Reconstruction 11.1 (2011)


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Facing off: French and English in Bon Cop, Bad Cop / Heather Macdougall

Abstract:
This essay performs a sociolinguistic analysis of Bon Cop Bad Cop (Eric Canuel, 2006), a bilingual action-comedy which succeeded in becoming the highest-grossing domestically-produced film in Canadian history.  The paper employs research methods that have productively been applied to multilingual texts and to other aspects of the dynamic between English and French in Canada.  The evidence presented, particularly the analysis of subtitling, contests the ideal of a monolingual nation-state: Bon Cop, Bad Cop’s popular success in both English and French Canada can be seen as an indication that even monolingual Canadians identify with the bilingual nature of their national culture.

Keywords:  Television & Film; Communication; Linguistics & Semiotics; Translation Studies

 <1> Hugh McLennan’s 1945 novel The Two Solitudes was an elegant literary allegory of the tensions between the Anglophone and Francophone populations in Canada.  It was both a commercial and critical success, winning the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, generally regarded as one of the most prestigious prizes for Canadian literature.  Furthermore, the title provided the mot juste to define the popular perception of the relationship between the two linguistic communities.   Regardless of the many and varied ways that the French- and English-speaking populations of Canada coexist and interact (and, indeed, overlap) with each other as well as with people from other linguistic backgrounds, the notion that the two communities are independent from each other and form two distinct “solitudes” has long been evoked to the point that it is firmly engrained in the cultural consciousness of the Canadian population.   Creative treatments of the tensions between the French and English languages, such as in McLennan’s work, have been complemented by a strong and growing body of rigorous quantitative and qualitative research by sociolinguistics and academics in other related fields.  These researchers have followed a variety of paths including, but not limited to, studies in bilingual education, code-switching, language attitudes, textual analysis, translation, and language shift.

<2>  Six decades after the publication of McLennan’s influential novel, the relationship between Francophones and Anglophones remains as complex as ever, and the time was ripe for a new creative representation of Canada’s unique linguistic situation.  Bon Cop, Bad Cop, conceived by Patrick Huard and directed by Eric Canuel, was released in the summer of 2006 and made history by being the first fully bilingual Canadian feature film given mainstream release.  It also, somewhat unexpectedly, made history by breaking box-office records; with over $12 million in ticket sales, it was the highest-grossing Canadian film ever in terms of domestic theatrical revenue.  The paper that follows is a sociolinguistic analysis of the film, incorporating a selection of approaches influenced in part by research methods that have productively been applied to multilingual texts or to other aspects of the dynamic between English and French in Canada.

<3> In her article “Film Audiences as Overhearers,” Claudia Bubel convincingly argues that film dialogue cannot be treated in the same way as natural dialogue, even though in many ways it does seek to imitate spontaneous speech.  She refers to Harald Burger’s notion of “multiple addressing,” and insists on its applicability to film because characters who appear to be speaking to each other are also always implicitly addressing the audience.  Film dialogue, for example, usually contains fewer instances of overlapping speech, backtracking, mispronunciations, or long pauses, and those instances that are present can be interpreted as meaningful events rather than mistakes on the part of the speaker (at least in conventional fiction films). Bubel also highlight’s the relevance of Mick Short’s theory of embedded discourse where audience members must decode dialogue to understand not only what characters are saying but what the author/director is saying about them.  The notion of embedded discourse can be extended and applied also to the ways that language varieties are often employed to construct a specific identity for a character (in a similar way to costume) by relying on the audience’s preconceived attitudes towards those language varieties.

<4> In an analysis of Bon Cop, Bad Cop, which due to its subject matter is even more self-conscious in its use of language than most films, it is particularly important to keep the intended cinema audience in mind, not only in terms of actual passages of dialogue represented in the film, but also in terms of the overall representation of the linguistic communities and the relations between them.  In other words, the characters and events depicted in the film cannot simply be interpreted as accurate reflections of Anglo-Franco relations in Canada any more than the dialogue can be analysed as spontaneous natural speech.

<5> That said, there is much to be gained by a careful analysis of the film in sociolinguistic terms. Sherry Simon’s investigation of hybrid texts, for example, demonstrates the ability of bilingual writers to highlight their position between cultures, creating a new site of individual and collective expression” (217). In other words, a creative exploration of two ethnolinguistic groups does not necessarily need to set up a fixed dichotomy separated by an empty void, but can instead open a vibrant and interesting space in the middle.  Kathryn Woolard echoes this sentiment in some of her own work:  influenced by the theories of hybrity and polyglossia articulated by Mikhail Bakhtin, she argues that “bilingual practice can dismantle (but does not simply neutralize) binary distinctions” (6).  Both of these researchers, along with many others, are working against the “privileging of monolingualism as against multilingualism” which was supported by European model of the nation-state, itself “legitimated by a monolingualist language ideology” (Gal 149).   Interestingly, Bon Cop, Bad Cop, despite being a bilingual text, largely subscribes to the assumption of monolingualism as the unmarked circumstance, as the two bilingual protagonists are exceptions within their own communities.  Furthermore, the two language communities are depicted as culturally independent from each other, with only a very few shared cultural references (the sport of hockey being the most obvious and important in the film).  My textual analysis of the film will therefore focus on an analysis of bilingualism as it is depicted in the film, including the circumstances which influence language choice for the bilingual characters.  I will rely on transcriptions from the film to illustrate my arguments.  This analysis is necessarily complemented by a broader consideration of the way the film itself circulated as a text, and so the first section of the paper will introduce some information on how and why the film was made, including choices in subtitling and marketing, and some background on the creative team involved in producing the film.  This information is extracted from reports and interviews in newspapers and cinema trade journals.  The final section of this essay will deal with the film’s reception and the implications of its commercial success; the analysis here will be supported primarily by the published discussions about the film in newspaper reviews across the country.

<6>  Throughout the entire essay I will be arguing that the film posits itself as overtly Canadian by employing both official languages in roughly equal amounts.  This is noteworthy, because it is a new approach in a film industry that has traditionally found only a very small domestic audience for films that are emphatically national.  It is significant to note, for example, that the previous record holder for box-office revenue for a Canadian film was Porky’s (Bob Clark, 1982), which was diegetically set in Florida and had virtually no on-screen indications of being a Canadian production.  Porky’s was a typical product of an industry in which, to quote film theorist Peter Urquhart, the most commercially successful films had a tendency to “conceal any signs of the nation in which they were filmed” (66).  Bon Cop, Bad Cop’s popular success in both English and French Canada (with some caveats, as will be described below) can be seen as an indication that even monolingual Canadians identify with the bilingual nature of their national culture.

The Making of Bon Cop, Bad Cop

<7>  Patrick Huard, an established Québecois actor, first thought of the concept for a bilingual film when he was presenting at the Genies, the Canadian film awards.  Relating the incident to Playback magazine, he explains,

The French-Canadians and the English were laughing at the same jokes, and I wasn’t prepared for that. I was doing a joke on the French, and the English would laugh. And the other way around. […]  I was surprised, and realized that maybe there’s something that we have in common. The one thing we can laugh about together is our differences. That’s when I had a flash for Bon Cop. (Robinson, paragraphs 5-6).

<8>  Several years later, and after collaborating with three other writers, the script was completed for Bon Cop, Bad Cop.  The filmfollows the traditions of the police action-comedy genre, which chronicles the unlikely pairing of two (usually male) officers with seemingly incompatible working styles who are forced to collaborate as partners.  Since a full ethnography of the genre (and its attendant dialogue conventions) is well beyond the scope of this paper, a brief overview will have to suffice.  The television series Starsky and Hutch helped to establish the genre as well as the convention that one of the cops sticks to the rules and follows procedure while the other is impetuous and impatient, but far more exciting.  Subsequent films have often emphasized the contrast between the two cops by employing characters from different ethnic backgrounds, as in Rush Hour or 48 Hours.

<9>  Bon Cop, Bad Cop is a Canadian version that employs Canada’s most obvious cultural dichotomy, language, to provide a contrast between the two principal characters.  David Bouchard is a hot-tempered Montreal cop who chain-smokes, drives too fast, and is always one wrong move away from being suspended; Martin Ward, by contrast, is a Toronto officer with an exemplary record, an ambition to get a desk job, and a healthy diet low in cholesterol.  The two are forced to work together when a murder victim is found on the Ontario-Quebec border.  This homicide turns out to be the first of many, and our protagonists follow the clues to a serial killer intent on killing off members of the Canadian hockey community who have betrayed their nation by selling out to the United States. 

<10> In an interview for 24 Images, producer and co-writer Kevin Tierney makes no apologies for the formulaic plot: “Bon Cop, Bad Cop, c’est une variation sur un theme. […] On ne voulait pas réinventer la roue” (Daudelin 23) [1]. In terms of the characters, Tierney admits that, “on a effectivement utilisé des stéréotypes pour les personnages principaux, les deux flics: le protestant constipé et le cow-boy québécois” (Ibid) [2].  These two protagonists stand in for the stereotypes of their respective linguistic communities; while David is passionate and macho, Martin is mild-mannered and efficient.  Despite highlighting the cultural differences between the two linguistic communities—albeit stereotypical articulations of those cultures—the film also implicitly supports a federalist project by framing them together against a threatening “other”: the United States of America, the country which is (in the film, at least) endangering Canada’s national sport.  The twin pastimes of hockey and America-bashing provide common ground across the linguistic divide.  Tierney is also careful to point out that the film does not have a political agenda: “Le sujet dont il est question ici est culturel, pas politique.  C’était notre choix dès le début : les différences culturelles, c’est amusant; la politique, ça n’intéresse personne” (Ibid) [3].  In keeping with this, there is no mention of Quebec separatism, and caricatures of politicians (a staple in Canadian comedy) are replaced by caricatures of prominent figures from the world of hockey: for example, the real-life commissioner of the National Hockey League, Gary Bettman, is clearly the inspiration behind the diminutive personage of Harry Buttman.

<11> This type of “inside joke” means that the film is not only Canadian in terms of content and production, but also implicitly in terms of audience.  Americans, normally a potential target market for Canadian films, might understand the NHL references; their country, however, is not flatteringly depicted in the film and furthermore is a market with a notoriously low tolerance for subtitled films.  Audiences further afield would certainly find much of the humour, as well as the plot devices, truly baffling.  Nevertheless, The Gazette reported in 2006 that the film performed well at the American Film Market, and agreements were made to screen it in countries including Turkey, Brazil, Hungary, Russia, and Thailand (The Gazette  A19).  It was never picked up for American distribution, however, although it is available on a DVD release in that region (Hays 24).  The foreign distribution of the film raises interesting questions about how it might be subtitled or dubbed when exhibited in countries where neither English nor French is spoken, and how the codeswitching could be indicated to a monolingual foreign audience.

<12> The issue of subtitling was dealt with in Canada by making available two versions: one print that subtitled the English dialogue in French, and a second that subtitled the French in English.  Interestingly, no version was struck to include subtitles in both languages thereby allowing the film to be seen by monolinguals from both communities in the same theatre. (While it was not possible in theatrical screenings, the DVD version allows bilingual viewers to switch off the subtitles completely, but again there is no option to have both languages appear in the subtitles).  Separate advertising materials were also prepared in the two official languages.  Both theatrical trailers emphasized the linguistic subject matter of the film, although there is a notable difference in the approach of the two versions.  The English trailer, which ran under the tagline “Shoot first, translate later,” contained scenes of David speaking French-accented English and only one, clearly facetious, line of subtitled French dialogue.  It would be possible, then—and perhaps this was the goal of the trailer editors—for English audiences to assume that the film would be about French Canadians without actually being in French.  By contrast, the French trailer contains an almost equal number of lines in French and English, and included the slightly more conciliatory tag line “Pour une fois, les deux solitudes vont se parler … peut-être” [4].   The marketing strategy hints at a greater acceptance of bilingualism among the French-speaking population than among the Anglophone community; this difference between the two groups is also supported within the text of the film, albeit in a more nuanced way.

Representing Canadian Bilingualism

<13>  It is significant that in a film that gives equal air time to French and English, only three characters are fluently bilingual: the two protagonists and the villain. A look at an early scene provides a good starting point for an analysis of bilingualism in the film.  The following transcription is from a scene which takes place in a small office at the Headquarters of the Sûreté de Québec in Montreal.  There are four characters involved in the scene: Capt. LeBoeuf, chief of the Sûreté du Québec (indicated in the transcription as SQ) is sitting behind a desk, Brian MacDuff, chief of the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) is standing behind him.  Toronto detective Martin Ward (MW) is standing in front of the desk, facing them.  Detective David Bouchard of Montreal (DB) enters as the scene begins.  Note that the two detectives met the previous day at the scene of the crime.

MW: [dryly, to DB] Good morning.

DB: [to MW, confident in his English but speaking with a French accent, sarcastically] Hey.  Nice turtleneck.  It’s really you.  [to SQ, but referencing MW] Que c’est qu’il câlice ici, la tête carrée?

SQ: [to DB] Ah, David, tu connais Martin. [gesturing to OPP] Je te présente Brian MacDuff, le chef de la Sûreté de l’Ontario. 

OPP: [politely, extending a hand to DB] Pleasure to meet you.

DB: [rudely, ignoring the offered hand] C’est ça, ouais. [looking back to SQ] Je peux savoir ce que je fais icitte à cette heure-là à matin?

SQ: [ignoring DB, to OPP, speaking in a very heavy Quebec-French accent] Uh, you wan talk, uh, Brian?

OPP: [To SQ, in standard Southern Ontario accent, politely] No, no. It’s your jurisdiction.
SQ: No, no, I h-insist.

OPP: Okay. [calmly, and in a professional, matter-of-fact tone, to the two detectives]  We know that the victim is from Montreal –

SQ: [interrupting, very loudly and dramatically, also addressing the two detectives] On sait [slams the table and gets up] que le victim [looks intently from one detective to the other, pauses dramatically] est de Montréal!

OPP: [pauses briefly, taken aback, then continues still matter-of-fact] We don’t know for sure yet if it’s a murder, and if it is, where the, uh, murder victim comes from. [5]

SQ: [still dramatically, gradually shifting into a stage whisper] On est pas certain encore si c’est un meurtre, et... si c’est le cas, d’où vient le meurtrier.

OPP: So, Captain LeBoeuf and I thought this would be a great opportunity –

SQ: Et on pensait, le capitaine LeBoeuf et moi, que c’était une belle… opportunité... [searching for words] de... de...

DB: [clearly embarrassed by his boss’s overdramatic performance]  OK. Ça va, chef.  Je comprends l’Anglais.

SQ: [somewhat surprised and possibly also relieved] Ah, ben, OK. [to OPP, in French-accented English] It’s okay. David can, uh, English.

[Both DB and MW are shown looking down, embarrassed on behalf of SQ and his clearly imperfect grasp of English.]

SQ: [struggling to make himself understood] He can English… he, uh, can…

OPP: [finally getting it] Oh! Oh, okay.  [laughter from both OPP and SQ]  Well, go ahead then.

SQ: Okay, okay, I go, I go.  [continues in heavy accent, obviously struggling to find words] So, we thought it was a good, uh, hopport—hop—[mumbling]

OPP [clearly and loudly, to SQ]: opportunity

SQ: hop – hoppor..

OPP: [smiling, encouraging] opportunity

SQ: hopportunity… to be, uh…

MW: [in confident and formal French, with a slight English accent] Vous pouvez parler Français, capitaine.

SQ: [in mild exasperation] Ah, mais ciboire.

DB: [incredulous and somewhat mocking] Tu parles Français toi?

MW : [sarcastically] Non, je parle pas Français. Je suis installer un petit gadget au cerveau and I see subtitles under people when they speak.  Oui, je parle Français.  J’étais en Français enrichi à Upper Canada College.

DB : Upper quoi?

MW : Et j’ai aussi vécu une année à Paris.

DB: [Jokingly to nobody in particular]  Ah, okay. C’est pour ça qu’il est chiant de même.

SQ: [to DB, warningly] Hey.

OPP: [to the two detectives] Right, the thing is, we want to show the RCMP they can’t have the whole pie.

SQ: Huh! No, no. OK [gestures to OPP to continue]

OPP: …and if we can co-operate it would be very good for our image and, uh, [to SQ, more quietly and somewhat conspiratorially] next year’s budgets.

SQ : Ha! Yes, yes.  [addressing the detectives] Fait que, jusqu’à nouvel ordre, vous êtes [dramatic pause, says this last word in English] partner.

<14>  This dialogue raises a number of points which are worth commenting upon.  Firstly, it is significant that when there is contact between speakers from the two language groups, it is assumed that English will dominate the conversation.  The beginning of this scene, in fact, mirrors a previous scene in which the two detectives first meet; after each of them state their names, Martin greets David with a polite “Enchanté,” in response to which David turns to his Quebecois colleagues and jokes in a strong mock-English accent “An-chan-tay!  On a tombé sur le gas qui peut par-lay le Fran-sezz!” The Quebecois officer then proceeds to converse with Martin in English. 

<15>  The fact that Martin speaks fluent French is not revealed until the scene transcribed above, and this is in itself important: the audience and the characters are all supposed to be surprised that a police officer from Toronto would speak French.  Martin has to explain his knowledge of French through both formal education and residency in a French milieu (significantly, however, in France rather than in Quebec).  David’s bilingualism, by contrast, never needs to be explained.  It appears to be a surprise to David’s boss, however, which is in keeping with the representation throughout the film of Quebeckers as monolingual (or near-monolingual) Francophones.  The police chief, for example, clearly has only a modest productive ability in his second language (although his receptive ability is demonstrated by his accurate translations).  In a later scene, David’s ex-wife Suzie asks Martin for dinner and he accepts; Suzie replies with an English “Fantastic,” which David immediately ridicules.  Voicing her mockingly, he says, “Fantastic?! C’est quoi là, tout a coup t’es rendu bilingue?”  He thereby indicates that his own bilingualism is something of an anomaly, and therefore it is strange that his special linguistic skills are not explained within the story in a similar fashion to Martin’s. 

<16> Finally, it is interesting that the only character in this scene who is completely unilingual is the one who in real life would most assuredly be bilingual: the chief of the Ontario Provincial Police.  With a sizeable Francophone population and no nationalist language laws like those of Quebec, the Ontario police force would surely choose a chief who is able to communicate with all of his constituents.  Yet, in the film, Brian MacDuff is completely ignorant of the French language.  All of his dealings with the Sûreté depend on Capt LeBoeuf’s fractured English, and he is never heard to speak a word of French in the entire film.  He apparently has no receptive knowledge of French either: when he suggests that David would “burn down the Empire State building and blow up Times Square” if he were sent to New York, David notes to Martin, “ça c’est un prejugé, ça!”  MacDuff demands of Martin, “What did he say?” – a request that Martin dismisses with “Just ignore him.”

<17>  Martin’s bilingualism often puts him in the position of mediator between David and the Anglophone characters.  As with the aforementioned example of the interchange with Capt MacDuff, David often uses French as an inside code which he assumes his Anglophone interlocutors (with the exception of his partner) will not understand.  When asked to translate, Martin never actually faithfully reproduces the original denotational meaning but rather adjusts it to suit his own needs or perspective.  Consider the following exchange when Martin and David are on a television program with Anglophone hockey commentator Tom Berry (TB) – clearly based on the real-life character Don Cherry – who treats the Montreal team and French Canadians in general with contempt:

DB: [angrily] Continuez avec tes osties de commentaires, tu vas regretter tes cravates laides.

TB: Come again?

MW: [trying to calm them both] He just said what a sharp dresser you are.

DB: No, that’s not what I said.
<18>  In another example, when David first sees Martin’s beautiful sister, he remarks in French, “C’est pas si plate que ça, Toronto.”  Iris responds flirtatiously with “I don’t know what that means,” at which point Martin interjects, “It means he wants to have sex with you.”  The roles do not reverse however; David never has to play translator for Martin, although this is predominantly due to Martin’s more consistent use of French when speaking with a Francophone interlocutor, rather than an assumption that Francophones will understand English.

<19>  To a certain extent, the depiction of monolinguals as the rule in Canada rather than the exception is accurate, as Chantal Gagnon notes: 

According to Statistics Canada (2001), only 17.65% of Canadians can speak both French and English. It is often said that Canada is composed of two monolingual peoples: French-speaking Canadians (most of whom are located in the province of Quebec) and English-speaking Canadians. Hence, heterolingualism (or language plurality) is part of Canada’s reality but perhaps not as much as it could be expected from a country promoting bilingualism and multiculturalism as its national ideals. (70)

<20>  The issue of when to use each language comes up explicitly only a few times in the film.  When speaking to each other, the two protagonists switch back and forth although both tend to favour their mother tongue, knowing that the other will have no trouble understanding it.  Occasionally, however, each of them uses some advantage to force the other to speak in his second language.  For example, when Martin finds himself in a headlock at the bar he struggles to yell to his partner, “Bouchard!  Help me!”  David feigns ignorance and asks his fellow pool players, “Y a t’il quelqu’un qui comprends l’Anglais icitte, parce que j’pense que le monsieur avec la face mauve là-bas essai de me dire quelque chose.”  David comes to the rescue only when Martin manages to gasp “David… Aide… moi… s’il… te… plaît.”  A few minutes later, the roles are reversed and a similar scene ensues.  Martin, however, is even more exigent and rebuts David’s “Fuck you” with a snide “Right language, wrong words.” 

<21>  The expectations for language choice when dealing with others are discussed between the two protagonists early in the film. Martin is trying to set some ground rules about their partnership, and the ensuing exchange highlights their contrasting approach:

MW: Rule number twelve, you let me interrogate the witnesses.  I do the talking.

DB: Si tu veux, mais en Français.

MW: Ça depends de la langue maternelle du sujet.

DB: Non, non. [very emphatic] Au Québec, on travaille en Français.

MW: Fine.  That leaves the rest of Canada under my jurisdiction, with the possible exception of some areas of New Brunswick.

<22>  Martin’s approach is attentive to the intended audience, while David ascribes languages to geographical territories.  As it happens, however, there are no Anglophone characters in Quebec in the course of the film, so the point is somewhat moot.  Indeed, as mentioned early, English and French Canada are depicted as culturally isolated from each other; Susan Gal and Judith Irvine describe this contrasting of one identity against another as “a familiar kind of process,” noting that “the ‘other,’ or simply the other side of the contrast, is often essentialized and imagined as homogenous” (975).

<23>  This cultural divide is consistent with a European model of nationalism that privileges monolingualism and that sees linguistic knowledge as “an emblem of political belonging” (Gal 149).  It is necessary for the development of the plot that the two main characters clearly belong to one community or the other.  Gal points out that under the nation-state model, “multilingualism implies political unreliability or mixed loyalty” (149), but this is not the case for our bilingual detectives. The film reinforces the concept of language as an integral part of culture, but its humour relies on the idea that knowledge of a language does not equal cultural belonging, as the two fluently bilingual cops struggle to understand each other’s society.  For example, David has to stop Martin from displaying his police badge when they go to a bar in St-Hubert—David  knows it will not make them any friends—while Martin repeatedly has to extinguish David’s cigarettes when they are working in Toronto, a far less smoke-friendly city than Montreal (at least in 2006).  Neither of the detectives ever appears totally at ease or assimilated into the other’s habitus. 

<24>  When the detectives are speaking in their second language, it is their accent (in addition to their stereotyped behaviour) that constantly reminds the audience of their primary identity.  In an interesting and relevant study on ethnic group affiliation and second language use in Montreal, Elizabeth Gatbonton and Pavel Trofimovich provide some useful definitions for analysing proficiency in a second language.   They define fluency as “the ability to produce speech smoothly and rapidly, without undue hesitations and pauses,”  while accent in a second language “denotes the extent to which learners’ L2 speech is free of segmental or suprasegmental features typically characteristic of their L1” (230).  Individuals can therefore be completely fluent in a second language while their accent, meanwhile, indicates their first language (and usually, but not always, their primary ethnic group affiliation).  This is certainly the case for the two protagonists in Bon Cop, Bad Cop

<25>  The position of the villain, however, is somewhat less clear.  The villain (who remains unnamed throughout the film) is the third fluently bilingual character.  His speech, however, is accented in both languages and this is commented upon by the other characters in the film.  David, for example, asks him facetiously, “Comment ça se fait que tu as un accent dans les deux langues?  C’était qui ton prof?  Jean Chrétien?”  The villain’s character is never fully developed (this is in fact one of the weaknesses of the film as a work of genre cinema), but he clearly identifies himself as a patriotic Canadian; his killing spree is, in his own words, a “heroic attempt to save our national sport” and to rid the hockey community of “all the money-grubbers and scumbags who sold our game to the Americans.”  He appears to belong somewhere in between the two communities, although the implications of this are not clear.  Here it is perhaps useful to look again at Kathryn Woolard’s work on strategies in bilingualism.  She notes that interference (such as accent) from another language, along with codeswitching and bivalency (using words which belong equally to two codes) can all be conscious strategies “of choosing both languages at once: arguably, interference is more a way of not choosing at all” (15). Perhaps then, the killer is attempting to demonstrate that he belongs to both communities, while his accented speech belies his full integration in either. He is, instead, some kind of outcast; this would be in keeping with his characterization in the film as a friendless loner who even kills his own accomplice.

<26>  Woolard’s notion of bivalency, mentioned above, is an interesting one but proves difficult to apply to the text of Bon Cop, Bad Cop.  While some important words in the film, such as “hockey” and “tattoo,” are identical in French and English, they do not provide a point of intrasentential transition from one language to another as they do in her Catalan/Castilian examples.  Nevertheless, we can look at instances of interlingual borrowing and codeswitching.  Again, David and Martin show contrasting approaches to language use.  Martin keeps the two languages separate and uses a formal register in both, for the most part.  This is in keeping with his rules-oriented, organized characterization; his use of languages is one of his many skills and he values his linguistic competence in a similar way to his other professional abilities.  David, by contrast, uses an informal register and borrows freely from English even in his conversations with other Francophones; despite his many borrowings, however, it is clear when he says to his boss, “Ah come on, c’est mon journée off,” for example, that he is in fact speaking French.  This is also in keeping with his passionate character; for him, language is used for expression, and the more words he has at his disposal, the more expressive he can be.  For example, he often uses English swear words, but it is amply demonstrated that this lexicon adds to, rather than replaces, a full arsenal of home-grown Quebecois “sacres.”

<27>  One of the most humorous scenes in the film is David’s lesson to Martin on the various forms of swearing, which have become a legendary aspect of Quebec culture.  Like many other aspects of language in Quebec, swearing has become the object of legislation in a recent real-life event when a man swore in English at a Quebecois police officer.  Originally charged with obstructing justice, the man was acquitted by Judge Pierre Bouchard who ruled that “while generally recognized as wrong, impolite and coarse, the words ‘fuck you’ do not at all constitute a blasphemy, since a blasphemy by definition invokes God or sacred things” (Peritz A4). In response to the event, Jean-Pierre Pichette, an ethnographer specializing in French-Canadian swearing customs, noted that “to French Canadians, it means nothing, it’s not our language, our code” (Ibid).  Even if English swear words mean nothing to French-speakers – certainly they are used casually throughout the film by many of the Francophone characters, but then so are French ones – Quebec swearing practices did seem to delight the critics and audiences in English Canada, as will be seen below.

Reception of the Film

<28>  Reviews for the film were generally sympathetic even where they were not glowing.  The consensus seemed to be that the film did what it set out to do, and given that it had no lofty ambitions, it was not faulted for lack of artistry.  Reviewer Vanessa Farquharson appraises the simple aspirations of the film when she notes that it outlines how “the path to national unity lies in French and English Canadians coming together and teaching one another how to swear and blow things up” (PM3)..  Her relief at finding a Canadian film that doesn’t try too hard to be artistically worthy is almost palpable: “That it manages to speak equally to both French and English Canadians without feeling like a drawn-out Heritage Moment is an accomplishment we can proudly call our own” (Ibid).  This is just what producer Kevin Tierney was hoping for, as he notes in an interview with the Vancouver Sun: “It’s just adolescent enough. We have a little sex, a little drugs and a little rock ’n roll. We blow a lot of [excrement] up and most Canadian movies don’t do that” (Zacharias  F20).

<29>  Even Jay Stone, who generally didn’t appreciate the film, did enjoy the bilingual comedy: “The odd-couple chemistry between Feore and Huard is both funny and uniquely homegrown: Bon Cop, Bad Cop is not just set in Canada, it’s distinctly set in Canada, and some of its scenes, particularly when Bouchard is explaining the ins and outs of Quebecois cursing, give you a glimpse of some distant future when a Canadian comedy can be both Canadian and comic” (C5).  Stephen Cole of the Globe and Mail recommended the film to Anglophones across the country, promising that “English audiences should enjoy all the same scenes that went over big in Montreal and Chicoutimi” (R8).

<30>  The interest in the film was not, however, consistent across the country, a fact that is somewhat obscured by the film’s claim to the record of highest-grossing Canadian film. In fact, the overwhelming majority of theatrical revenue came from the province of Quebec.  In October of 2006, near the end of the film’s theatrical run, the Ottawa Citizen reported that of the $11.4m in domestic theatrical revenue, a full $9m was from Quebec.  Despite the disproportionate distribution of ticket sales, Brendan Kelly defended the film by noting that “the Montreal-shot bilingual action-comedy made more money in the rest of Canada [outside Quebec] than most English-Canadian films ever do” (2006 E8).  In the same article, Kelly quotes CEO of film distribution company Maple Pictures, Brad Pelman, who affirmed, “any Canadian film that grosses $1 million in Canada is a terrific success” (Ibid).  Bon Cop, Bad Cop exceded that benchmark by over 100% before even adding in ticket sales from Quebec.  To add further complexity to the situation, in Montreal – which has a majority French population but a strong Anglophone minority – the English-subtitled screenings of the film out-performed the French screenings (Whyte C21).  In a different approach, a group of researchers based at Carleton University applied cartographic techniques to map the sites of diegetic action in the film and overlayed it with a second map charting the relative audience figures for different theatres.  Their conclusion was that “both maps resonate to each other showing a surprising convergence at the border between Quebec and Ontario” [6].

<31>  By considering all these statements together, a pattern emerges that the film was most successful among populations where contact between the two languages is common.  In other words, rather than considering the Canadian cinema audience simply in terms of geographically defined English and French Canada, the success of Bon Cop, Bad Cop may lead film distributors to start thinking of hybrid or mixed populations as a significant market with its own tastes.  Furthermore, as Linda Cardinal argues in “The Ideological Limits of Linguistic Diversity in Canada,” heterolingualism is an important part of the cultural landscape across Canada.  She describes the Official Languages Act, which institutionalises the equality of French and English in governmental proceedings, as “the cornerstone of the government’s strategy for national unity” (481).  Furthermore, she notes that:

The concept of official languages plays an important role in the government’s nation-building strategy, whose objective is to unite Canadians and Quebeckers into one national community.  This makes language and nationalism closely related in Canada as a whole and not just in Québec as it is often taken for granted in the literature. (482)
The Official Languages Act focuses primarily on making information and services available in both languages, rather than supporting bilingualism at either the individual or textual level.  Gagnon notes that the translation of Canadian political speeches, for example, are so effective that listeners usually believe they are hearing a speech originally written in their own language: “Federal translators, it would seem, homogenise their target texts to the point that readers/listeners forget that they live in a bilingual country” (71).

<32> Bon Cop, Bad Cop, by contrast, created a hybrid text that emphasized rather than obscured the bilingual culture of Canada.  Whether or not it will mark the beginning of a trend remains to be seen, but the success of the film has already helped its two stars—both already well-recognized within their primary language community—break into a second market.  Patrick Huard is currently in the early stages of development for an English-language television program, and Colm Feore has started a veritable second career in French-language films.  He has completed two Francophone films since Bon Cop, Bad Cop, as well as a Quebec ad for a breakfast cereal (Kelly 2007 D5).  This is significant because it may help to establish a larger body of shared cultural references across Canada, in contrast to the current situation where the Quebec cultural industry is self-supporting but quite insular while the Anglo-Canadian industry does “little more than prop up a foreign [American] star system” (Hays 22).

Conclusion

<33>  The hybrid nature of Bon Cop, Bad Cop and the success of the film in both its English- and French-subtitled versions position the film as an interesting object for sociolinguistic study.  As a work of fiction, and therefore a creative interpretation of reality, the cinematic representation of dialogue and language attitudes can not be interpreted as faithful reflections of natural language use in Canadian society, but the film can nevertheless be approached on a number of levels, as has been demonstrated above.  In particular, the text of the film rehearses in exaggerated ways the stereotypes associated with English and French Canadians.  More significantly, it provides an interesting and creative examination of individual bilingualism within societal biculturalism.  The bicultural aspect of Canadian society was further demonstrated in the reception of the film, as it broke national box-office records and played to strong audiences particularly in areas where language contact is frequent.  Most importantly, perhaps, Bon Cop, Bad Cop represents a refreshing new dimension in a Canadian film industry where the two solitudes have generally been even more pronounced than in other aspects of Canadian culture.  

Notes

[1] “Bon Cop, Bad Cop is a variation on a theme… we weren’t trying to reinvent the wheel.” (Translations mine.)

[2] “We essentially used stereotypes for our main characters, the two cops: the constipated Protestant and the Quebec cow-boy.”

[3] “The subject matter here is cultural, not political.  That was our choice from the start: cultural differences, those are funny; politics don’t interest anyone.”

[4] “For once, the two solitudes will speak to each other… maybe.”

[5] This is likely a mistake in the actor’s reading, as it is clear from both the context and the subsequent translation that the intended referent is actually “the murderer.”

[6]

“Bon Cop / Cadrage” Territoires Cinematographiques Canadiens. <http://www.atlascine.org/iWeb/Site/atlasen.html> [consulted 10 March, 2010]

Works cited

“Bon Cop Makes Waves Worldwide” The Gazette. Nov 5, 2006. A19.

Bubel, Claudia M. “Film Audiences as Overhearers.” Journal of Pragmatics 40 (2008): 55-71.

Cardinal, Linda.  “The Ideological Limits of Linguistic Diversity in Canada.”  Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development.  26.6 (2005): 481-495.

Cole, Stephen. “Ce Film est Très Okay, Eh?” The Globe and Mail. Aug 18, 2006: R8.

Daudelin, Robert. “Kevin Tierney et Bon Cop, Bad Cop: Le point de vue du producteur.” 24 Images 130 (Dec-Jan 06/07): 23.

Farquharson, Vanessa. “All-Canadien Buddy Flics.” National Post. Aug 18, 2006. PM3.

Gagnon, Chantal. “Language Plurality as Power Struggle: Translating Politics in Canada.” Target 18:1 (2006): 69-90.

Gal, Susan.  “Multilingualism.” The Routledge Companion to Sociolinguistics.  Eds. Carmen Llamas, Louise Mullany, Peter Stockwell. New York: Routledge, 2007.

Gal, Susan and Judith Irvine. “The Boundaries of Languages and Disciplines: How Ideologies Construct Difference.”  Social Research 62.4 (Winter 1995): 967-1001.

Gatbonton, Elizabeth and Pavel Trofimovich.  “The Ethnic Group Affiliation and L2 Proficiency Link: Empirical Evidence.”  Language Awareness 17.3 (2008): 229-248.

Hays, Matthew.  “Bon Cop, Bad Cop and Canada’s Two Solitudes.” Cineaste (Fall 2007): 20-24.

Kelly, Brendan.“Canada's Cinematic Solitudes.” The Ottawa Citizen. Oct 12, 2006: E8.

Kelly, Brendan.  “No Shortage of Bon Cop Roles for Colm Feore.” The Gazette. Aug 13, 2007: D5.



Peritz, Ingrid.  “The Two Solitudes of Swearing: In Quebec, the F-word’s Not so Bad.”  The Globe and Mail.  Nov 7, 2008: A4

Robinson, Marcus. “Huard Comes Full Circle at Genies.” Playback Feb 5, 2007, online at <http://www.playbackonline.ca/articles/magazine/20070205/huard.html> [consulted March 10 2010]

Simon, Sherry. “Cultural and Textual Hybridity.” Across Languages and Cultures 2.2 (2001): 217-226.

Stone, Jay. “Two Languages, But Only Half Funny.” Calgary Herald. Aug 18, 2006: C5.

Urquhart, Peter. “You Should Know Something—Anything—About this Movie.  You Paid for it.” Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 12.2 (Fall 2003): 64-80.

Whyte, Murray. “Can Quirky Hybrid Movie Cop Quebec’s Energy?” Toronto Star. Aug 13, 2006: C21.

Woolard, Kathryn. “Simultaneity and Bivalency as Strategies in Bilingualism.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 8.1 (1999): 3-29.

Zacharias, Yvonne. “Bon Cliché, Bad Cliché: Film Got it Just Right.” The Vancouver Sun. Apr 28, 2007: F20.

 

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