Claude Fortin's movies have always been structurally surprising, to say the least. He always puts himself as the main character and manages to keep enough mystery, leaving the viewer wonder what's real, and what's not. This is part of a reflection he's been conducting for years now, about the medias as a mirror of our society, and the veracity of the images that we see, be it on TV or on the big screen.
He pushes things further here, as his fetish character, himself, tries to shoot a documentary about the life of a great TV artist, Serge Laprade, so that the viewer sees the entire story of television in Quebec through Laprade's experience. He will encounter many difficulties in the making, one of them being the generation gap between Laprade, his subject, and him. The most important being... that TV isn't really the "collective memory" of a population. If you see Serge Laprade's page here on IMDb, and you've never heard about him, you'd think he hasn't done much in his artistic life.
But you'd be dead wrong.
The movie follows Fortin in his quest to have his movie done, so it plays on different levels : the struggling a director has to go through, when he doesn't quite "fit in" the system, to have his movie completed; the absurdity of all the procedure one has to go through to dig in the past, searching for archived material; and the touching relationship building up between these two men that, when the movie starts, have nothing in common.
100% BIO is a touching and ingenious movie, not limited to urbanity as Fortin lives in Gaspésie (in the movie at least), a breathlessly beautiful region that his loving lense caresses in the final part of the film. And Laprade is a particular revelation here, a lovable individual that's brutally honest about what he's done, and mostly what he is.
