Sarrasine

Susan Patrick is a librarian at Ryerson Polytechnical University.

This is the translated screenplay of a film made in Quebec in the early
1990s in French, Italian, and Sicilian, about the immigrant experience
and Canadian racism at the turn of the century. The story, which
involves an Italian immigrant who accidentally kills a Québécois and
is convicted of murder, is an interesting and unusual one that centres
on the effects of these events on the condemned man’s wife—her
growth and development of independence. A screenplay faces an obvious
inherent difficulty in attempting to convey the effects of a film,
particularly one in which the speeches must lose something in the
translation, but here the film’s themes are illuminated by an
afterword with comments about the sound and visuals and by an interview
with the two writers.

Sarrasine would probably be of most interest to those who have seen the
film, but its raising of questions about such unpleasant aspects of
Canadian society as historic racism and discrimination, which some would
prefer to ignore, make the script worth reading, and its publication may
serve to popularize what reads as a worthy film.