“Les Mecs”: a series by and for privileged men

The eagerly awaited new fiction by Jacques Davidts, Guys, is available today on HERE Tou.TV Extra. Metro watched with attention the first episodes of the series which has already caused much ink to flow.

Normand Daneau, Yanic Truesdale, Christian Bégin and Alexis Martin play the main characters.

Make no mistake: those who will choose to watch Guys There will be no feminist discourse there. And this is very good, since this was not the intention of its creator Jacques Davidts (The parents).

“I did not write something masculinist”, denies the scriptwriter. “There is absolutely no social issue, I do not politicize anything, I just do a comedy about 50-year-old guys, so guys my age”, he said during a press conference by Zoom .

Why, then, is the newly released series so much talked about? Maybe because it tells the story of four privileged fifties.

The comedy was thus written, produced (Guillaume Lespérance) and directed (Ricardo Trogi) exclusively by men.

From the first minutes, the tone is set. We feel that Guys, like its main characters, is aimed at aging, well-to-do men who have an insatiable need for reassurance. As the series tackles their existential concerns (weight gain, rejection by the opposite sex, etc.), would Simon, Christian, Étienne and Martin suddenly be afraid of suffering the same fate that society has in store for women over 40? years?

The theme of the series is controversial, to say the least. One year ago, Martine Delvaux questioned, rightly, the need for a program that would give “the club guys a place they have, a little bit, lost”.

Following the publication of his opinion piece in Press, the author had drawn the wrath of the chronicler of Journal of Montreal Sophie Durocher. After letting off steam on her favorite “cheeky feminist”, she drew a dubious shortcut between the series and feminism.

According to the dictionary of the French language Larousse, feminism is a “militant movement for the improvement and extension of the role and rights of women in society”. Finally, Guys is nothing but entertainment for the informed public.

#MeToo and Guys

The author admits to having felt a “certain anxiety” at the idea of ​​calling his series Guys. The story of this group of friends could indeed “seem out of place to some people,” he admits. As a coincidence, his project was presented to Radio-Canada the day after the outbreak of the Weinstein affair.

Regardless of the current events of the time, André Béraud, the channel’s first director of drama and feature films, was seduced “by the benevolent and even a little slobbery side of the project”.

“Guys to whom we give the right to speak and to express themselves, to evolve, to ask questions, we don’t see that often. It’s good to see the male counterpart of series like The Simones and Let go», He adds.

One of Jacques Davidts’ wishes when writing was “to have dialogues that lead to a debate”. In particular, we can hear the merry friends using words that are too often outdated.

For example, they speak of “old bachelors” to describe women their age. But still, again Simon calls Christian (professor of literature at the university) on the #MeToo movement when the latter has just introduced him to his lover Wendy, a student – but beware, not his and it’s supposed to do all the difference – “future Simone de Beauvoir” who could be his daughter.

Fortunately, the female characters are there to call them to order and tell them that they are sometimes “misogynistic” and “backward”. “When it starts on one side, it brings you back to the other,” specifies Jacques Davidts, confident that the spectators will grasp the humor of his words.

Lucid, he considers himself happy that Guys “Hit the air” and “people might like it or not.”