Beautiful Enigma: Nadine Valcin’s Simply Johanne
By Maurie Alioff
(November 4, 2024 – Montreal, QC) Back in 1990, filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin told me that her friend Johanne Harrelle was earning a living by running a Bed and Breakfast. At the time, I saw that as a disheartening comedown. Harrelle had been a vibrant and mesmerizingly stunning fashion model and actress, the first Black model in Canada. Moreover, she had played herself in one of the country’s earliest feature films, Claude Jutra’s 1963 A tout prendre (Take It All).
Jutra met Johanne in 1956, and a few years following his bailing out of their apparently ecstatic relationship, asked her to join him in the re-creation of their lives on screen. Playing a fictionalized version of himself, Jutra started shooting in 1961. At the time, Take It All set off a flurry; it was maybe the first picture in North America to depict an interracial couple, including sexual moments between them.
Just released, Nadine Valcin’s documentary, Johanne, tout simplement (Simply Johanne in English), depicts the enigmatic Harrelle’s story. When she emerged as a joyfully free-spirited presence in Montreal’s fashion and art scene, people bought into her story that she was Haitian. In fact, Valcin’s film underlines the reality known for years: Harrelle invented stories about her non-existent Caribbean background. She was the Montreal born daughter of a white Quebecoise woman and a Black American father. Abandoned by her mother Berthe, she lived the first few years of her life in an orphanage.
Valcin’s doc is not just a portrait of an intriguing woman who lit up rooms with her smiling energy, provoked ideas with her insights, suffered emotional slumps, and went over-the-top with her hedonism. Through Johanne, Valcin explores the trajectory of a Black woman who creates an identity that allows her to successfully maneuver white society and succeed in it. (The film never delves into Claude Jutra’s early onset Alzheimer’s Disease, his 1986 suicide, or the 2016 allegations of Pederasty that led to his disgrace.)
A few years after Harrelle’s emergence in Quebec and France, Peggy Ann Freeman, a Black Woman from Detroit, transformed herself into Donyale Luna, creating an identity so otherworldly that people smitten by her believed she was literally from another world. After leaving home, the six foot plus Donyale became the first Black model to appear on the cover of British Vogue although editor Diana Vreeland refused Richard Avedon’s entreaties to use his images of her in the American edition. Vreeland’s slur was pure redneck, and echoes today’s racist comments about Michelle Obama and no doubt Kamala Harris. Donyale Luna, who I came close to meeting through a close American friend of hers, caused a sensation in Europe and played an indelible role in Fellini’s Satyricon.
Valcin’s Simply Johanne appears exactly one year after Donyale Luna: Supermodel, produced by Luna’s daughter Dream and now streaming on Crave. The two pictures would make for a great double bill. Two stunning women who invented themselves the way artists like Bob Dylan and Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta do, and on one level did so to ward off the evil eye of race hatred.
In Simply Johanne, Alanis Obomsawin recalls that at the premiere of Jutra’s A tout prendre, some viewers were enraged by the sight of a black woman on the screen. “Shhh,” the Abenaki Obomsawin remembers someone whispering, “We’ve got an Indian woman here.” Alanis’s bemused and ironic smile sums up her reaction to the embarrassing moment.
Johanne’s simulated Haitian identity (she would sing a Patois song) built an exotic persona that obviously made her a fantasy figure to people at the time. Interview subjects talk about how “regal” she was, raving about her panther walk, and there’s more than one reference to Egyptian Queen Nefertiti. But not Eartha Kitt, Lena Horne, Billie Holiday, Josephine Baker, you name her. A historian says, she was mixed blood, not too black. For him, Johanne’s light skin explains why she “aroused desire” on the runway. Tell that to actress Lupita Nyong’o or model Adut Acech.
Valcin’s film merges footage from A tout prendre, fashion stills, personal pictures, Haitian actresses re-enacting key moments of her life, readings from her memoirs, interviews with her as an older woman and people like Obomsawin who knew her. We learn that Johanne prized her personal freedom above everything else, including her two sons. Connected emotionally and distant, She thought every encounter was a “miracle and an aberration.”
Sadly, extravagant and generous-to-a-fault Johanne eventually had to sell her house, bought by her husband of 15 years, French sociologist Edgar Morin, and all her possessions. Obomsawin, a touchingly eloquent interview subject, remembers how she tidied her friend’s tiny apartment on Nun’s Island when Johanne became sick. Apparently the onetime supermodel never stopped being haunted by her childhood abandonment.
Valcin has also designed an installation about Johanne Harrelle, at Toronto’s Image Centre. Entitled Origines, the Centre describes it as a “reflection on Blackness and belonging as specifically experienced by Harrelle, but also in the broader context of the implicit whiteness of Canadian society.”
Click here to watch the trailer and learn more about Simply Johanne.
Maurie Alioff is a film journalist, critic, screenwriter and media columnist. His articles have appeared in various publications, including Canadian Cinematographer, POV Magazine, and The New York Times. He is affiliated with the Quebec media industry publication, CTVM.info and is the Québec Correspondent for Northernstars.ca
