Whither the Revolution?

When the Parti Québécois brought in their language laws in the late 1970s, I was a book buyer for Coles Book Stores. I was sent to Montreal to get clarification of how the new signage rules affected selling English books in la belle province. I expected to meet with a faded, stern, government bureaucrat, but found myself across the desk from a rather debonair fellow wearing a turtleneck and sports jacket, boots, jean-cut slacks, and whose hair fell fetchingly across his forehead. This was not a grim enforcer of language rights, but a relaxed, sexy, francophone dude. In fact, he told me, he was not a career civil servant, but, before the PQ was elected, had been a filmmaker. I left our meeting wondering how he had been transformed from something so glamourous to something so mundane.

I thought that question would be answered by Benoît Fillion, the narrator of Adieu, Betty Crocker, who had been such a young man. Instead of a filmmaker turned...