J'me marie, j'me marie pas

After several months of shooting uninspiring portraits as part of the En tant que femmes series initiated by Anne Claire Poirier at the NFB, Mireille Dansereau decided to turn to her friends, exploring their concerns about romantic relationships, contraception, creation, and the decision to have children. In J’me marie, j’me marie pas, Francine Larivée (artist and creator of La chambre nuptiale [1976]), Linda Gaboriau (translator and dramaturgical advisor), Jocelyne Lepage (journalist), and Tanya Mackay (filmmaker) form a quadriptych of women in their late twenties and early thirties. Vignettes of their lives unfold, offering a conversational insight into their evolving reflections on identity, relationship dynamics, and their varied parental configurations (single parenting, childless, in heterosexual co-parenting), in differentiation or correspondence with traditional roles and the discourses conveyed by their parents.

Not even a decade after the end of the marital obedience requirement in the Civil Code, three years after the decriminalization of contraception, and well before same-sex marriage (2004) and civil unions in Quebec (2002), Dansereau, as an attentive interviewer present in the frame, heart-to-heart, manages to bring forth the voices of embodied women—authentic voices at times liberated, at times uncertain or untamed—whose resonance still echoes today.

Rachel Samson
Animator, author and programmer