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Episode 8

THE DON JUAN OF THE LAWN: OBSESSION AND ESTRANGEMENT IN AMANITA PESTILENS

In 1963, René Bonnière’s Amanita Pestilens told the farcical story of Henri Martin, a Montreal bookkeeper known as the “Don Juan of the Lawn.” Produced by Crawley Films and shot simultaneously in English and French, the film turns Martin’s immaculate Mount Royal lawn into an emblem of status, order, and assimilation. When luminous pink-orange mushrooms invade the lawn, his middle-class fantasy begins to collapse into debt, paranoia, and violence. In this video essay, Stephen Broomer examines how Amanita Pestilens transforms a comic fungal nuisance into a satire of consumer conformity, bilingual ambition, and the fragile public face of Canadian suburban life.

Creators

  • Stephen Broomer is a Canadian filmmaker, writer, and film preservationist. He is the founder of the Black Zero Film Collection, restoring and publishing Canadian experimental cinema. His films have screened at Anthology Film Archives, the TIFF Bell Lightbox, Lincoln Center and the Canadian Film Institute. He teaches in the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto.