contents of the ‘original’ text are realized in the lives of the actors apparently without their realizing it. In this contribution the dialectics of Arcand’s postmodern procedure is followed up along two lines: firstly, the strategy of the overlayering of three narratives is uncovered In a second phase, the dialectics of appearance and truth in the overlayering of narratives is discussed.