Falardeau Built Elvis Gratton to Be Despised. Quebec Adopted Him.

Pierre Falardeau built Bob Gratton to be despised. A garage owner from Brossard, racist, sexist, federalist, who dresses up as Elvis in a rented suit and calls it making it. The character was created after the 1980 referendum, as a portrait of the mindset Falardeau held responsible for the No.

Quebec adopted him. "Think big, s'ti" entered the language and never left.

What Falardeau was aiming at

Falardeau was sixteen when he joined the Rassemblement pour l'indépendance nationale. He spent his life reading Quebec through decolonization, through Algeria, Cuba and Palestine. One of his lines sums it up. "Une chaîne en fer, en argent ou en or est toujours une chaîne." A chain of iron, silver or gold is still a chain.

Gratton was supposed to be the proof. A man so completely sold on America that he can no longer locate himself. He arrives across three short films, in 1981, 1983 and 1985, assembled the same year into the feature "Elvis Gratton: Le king des kings". Julien Poulin plays him and co-wrote him.

The scene

A tourist asks Gratton whether he is Canadian. The answer is the best thing Falardeau ever wrote, and it contains no joke at all. Only a list.

"Moi, je suis un Canadien québécois. Un Français, canadien français. Un Américain du Nord français. Un francophone québécois canadien. Un Québécois d'expression canadienne-française française. On est des Canadiens américains, francophones d'Amérique du Nord. Des Franco-Québécois. On est des Franco-Canadiens du Québec. Des Québécois canadiens."

He is not dodging the question. He is sincerely trying to answer it, and every attempt adds a word without ever arriving anywhere. It is a definition collapsing while it is being spoken.

The satire that lost

Audiences laughed with Gratton instead of at him. The lines became expressions, the character became a mascot, and then a television series ran for forty-one episodes between 2007 and 2009.

Falardeau took it badly. His verdict was that "un peuple qui se complaît dans le spectacle de sa propre niaiserie est tombé bien bas". A people who take pleasure in the spectacle of their own stupidity have sunk very low.

He made two sequels anyway, in 1999 and 2004. He died on 25 September 2009 at sixty-two, of kidney cancer. Julien Poulin died on 4 January 2025, at seventy-eight.

Why it ends up on a shirt

The Elvis Gratton tee takes the pompadour, the jowls and the rhinestone collar, under a signature-style wordmark. It does not settle whether you are wearing the character or the critique of the character, because the film does not settle it either.

Forty years on, the identity scene still gets quoted in Quebec election campaigns. Falardeau wanted it to hurt. It gets a laugh. Both readings work, and the fact that nobody has settled which one is correct is exactly what keeps the character alive.

Related: the Canadian shelf, the Screen shelf, or the full catalogue.

Another film about people reciting a politics they have not earned. One Student in La Chinoise Was Not Acting.

More Canadians who refused the maple leaf in 6 Canadian Tees That Aren't a Maple Leaf and Terry Fox Wore Out Nine Shoes. All Nine Were Left Shoes.