Jean-Marc Vallée exhibit Mixtape pays homage to the music of the late director’s movies and TV shows | Canada Voices

It’s hard to imagine a gallery exhibition about any filmmaker other than Jean-Marc Vallée that would centre on a room without any still or moving images – only audio.

But when you pull up one of the late Quebec director’s movies or television series in the screening room of your mind, it’s as likely that you’ll first hear music as see an image in your head.

Recall his hit HBO series Big Little Lies, for example, and it’s impossible not to first summon those cool “oohs” from the memorable title sequence, Michael Kiwanuka’s Cold Little Heart playing as Reese Witherspoon and the other Californian moms of the dark mystery miniseries drive their children to school.

Whether it was sexual-assault survivor Jane Chapman (Shailene Woodley) jogging on the beach, trying to outrun her trauma, with her headphones blasting the B-52’s, or the precocious six-year-old Chloe (Darby Camp) putting on PJ Harvey from the back seat to drown out her parents’ arguments, music was an integral part of the telling of that twisted tale; his characters made soundtracks for their own lives in a way that blurred the distinction between diegetic and non-diegetic.

Jean-Marc Vallée: Mixtape – a bilingual, immersive homage to the director of movies such as Wild and Dallas Buyers Club, next at Le Diamant in Quebec City from July 23 to Aug. 31 – explores the unique ways the director, whose father was a DJ, integrated songs in his work both on screen and behind the scenes before his death at 58 in 2021.

It’s co-curated by Phoebe Greenberg, who was first approached by Vallée’s son, Alex, with the prospect of creating an exhibition with the family’s participation, and her colleague Sylvain Dumais – both of whom work at Centre Phi, a contemporary art gallery currently spread over three buildings in Old Montreal. (That’s where Mixtape originated and I saw it earlier this year.)

“Other directors use music in an interesting way – or have a good soundtrack – but it’s never as embedded into the narrative and into the script at the very, very, very beginning like with Vallée,” Dumais said in an interview.

Incendiary Canadian director Jean-Marc Vallée, dead at 58, was just getting started

Mixtape begins in a darkened room with a small illuminated model of Vallée’s Montreal childhood home – shades of Robert Lepage’s autographical stage show 887. Vallée’s son, Alex, can be heard talking about how his father grew up in a house constantly buzzing with music.

Film clips of the Matthew Herbert song Café de Flore magically bridging timelines in the 2011 movie of that same name and Jake Gyllenhaal’s character wearing headphones and dancing to Mr. Big by Free in 2015’s Demolition are seen on screens scattered on the walls.

But the creatively designed centrepiece of Mixtape is a separate room with a table full of mixing boards and headphones through which you can listen to an interactive playlist of eight tracks that have meaning in Vallée’s life and oeuvre.

Visitors can move sliders up and down to overlay original audio interviews (with captioning in English or French) freshly recorded with many of the director’s collaborators about how he used music on the set, to build relationships and characters, and as a storytelling device.

Essentially, you get to edit your own radio documentary out of clips featuring the recollections of international stars such as Witherspoon, Vanessa Paradis and Matthew McConaughey, as well as Quebec contemporaries and collaborators such as actor Marc-André Grondin and fellow filmmaker Denis Villeneuve.

Villeneuve, for his part, talks about being captivated by Vallée’s 2005 breakthrough C.R.A.Z.Y. – another movie that takes its title from a song, by Patsy Cline. The film is about a gay teenager named Zac (Grondin) coming of age in 1960s and 1970s Quebec.

He highlights the striking scene set at midnight mass where Zac, high on marijuana, imagines himself floating above the choir and congregation as they sing along to the “ooh, oohs” from the Rolling Stones Sympathy for the Devil.

“I remember the aesthetic shock, the feeling that I was witnessing the emergence of an uninhibited voice, of someone who fully embraced their Americanness, who was completely in tune with what was happening outside of Quebec,” Villeneuve says in French. “An extremely Québécois film that had something universal about it.”

Push up a different slider and you can instead hear producer Pierre Even talk about the shooting of that very scene, which involved 100 extras. The production had not yet lined up the rights for the Stones song – and there was no money to reshoot it if it didn’t. “It’s the song that gave me the most grey hairs,” Even recalls.

It wasn’t until six months later that the rights came through.

Dumais didn’t include this tidbit in the exhibition – but he says Vallée then had to find the money to pay for the song. “He may have gone and asked for more money on his house on his mortgage to get money for the music, or he used some of his director fee to get the money for the music he wanted,” the curator says. “There are a couple of different stories.”

The history of Vallée’s career as a director is still being written and gets a rough draft in this exhibition. Laura Dern and Witherspoon talk about how he used Simon and Garfunkel’s El Cóndor Pasa, a song he associated with his own mother, to summon the main character’s late mother in Wild, and about how seriously he took the karaoke nights while filming Big Little Lies. (Footage of him singing karaoke is the last thing you see in Mixtape before exiting.)

But while Vallée used songs to help his actors build their characters and their emotional histories, he wasn’t always as open to them going down their own musical trajectories.

In one very funny part of Mixtape set to the music of the Cure, McConaughey talks about his conviction that Ron Woodroof, the character he played in Dallas Buyers Club, who smuggled unapproved AIDS drugs into Texas in the 1980s, would have listened to ZZ Top. McConaughey relates how, while filming one scene where his character was driving, he insisted on singing one of ZZ Top’s songs over and over.

Vallée kept asking him to do a take without singing – and McConaughey kept stubbornly refusing.

When the actor finally saw the film, he realized Vallée had found a way to cut around his singing. “I just don’t think – no matter how perfect it was, and it was absolutely perfect, ZZ Top was ever going to be on a Jean-Marc Vallée soundtrack of his film,” he says, with a big laugh.

Vallée shared mixtapes – cassette tapes, then playlists – his whole life to build relationships. “We contaminate each other as music lovers, you know, by making playlists for each other,” he can be heard saying in archival audio.

The mixtape Greenberg and Dumais lovingly put together about Vallée promises to have a long life – after its stint in Quebec City, a mobile version will be sent to film festivals around the world, starting with the Geneva International Film Festival this fall.