‘Jesus is “in” these days’, Richard Cardinal tells Daniel in Jesus of Montreal (Jésus de Montréal), a critically acclaimed drama from 1989 by Quebec filmmaker Denys Arcand. ‘But you’ll have to do the weekend talk shows’. Daniel (Lothaire Bluteau) plays an actor in the film who is starring in a radically innovative Passion play of his own composition that tout le monde is buzzing about, while Richard (Yves Jacques), with a distractingly attractive young woman of seventeen on his arm, is talking to him about career opportunities. A commanding view of the city unfurls in the distance behind them as they stroll along the floor of the lawyer’s skyscraper office. Although it is set in a Canadian city, as the title makes clear, it is the culture of 1980s materialism spreading from south of the border that is the movie’s principal topic. Arcand’s previous film, titled The Decline of the American Empire, had starred some of the same actors and dealt with some of the same moral issues, but Jesus of Montreal is a far more allegorical movie. In this scene, Richard exemplifies everything the director is striving against, in a way that is simultaneously heavy-handed and light-hearted. If Daniel is Jesus in Arcand’s telling, Richard is certainly ‘the devil who took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendour’, as we read in the Gospels of Matthew (4:8) and Luke (4:5).