Remembering the Quebec cultural icon that was Julien Poulin

Le Bel Écran is a monthly column about Quebec's screen culture from a local perspective. 

In the 1980s, Julien Poulin became a Quebec cultural icon as Elvis Gratton, one of the province's most beloved characters. With his distinctive tooth gap, iconic ill-fitting red costume and greasy mop of curly hair, there was no one else like him. 

Over his career, he amassed nearly 100 screen credits in TV and film and was a prominent figure in theatre. In his screen roles, he exemplified the Quebec archetype of the working-class everyman. Beyond acting, Poulin was also a passionate political voice — a lifelong sovereignist and leftist. When he passed away earlier this month at 78, Quebecers across the province mourned not just an actor but someone they considered part of their community.

Claire Valade, the current president of the Quebec Film Critics Association, remembers her first introduction to Poulin. "I had a Quebec cinema class and had an amazing teacher, Roland Haché. One day he screened [the film] Elvis Gratton." She recalls, "I was never really into broad comedy, and Elvis Gratton, when you take it at first level, is a broad comedy. I didn't really get it. I thought, 'This guy is a complete moron!' In the discussion after class, I had time to reflect and we talked about the fact that the film is also a satire. It wasn't my introduction to satire but it was the first time I saw a Quebec cinema comedy with a political agenda."

The character of Elvis Gratton satirizes a certain type of Quebecer: a poorly educated federalist who believes in capitalism more than he believes in himself. "Basically, Elvis Gratton is the image of the colonized Quebecer," explains Valade. "He's not just been colonized once, but twice, because his biggest idol is Elvis. He's all about consumerism. He's this figure of the Quebecer who doesn't see what Americanization and colonization is doing to their culture."

For Charlotte Lehoux, a film programmer at Cinema Public and writer at Hors Champ, Poulin was a constant in her life. "I really love him. He's accompanied me from childhood till now. He made me laugh as a child, and as an adult, as I grew politically, my perception of his work also grew," she says. 

Lehoux cites his collaborations with Pierre Falardeau, one of the most acclaimed directors in Quebec, who not only made Elvis Gratton but films like Octobre and Le Party, as influential. "Poulin was very outspoken politically in terms of independence but also basic social justice. As I grew into adulthood I discovered Pea Soup, a film [Falardeau and Poulin] directed together, and these things prompted me to grow a political consciousness that I didn't really have before."

Lehoux explains that to understand Poulin's influence is to contextualize him within his beliefs. "He cannot be disassociated from his politics. He embodied a post-shock wave of cinema that was disappointed in the state of Quebec and the failure of the independentist movement. He embodied that in Quebec history," she explains.

In the aftermath of Poulin's death, there was an outpouring of eulogies by politicians. Among them was Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, the head of the current Parti Québécois, who mourned the loss on X calling the actor "a cultural giant and a militant for the Quebec independence movement." Current premier François Legault and Marc Tanguay, interim leader for the Quebec Liberals, offered similarly decontextualized tributes to the actor. 

For Olivier Thibodeau, a critic for Panorama who grew up watching Poulin on the children's TV show Robin et Stella, this appropriation of Poulin by centrist and right-wing politicians motivated him to write a eulogistic defense of Poulin's work.

In "The Clown of Clowns: homage to an unknown revolutionary," he writes: "Poulin was more than a sovereignist, he was a socialist driven by an anti-corporatist spirit that is light years away from the neoliberal positions currently adopted by the so-called defenders of Quebec identity."

Thibodeau says that he was first approached to write about Poulin because he'd recently written about the film Pea Soup. "I looked around at what was being written about him and realized many politicians recycled him as a figure for their movement. PSP [Paul St-Pierre Plamondon], for example, tries to make him out as a militant figure for Quebec independence. That kind of rubbed me the wrong way because Julien doesn't represent the independence movement of today, he represents the independence movement from yesterday." This earlier strain of sovereignty that Poulin fought for, Thibodeau emphasizes, is deeply tied to the liberation and independence of people from across the world. 

Thibodeau researched Poulin's career as a filmmaker and the documentaries he did with Falardeau in the 1970s. These films tackle ideas like militarism in the police with films like Le Magra and life in post-revolution Algeria in a film called À force de courage. Thibodeau describes these films as "really engaged and militant cinema that advocates for socialist revolution basically. It's very, very far away from the independence of today's PQ, for example, that proposes basically a neoliberalist and kind of racist independence movement." 

Thibodeau — as well as others — keep coming back to the idea that the enduring and intergenerational appeal of Poulin is that he has come to represent the archetype of the Quebec male. "You know, he has a tough exterior, but he has a heart of gold. He's a proletarian figure."

Among the films that kept coming up again and again was a film made late in Poulin's career, Rafaël Ouellet's Camion. It's a film that really exemplifies this working-class quality that Poulin had. 

Valade explains why Camion is her favourite of his roles: "It came out at a point in his career when people had forgotten that he could be other things than Elvis Gratton. He's everything that you forgot to expect from him. He's an ordinary man dealing with a difficult situation, so close to being broken and he rebuilds himself in the film and it's beautiful to see. It's so believable; he could be your neighbour."

Rest in peace, Julien Poulin. You were a great neighbour to so many Quebecers.