Don't Let It Kill You

Don't Let It Kill You (French: Il ne faut pas mourir pour ça) is a 1967 French-Canadian feature from Jean Pierre Lefebvre.[1] It is the first film in his "Abel Trilogy", followed by The Old Country Where Rimbaud Died (Le Vieux pays où Rimbaud est mort) in 1977 and Now or Never (Aujourd'hui ou jamais) in 1998.[2]

Don't Let It Kill You
FrenchIl ne faut pas mourir pour ça
Directed byJean Pierre Lefebvre
Produced byJean Pierre Lefebvre
Written byJean Pierre Lefebvre
Marcel Sabourin
StarringMarcel Sabourin
Monique Champagne
Suzanne Grossman
Claudine Monfette
Fleur-Ange Laplante
Music byAndrée Paul
CinematographyJacques Leduc
Edited byMarguerite Duparc
Distributed byLes Films J.P. Lefebvre
Release date
1967 (Montreal, Festival du Cinéma Canadien, Festival International du Film)
Running time
75 minutes
CountryCanada
LanguageFrench
Budget$35,000

Synopsis

The story concerns a day in the life of Abel Gagné (Marcel Sabourin). Self-absorbed to the point of existential withdrawal, the gentle and mildly eccentric Abel confers upon all events a kind of mystical grandeur and perplexity. (The film opens with a slogan on a blackboard: "I want to change the course of things – but it is things which change me.")[3]

One day he makes breakfast, behaving in a somewhat odd manner as he prepares to go out. He visits his dying mother (Monique Champagne) in hospital and learns that his father (who had left them and is living in Brazil) has sent him $10,000. Later, by chance, he meets Mary (Suzanne Grossman), an old girlfriend he has not seen for five years. She is about to be married in Paris. He returns home to wait for Madeleine (Claudine Monfette), his current girlfriend, and the hospital calls to tell him his mother has died.

This intimate, gently comic, ironic and poetic meditation on individualism and fatalism is the third feature from Lefebvre, the first to win him international praise, and is one of his most appealing.[4]

References
  1. "Il ne faut pas mourir pour ça". Variety. July 17, 1968. p. 24.
  2. Juliette Ruer, "Aujourd’hui ou jamais : Vol planant". Voir, October 14, 1998.
  3. Harcourt, Peter (1981). Jean Pierre Lefebvre. Ottawa: Canadian Film Institute. pp. 16–22.
  4. Morris, Peter (1984). The Film Companion. Toronto: Irwin Publishing. pp. 150–151. ISBN 0 7725 1505 0.


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