Nô (film)


Nô is a 1998 Canadian film by director Robert Lepage. It was based on one segment in Lepage's play Seven Streams of the River Ota.
The title is a pun which reflects the film's dramatic structure, linking the 1980 Quebec referendum to Japanese Nō theatre.

Plot

The film is set in 1970 at the height of the FLQ bombings in Montreal, known as the October Crisis. During the Crisis, Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau instituted the War Measures Act, which resulted in martial law on the streets of Montreal. The central character, Sophie, is an actress working in Osaka at Expo '70, while her boyfriend, Michel, is an FLQ sympathizer. Sophie discovers that she is pregnant and phones Michel, but before she can tell him, two FLQ friends suddenly turn up at his apartment looking for a place to hide, and Michel has to hang up. Sophie, who is unaware of the crises happening in Montreal, is upset by Michel apparently not wanting to talk to her, and isn't even sure if he is the father. She has to decide whether to stay and get an abortion in Japan, where abortion is legal, or keep the baby and return to Montreal the next day as planned. Meanwhile, she has to avoid the advances of fellow actor François-Xavier and survive a dinner with Canadian ambassador Walter and his difficult wife Patricia. Sophie's interpreter friend Hanako, a Japanese woman blinded by the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, is preparing to move to Vancouver with her Canadian interpreter boyfriend. In the meantime, in Montreal, Michel's two friends are plotting to set off a bomb, but they end up blowing up Michel's apartment by mistake.