Denis Arcand – alegerea locaţiei & tema: istoria cu actorul căruia i s-a refuzat un rol pt.că avea barbă (pt.că era distribuit în piesa de la Oratoriul St.Joseph) > > > Arcand merge să vadă piesa şi o găseşte mediocră. DECIDE SĂ FACĂ UN FILM.

Paralele cu EVANGHELIILE: Daniel Coloumbe [Lothaire Bluteau] has returned to Montreal after spending a

long period traveling in "the East". In the opening scene, one actor points to Daniel, calling him "a much better

actor", which echoes John the Baptist foretelling the arrival of Jesus the Messiah.

The first actor later "sells-out" and lets his head be used in an advertisement, parallelling John the Baptist's beheading.

The actors then gather for the Passion play, some of them leaving safe jobs to do so, recalling Jesus gathering the disciples.

Daniel wrecks an advertising casting session, where the casting director enjoys humiliating participants, and displays deep contempt for them. This is a parallel of when Jesus casts the money-lenders out of the Temple.

Daniel's arrest and court appearance before an indecisive judge, played by the film's director himself, parallels Jesus' appearance before Pontius Pilate.

The smooth elite lawyer, who lays out a grand commercial career for Daniel, looking down from a skyscraper at the city, refers to the temptation of Christ by the devil atop a high pinnacle.

The resurrection of Jesus is depicted as the donation of Daniel's organs, which live on in the lives of others.

The founding of the Christian church becomes the plans for an experimental theatre company.

DAR FILMUL NU ÎŞI PROPUNE SĂ FIE O ECRANIZARE A EVANGHELIILOR ÎN CONTEXT CONTEMPORAN: It would be a mistake to suppose, as some have done, that Arcand is asking, "What would it be like if Jesus had come today?" Instead, Arcand is doing what he often does: holding history up as a mirror to our own time, and noting how human behavior has a tendency to repeat itself. (See his documentary Comfort and Indifference, in which an actor playing Machiavelli comments on the forces at work in Canadian politics; or see his dramatic films The Decline of the American Empire and The Barbarian Invasions, which draw an explicit parallel between the decadence of ancient Rome and the decadence of today.) 

Daniel Coloumbe - decides to base the play not on the gospels per se but on his own reconstruction of the "historical Jesus"—and because his play challenges Christian dogma at every turn, he quickly runs afoul of the priests who hired him.

Arcand - Arcand is also profoundly concerned with the question of meaning and how it can be found in a post-modern world teeming with so many contradictory stories and messages.

::: JESUS DE MONTREAL – o tragedie postmodernă?Pe aceeaşi scenă:

o an adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov in the film's opening sceneo later on it stages a beer-commercial audition

>>> every stage and every screen is a blank space waiting to be filled, and it doesn't matter what fills it.

o Similarly, at one point, the passion-play actors tease the priest who first commissioned their play—and now wants to revise it—by acting out the different genres through which they could filter the story of Christ: kabuki, method acting, comédie française. What difference can the content of the story make when its form is dictated by conventions such as these? 

o And yet, in a strange way, there is hope here. One of the most important scenes in the film doesn't concern Jesus at all: instead, it features an actor [Rene] in a recording booth, as he narrates a documentary about the vastness of space and the insignificance of human life. That, right there, is the Modern story. But once he has finished his narration, the actor hands the script to the man who wrote it and says, "It leaves a lot unanswered." Yes, the man replies, "and though it's valid today, in years it may change."