Le critique

In early 2021, the video historian Sébastien Hudon sent an old review of an Orson Welles film to the Université Laval professor Jean-Pierre Sirois-Trahan. The byline read “René Lévesque.” Hudon wondered, “Is this the René Lévesque?”

So much of Lévesque’s life has been explored at length, including his years as a wartime correspondent and broadcaster; his popular television program Point de mire in the 1950s; his entry into provincial politics as a Liberal cabinet minister in 1960, becoming a key engine of the Quiet Revolution; his decision to form the Parti Québécois in 1968; his premiership, from 1976 until he stepped down in 1985. But film critic?

In a 1973 interview, Lévesque said that he loved film and had even written about it in the past. His biographer Pierre Godin quoted a letter from the ’40s, in which Lévesque said that his leisure time was taken up wandering from cinema to cinema and from bookstore to bookstore. But, until now, no...