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| Directed by Sylvia Spring |
| Canada, 1971 (fiction, 90 minutes, colour, English) |
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| Image: © Spring Releases |
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Film Description: "Following a dispute with her father, a young Québécoise, Madeleine (Lipman), goes to live in Vancouver. She works at several jobs there and eventually becomes the mistress of Toro (Juliani), a macho social worker and political activist. [...]" -- Peter Morris (source)
Film Description [in French] : |
| Film Credits (partial): | |
| Written by: | Sylvia Spring, Kenneth S. Specht |
| Produced by: | Kenneth S. Specht |
| Principal Cast: | Nicola Lipman, John Juliani, Wayne Specht, Gordon Robertson, Ronald Ulrich, Barry Cramer, Roxanne Irwin, Margot Chapman, Robertson Wood, Roger Dressler, Jim McQueen, Mona Brisson, Wayne Robson, Tandy Johnson, Lewine Willaby, Rowena Jones |
| Cinematography: | Doug McKay |
| Film Editing: | Luke Bennett |
| Music: | Ross Barrett |
| Production Company: | Spring Releases Ltd., Glen-Warren Productions Ltd. |
"I guess I'll never really want to do anything else [besides filmmaking]. All of my fantasies and dreams are about movies now. I dream about Fellini. I think all the time about things inside me—Canadian things—that I want to make movies about. But I'm bruised. I just want to get this venture [Madeleine Is...] over and done with and then I might want to go to work again."
-- Sylvia Spring
(source)
"The people who like it [Madeleine Is...] now are mostly young women who are beginning to assert themselves as human beings. That may be its only value now. I feel like shaking Madeleine myself now, to make her move faster."
-- Sylvia Spring
(source)
"Women reviewers [of Madeleine Is...] were generally more positive and sympathetic to what I was attempting to say and do since they could probably identify more readily with Madeleine's problems."
-- Sylvia Spring
(source)
"When Madeleine Is was released [...] critics frothed, box-office figures were desolate, and the kindest thing people could say was: 'Too bad—she's a talented filmmaker but this is such an awful film. Technically amateurish, the content is flimsy, it's just bad.' Years passed and Madeleine Is became a skeleton in Canada's cinema closets. It was the Most Bad-Mouthed Film Ever Made in this country (and I had missed it). A few years ago, there was another screening. Expecting the worst, I nonetheless decided to see it and was: 1. Totally mindblown 2. Then ANGRY 3. Finally, philosophically resigned. Why? For one, Madeleine Is is technically one of the best films produced under the Canadian Film Development Corporation's low-budget programme. But it's also a good film and is still a relevant account of the chaotic sixties."
-- A. Ibranyi-Kiss
(source)
"Best known as the first narrative feature to be directed by a woman in Canada, Sylvia Spring's Madeleine Is... should also be recognized as one of the best documents of Vancouver in the history of fiction film, unusually sophisticated in dealing with urban issues as pertinent today as they were in the 1970s."
-- Randolph Jordan
(source)
"Madeleine Is..., at the New Yorker, is a movie about a mixed-up Vancouver girl who is trying to discover her 'authentic self.' The film was directed and co-written by Sylvia Spring, a Vancouver girl who is also, judging from the material on the screen, mixed up and (God help us) trying to discover her authentic self. [...] The material is whimsical, self-indulgent and banal and if anything it's made to seem even worse by the clumsy, amateurish way it's been filmed."
-- Martin Knelman
(source)
"Sylvia [Spring] is 28 years old and good-looking enough to qualify as a movie star. Instead, she is writer-director of a new $100,000 Canadian-made film called Madeleine Is."
-- Betty Lee
(source)
"Granted that [in Madeleine Is] the metaphor of the clown is somewhat awkward and that there are weaknesses in terms of acting, narrative structure and musical score; these flaws do not explain the film's exclusion from the canon. Dansereau's La vie rêvée is far from being a perfect film, and yet it has received a fair amount of attention in books from Take Two to Gendering the Nation. In fact, Spring's film has a few very powerful moments—such as when Toro tries to force David and Madeleine to have sex, threatening them with a hammer—and some strikingly expressionistic shots of downtown Vancouver. But regardless of its uneven technical and artistic quality, I would argue that the indifference from which the film has suffered results mainly from two factors: its politics and its style."
-- André Loiselle
(source)
"The first feature-length fiction film made by a woman in Canada (a low-budget feature, sponsored by the CFDC [Canadian Film Development Corporation]) has a clear feminist orientation in its portrayal of Madeleine, who at the end moves on to a state of self-possession, indifferent to men. It was generally warmly received by critics but enjoyed only a modest release and has tended to be less well regarded than La vie rêvée, made almost simultaneously."
-- Peter Morris
(source)
"In Madeleine Is... we are confronted once again with a tale of mixed-up, vulnerable youth embarked on the agonizing search for self-discovery. Agonizing, as far as this film is concerned, is the key word."
-- Daniel Stoffman
(source)
"The film [Madeleine Is...] is of a single piece without a satisfactory conclusion and without too much learning inflicted on the heroine who finally drives the Marxist from her bed and apartment. It is a working out film, nicely shot against the lovely Vancouver cityscape, but with irksome sound at times."
-- Variety
(source)
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