Actor says The Revenant is ‘stupid’ for portraying French-Canadians as murderous rapists

Actor says The Revenant is ‘stupid’ for portraying French-Canadians as murderous rapists

[link to news.nationalpost.com]

For portraying French-speaking voyageurs as duplicitous, murdering rapists, a prominent Canadian actor is accusing the hit film The Revenant of being anti-French-Canadian.

“It’s the French Canadians who rape, who lynch, who keep sex slaves,” actor Roy Dupuis was quoted as saying in the Quebec version of Huffington Post.

“They have the worst roles!”

Born in Ontario to Francophone parents, Dupuis is famous for portrayed hockey player Maurice Richard in a 2013 biopic, and for his roles as Canadian general Roméo Dallaire in the Rwandan Genocide drama Shake Hands with the Devil.

Dupuis said he was originally offered the role of Toussaint, the leader of a French-Canadian fur trading expedition, but turned it down after reading the script and seeing the Canadiens depicted as “horrible barbarians.”

Toussaint was ultimately portrayed by French actor Fabrice Adde.

Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, The Revenant is a semi-fictionalized account of the story of Hugh Glass, an American frontiersman who crawled 320 kilometres to safety after he was attacked by a grizzly and left for dead by fellow trappers.

Of the various white and indigenous groups depicted in the film, a group of French-speaking fur traders does indeed come off as the most unambiguously evil.

Early on, they can be seen trading for furs stolen from murdered Americans. They lynch a Pawnee man seemingly for fun and keep the daughter of an Arikara chief as a sex slave.

In a decisive scene, the DiCaprio character steals a horse from the French-Canadian camp and handily shoots two dazed Canadiens who have been shown drinking and carousing.

In the confusion, meanwhile, Toussaint is castrated by the kidnapped Arikara girl. Later, a cowering survivor of the attack can be seen approaching an American fort and begging for food.

“There is no credibility in this revenge drama,” Dupuis told the Huffington Post, adding that French-speakers forged alliances and built families with natives, while it was the Americans who conquered their way through the West.

“It’s completely stupid!”

The movie takes place in 1823 along the Upper Missouri River in what is now modern-day South Dakota.

At the time, the area was indeed frequented by French-Canadian and Metis trappers from Lower Canada working for the Hudson’s Bay Company.

“Drunkenness, sex slavery, rape; can’t think of any direct evidence for the latter, but who knows what evil deeds went unrecorded in a setting where there are no institutions of justice as we know them?” wrote Allan Greer, the Canada Research Chair in Colonial North America, writing in an email to the National Post.