By BRENDAN KELLY - Pierre Falardeau (at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in 2001) helped create a great comic character in the Elvis Gratton series.

Photograph by: JOHN KENNEY, THE GAZETTE, The Gazette
Pierre Falardeau was not Quebec's greatest filmmaker, nor was he the sovereignty movement's most articulate defender. But since his death from cancer Friday, anyone paying attention to the francophone media might have gotten the impression that the engagé filmmaker was a kind of separatist superhero, combining the cinematic brilliance of Denys Arcand with the nationalist inspiration of René Lévesque.
Death tends to do that - it leads to people losing perspective and often opting for a little deification. Look what happened with Michael Jackson. So it's no big surprise that Falardeau's supporters have tended to overstate his importance over the past few days and, at the same time, gloss over some of the more unpleasant bits of his legacy. Pierre Maisonneuve's midday phone-in show on La Première Chaîne of Radio-Canada yesterday was a full-blown Falardeau love-in - and you had to appreciate the irony that the federal public broadcaster was celebrating a man who spent his life advocating Quebec's separation from Canada. (This was only fitting, given that federal funder Telefilm Canada helped finance many of Falardeau's most staunchly separatist movies, even though he made a career out of lambasting the agency.)
Falardeau did indeed make a few of the most powerful films to come out of Quebec over the past couple of decades. In my view, Le Party, his gritty, in-your-face prison drama from 1990, remains one of the most intense films ever shot in this province and maybe his greatest work. His hotly contested 1994 thriller Octobre, a sympathetic portrait of a cell of FLQ terrorists, also remains a riveting piece of filmmaking.
But Falardeau hadn't exactly been whipping off the masterworks in recent years. In fact, his last feature - the third Elvis Gratton instalment, La vengeance d'Elvis Wong (2004) - was a mean-spirited, remarkably unfunny alleged comedy that happily insulted every ethnic group in sight. (That film's lowbrow jokes set the stage for some of the bigoted remarks that tarnished his post-film career as a journalist, including attacks on the ethnicity of David Suzuki and Michaëlle Jean.)
Even 15 février 1839, which most local francophone critics declared a masterpiece, was, I think, a deeply flawed work, marred by Falardeau's penchant for hammering home a political message at the expense of a human drama's nuance. But that film did feature an astonishing performance from Luc Picard as real-life rebel Marie-Thomas De Lorimier, who was hanged for his participation in the Lower Canada Rebellion of 1837. It was a reminder that Falardeau often elicited great work from his actors.
The Elvis Gratton series was an example of diminishing creative returns, moving from the inspired shorts in the early '80s to 1999's quite funny Elvis Gratton II to the toxic third and final episode. But what doesn't often get mentioned is that Falardeau's old friend Julien Poulin - whom he met while in high school at Collège de Montréal in the early '60s - is brilliant as the title character. Elvis is one of the great comic characters of modern Canadian cinema, and neither Poulin nor Falardeau get the credit they deserve for coming up with this oh so crude, oh so hilarious creation.
That's the other thing overlooked about Falardeau: He never lost his biting sense of humour. He was, in person, one very funny guy. When I first met him, early in 2001, he insisted we do the interview at the Beaver Club in the Queen Elizabeth Hotel. That was Falardeau's idea of fun, the filmmaker loving the idea of spending the afternoon at the posh spot long known as the meeting place for Montreal's anglo business elite.
He was enjoying a few glasses of chilled Brouilly, chain-smoking cigarettes and freaking out the suits with his loud table-thumping discourse. We got into quite an argument right at the start when he told me that since I had an Irish name, I must be a card-carrying PQ member. He was none too pleased when I told him I didn't think there was much of a comparison to be made between Quebec and Northern Ireland.
We agreed to disagree - but that didn't stop him from happily haranguing me for over an hour.
The last time we met was at a talk given by Spike Lee at the Cinémathèque québécoise in April. He told me he'd given up on filmmaking and seemed to think it was quite hilarious that he'd recycled himself as a journalist, penning a column for the weekly Ici.
He then went and asked Lee an almost absurdly dumb question, in what seemed to me like a classic Falardeau send-up of the whole inane event (which featured a slew of silly questions from the journalists on hand). As usual, Falardeau's goal was to stir it up - and it worked.
The comic rebel with a cause - that's the Pierre Falardeau I'll miss the most.
bkelly@thegazette.canwest.com