Missed Connections : Intimacy and Identity in the Quebec New Wave

A young woman drifts through a sleepless summer; a young immigrant man with a disability creates an online alter ego to try to find love; an English professor pursues lost youth and slips into fantasy; strangers cross paths yet fail to form a meaningful relationship. In Missed Connections Mercédès Baillargeon explores the Quebec New Wave as a cinema of distance, hesitation, and unresolved encounters, reflecting both global uncertainty and a more intimate search for self-determination.

Combining historical contextualization with formal analysis and cultural insight, Baillargeon engages with a broad repertoire of Quebec films, including those by Stéphane Lafleur, Rafaël Ouellet, Sophie Deraspe, Anne Émond, and Xavier Dolan. She argues that the Quebec New Wave articulates an aesthetic of crisis in which political disillusionment and the erosion of nationalist narratives in the aftermath of the 1995 referendum on sovereignty take shape on screen as muted emotions, suspended time, and inhibited liaisons. Within this affective landscape, Baillargeon traces the New Wave’s reframing of self-determination as an ongoing negotiation of identity, belonging, and connection, as well as its evolution from an initially narrow, predominantly white and masculine corpus toward more inclusive representations of women, queer subjects, peoples with disabilities, immigrants, and Indigenous communities.

Redefining Quebec cinema beyond frameworks of national identity, Missed Connections reinvigorates our understanding of a dynamic and innovative cinematic tradition.