What parts of Daniel's Life parallels that of Jesus?

Daniel has any number of elements that are similar to the life of Christ. The first third of the film, after he is asked to rewrite the passion play, he collects disciples. As his relationship with the disciples deepens, his life explicitly begins to parallel the Christ story. He finds an actress who is sleeping with her director, seeking worldly fame as opposed to following her spiritual gifts, this Magdalene figure becomes the lead of three women who eventually witness his death in a hospital and symbolic resurrection, in the corporeal sense of working as an organ donor and the symbolic sense of the dissemination of his writing
But I am getting ahead of myself. The passion play that Daniel recasts as an example of social and political dissent becomes popular as a work itself. In this popularity, men of power come to him, offer him favours. He grows increasingly uncomfortable with these people, with treating the passion of the Christ as another art performance that one does on a Saturday night. The Magdalene figure becomes Daniel's lover, she agrees to do a beer ad. At the audition, she is asked to take her clothes off. Daniel overturns what turns out to be 23 000 dollars in film equipment.
His friends hire a lawyer, who tries to convince Daniel to use his new found success and fame for good. He is Pharisaical, suggesting that selling out one's art becomes an act of heresy. That Daniel refutes him, is the beginning of the end. The passion play, filled with a female Christ, archaeological discussions of the real and the fake, and an ambiguous resurrection is a scandalous desire to return to a purified Christianity, infused with a love for the other, for art, for justice, and for the desire not for churches, but a populist redemption.
The dioceses shuts down the production. Daniel and his actors discuss next moves on the summit of Mount Trembly, like when Christ brought his apostles to Mount Olive, and shows them that he is fully divine and human. Agreeing to go on with the play, in the dark, security corners him, like the soldiers at Gethsemane. He collapses, is turned away from two hospitals, and travels through the city, before dying in a Metro station. After death, he is shot from above on a cruciform bed, and there are scenes of his eyes given to a blind woman, and his heart given to a previously dead man, alluding to his making the blind see, and the Lazarus myth. These scenes are interspersed with three women, including the Magdalene figure bringing the passion play into the world, like Quebecois Phoebes.

What Critique does this film offer about the origin of religious movements.
The new religious movement that is building here, is built from the work of Daniel and his rewriting of the passion play. That the prophecy is both written about and preformed, and that it textually resurrects a play that is so threadbare that it becomes a mockery gives a good general sense of how Arycand feels about the origin of religious movements. That Daniel is asked to make trendy this eternal story, and dies a martyr to his art, when the rewrite is proven too radical cements the central message of the film. This message has a triune formula. First, all new religious movements begin not ex nihlo from other texts. Just as Daniel's disciples and words grow from the catholic culture of old Quebec, so did Christianity grow from Judaism, Secondly, this growth from old movements, must have a logophillic component. Dennis is given a copy of the old script, he finds his disciples reading from a wide variety of scripts, dubbing English pornography or science documentaries to French for example; when he sets to rewrite the Passion play, he goes to the library so often that the librarian assumes that he is an evangelical and attempts to have a discussion of conversion for him. Later, there are rehearsals, in apartments filled with books, and when we finally see the production it is an intertextual exercise, using erotic, scientific, religious, and social texts. Third, that the old movement, and the logophillic tendencies, must have a social component, that constitutes a willingness to change. The actors not only turn down paying gigs to work for free, they rewrite the text with Daniel, argue with him about meaning, live together, and raise a child as well. They eat, drink, and by implication make love as a communal force. Arycands critique of the origin of religion, is that it fails to fulfil this narrative. That those radicals ignore tradition, that those who do not ignore tradition are afraid of text (written words on the page, the old fashioned meaning of the word, not the post modern equivalent where text is something that incorporates meaning) and lastly, that those who do not ignore tradition, and engage with the written words on the page, sully their art (and he assumes that art is a new kind of religion) by doing side work that pays the bills.

The passion play as a dramatic staging of Jesus life, trial and death is preformed in many Chrsitian denomoations...during Lent....How do you think it functions as a ritual for the characters in The Jesus of Montreal?
Remembering that a Christ figure is not Christ, and that Arycand is using the play within the play, to construct a narrative of resistance against much of the Anglophone relationship with Quebec, so that there are several layers in the rituals described here, simulacrum of images that have already been heavily formalised, and even the critiques of these forms have existed since the gnostic thinkers. That said, Lynd's quotation of Catherine Bell's Six Forms of Ritual can be useful here. Bell elcuidates 6 forms of ritual: Formalism, Traditionalism, Invariance, Rule Governance, Sacral Symbolism, and Performance. 1Arycand uses each of these six forms to talk about what it means to be a catholic in Quebec.
He uses the idea of a passion play, of course, and his passion play features many of the forms that have not been changed since the mystery plays in the medieval era. There are 12 stations of the cross, pilgrims travel to each one, and the words/visual images do not change much at all. But he is also aware of how these forms are resistant to change. When the priest and the arch diocese refuse for the play to go on, there is a small and very tight burlesque, playing the passion as Kabuki, New York Method, Romance and traditionally Quebecois. Arycand then is aware of the filmic choices he is making, and how those filmic choices both reinforce a traditionally Catholic relationship to form (for example the lighting, camera movement and close ups in the last performance), update it (the cruciform ed hospital bed), and de-construct it (how the descent from the cross happens with a crane shot that mostly ignores the dead prophet)
The last scene in the Metro station, with the sweeping crane shot, and the elevators taking up most of the mise-en-scene, and that it can still be identified as a desecnsion, suggests that Arycand knows the traditions of Catholicism. But it is not only formal calls. Lync defines traditionalism as a sense that “we have always done it this way, even if we haven't”2 Though the passion play is only 45 years old, any change to it becomes a radical act of violence not only against the church but by Christ Himself. (same way really, that when Mireille is asked to dance and disrobe for the audition, and she is reluctant too, she is told that she is being difficult, that there is no other way of casting for beer ads.
This leads to a discussion of invariance. That things will never change, that any attempts to change the liturgy, to change how actors work, to change how plays are written or how christ is delivered to an audience that dismisses this work will be problematic. This invariance can be understood best when the priest who is sleeping with one of the actors refuses to break the rules about can be performed in the church. The passion play exists in the form that it was convienced in, as a way of bringing pilgrims and not critics to the shrine, and this must not change.
Dennis dies when the mob who comes to see the play overwhelms him. He does not die on the cross, but is brought to catholic hospitals, who refuse to help him and refuse to acknowledge how unwell he is. Though the psychiatrist claims that he is more rational then the judge who is to sentence him, he refuses to live in a world that does not respect his life as an artist or a french candian. It is ironic then that he is brought to a Jewish hospital at the end, an orginzation outside of the required rule governance found in both the social and religious milieu of mid 1980s Montreal.
This religious significance, this using ritual to move to larger truths can be found in the idea of sacral significance. In this way, though it is a gloss on Mark, Jesus of Montreal becomes a post secualr reworking of John 1:1, the sacral significance occurs in the ritual magic that turns words into the flesh of God. In this way Daniel becomes closer and closer to incorporate the flesh of Christ, as he gets closer and closer to the words. The word was made flesh, and by mirrored extension, those who make words make flesh, both symbolically in the sense of other characters embody the word of God.
Though this embodiment is profoundly sacral, that it ties all of the rituals together in a text that is about the metacontextual nature of performance, that it makes the mass, the psychiatric office, pornography, educational television, advertisements, and the passion play as parts of the same spectrum, makes the viewer consider what it means to be a passive viewer, to not perform the linguistic mysteries that both an inbound sense of art, and a religious sense of obligation require of them.

Compare Daniel's crucifxion in the passion play to that of Jesus-movies you may have seen...
Passolini and Arycand have much in common, both outsiders in a traditionally catholic culture, both nervous about American imperialism, both infatuated with the aesthetic history of American Christianity, both attempting to politically engage with a society who is attempting to extract itself from a monoculture, both have read the scriptures, and both are politically far left. So the two should be similar. Except that Passolini understood that the Christian story was about Christ, and attempted to purify it, not bring any of his own socio-cultural baggage into the mix. He hired a queer christ, and his own mother as the Madonna, of course, but that is outside the text, an extra bit when you have spent enough time with the rest of it.
When Passolini attempted to renew the gospel then, or update it, he did not feel the need to add meta-layers and so he did not choose the gospel that was the closest to his social concerns, and he did not film it at the Cine Citta, he went to the south of Italy, lived with his actors and created something that was infused with the spirit of Italian neo-realism, but was uniquely his.
There are things that similar though. Arycand loves Montreal profoundly, loves the people and loves the city in a way that no one else has. This love is difficult, honest, and earnest. The genius of this film and his films in general is that he can make cliché scenes of sentiment seem refreshed. The bohemian actors having dinner together becomes a tender and generous reworking of the last supper, for example. Pasolini loves Italy deeply, loves the city and loves the men, in a way that no one else has. The genius of his films is that he adapts the cultures of European classics with a po-faced earnestness, a believability and emotional rawness that is often not gentle or tender.
That Arycand felt the need to rework the gospel story in order to create a complicated narrative of ethnic ennui suggests that he might not be as trustful of his source material, or at least that he is attrempting to secularise the story. Pasolini though a marxist, believed in the Catholic church. There stories were his stories, this identity is not something you see in the detachment of Arycand's work. Or to put it another way, Arycand is capable of great emotional outpourings, of operatic excess, but these moments hold back to the final scenes, they work as catharsis and completion.
Pasolini's emotions are small, and the work is so unritualistic, and unformalised, that the there is no catharsis, no endings, nothing even close to the Lazarus motif or the blind woman seeing. Arcyand's work is squalid, close to the ground, domestic, and outward seeking. They are shooting from the same playbook, but their traditions, reading, and narrative sense make them create explicitly different works about implicitly similar subjects.

What do you think the role of the priest is in this film?
The priest is a sly and ironic critique He attempts to modernize the passion play, and discusses Daniel's changes as questions of fashions. He is sleeping with one of the actresses, quotes Camus' the Myth of Sisyphus as part of a sermon, would quit the priesthood but is too comfortable with the material comforts (literally the nun's making him breakfast), and later refuses to take moral responsibility for the arch-diocese banning the rewritten play.
This kind of priest has been a staple of French farce since Moliere: arch and decadent, urbane, sexualised, and basically amoral. When he is found in the apartment by Daniel, his lover says “I don't want this to become a bedroom farce” and it is not, because he makes no effort to hide his corruption. In a scene slightly afterwards, he makes excuses for not doing the intellectual work required for his role as university lecturer because his bishop has prevented anyone to have new and non prescribed ideas.
In this sense, with his status as part of the old guard, as engorged and happy as anything, he is a symbolic stand-in for the Church, who always assumes it will have power, who maintains the status qou, and who refuses to notice that change is not only inevitable but happening in front of him. He does not acknowledge the prophetic potential of Daniel, like the Church did not recognize what was new in Quebec society.

How approprite do you think Hamlet's soliloquy is in the film? What does it reveal about the actors understanding of religion?
Hamlet's soliloquy does three things. It secularises the search for eternal truth, which allows for a smoother transition between the religion for religions sake and art as a new kind of faith. It also talks about the nature of person-hood, what makes someone human, which is something that Daniels modified Passion Play mentions directly. Also, because both the priest, some of the actors, and Daniel speak it, it becomes a voice of ambiguity.
If the text can be used by a true believer, a doubting Thomas, and a Pharisees, it confirms the construction of Christ's humanity, and becomes not only a comment on the gnostic idea of a non-divine Christ, but integrative, allowing for another kind of secular set of agreements on how to be human. (Though I am not sure why the used Hamlet and not Racine?)
Jesus of Toronto :
There is nothing unified and iconographic in Toronto's history. The old guard Anglicans and Presbyterian that helped found the city and had most of its hard power for the 19th century were built alongside first nations, Irish Catholics, free thinkers, and non conformists. They sought comfort, but did not have the power of the Catholic church that Montreal did. All of that said, Arycand's work is very much about the 1960s, and being from Montreal, and sorting out what to do with a language, a structure of life, a society and a culture that was distinctly separate from especially Toronto.
There could be a similar sense of isolation in Vancouver, with it's geographical distance and the political problems of for example the Sikhs or the Dukaboors, and coming from Alberta, I know there is a sense of isolation in the prairies, where we give to the east, and do not get nearly as much in return, and the economic solitude of Atlantic Canada is well documented, and Toronto is far from perfect, but it sort of lacks the two things that the film suggests Montreal has: that isolation and a fear of scandal.
If I was to make such a movie, then maybe it could go the other way, sort of make it like Don McKellor's Last Night (which might just be the Jesus of Toronto), where the apocalypse happens to a wide variety of people, and those people walk the city, or have family dinner, or party a bit, or do nothing. That diffusiveness, and diveristy, the quietness, and the communal lack of solitary isolation is essentially a Toronto story, and one that I think works as an interesting companion piece to this work.
So, it would be important to examine the polyglot nature of the city, how it speaks 100+ languages, and has dozens of ethnic groups. My plot would not follow any strict narrative, or connecitons to anything idelogical, but be a set of small and discreet encounters, sometimes with noise, sometimes with silence, that combine the fractured, amorphous nature of the city into a set of impressionistic emotions, but not into one allegory that can only be read by a monoculture. I would set it all over the place, at the Hindu temple in Brampton, the new masjid in the Danforth, at the Cathedral of ST James, and at Moonbeam coffee house in Kensington, around a dining room in Rosedale, and at a loft in Liberty Village, I would have a scene at a pub, and among the dead animals at the ROM, and someone getting a lapdance at the Zanzibar, nothing transcendent, because there is no transcendence here. There are 8 million people, in one of the most decentralised cities, in one of the most decentralised regions, in one of the most decentralised countries trying to figure out what they have in common, which is very little.