Pour vivre ici underlines strength of Quebec film
Émond makes slow-moving dramas that are often meditations on spirituality
Watching Montreal writerdirector Bernard Émond’s Pour vivre ici, I was reminded of how great it is to live in a place where filmmakers make challenging, ambitious art films that some people actually care about.
I’m not suggesting this Frenchlanguage feature is likely to tear it up at the box office. Émond’s films never do. But they often play prestigious film festivals around the world and garner positive reviews from critics everywhere. Émond’s latest opened the 36th Rendez-vous Québec Cinéma fest last Wednesday and began its commercial run Friday.
Les Films Séville, the country’s largest distributor, is handling the film, and Séville International is selling the film around the globe. My point is that a film like this gets noticed ’round these parts. When an auteur film makes its bow in the rest of Canada, in 99 cases out of 100, it comes and goes without anyone noticing it was ever on the screen in the 25th room at the local multiplex.
That Quebec art-film tradition — which stretches from Denys Arcand to Xavier Dolan — is what makes our film scene unique. We live in a world of cookiecutter superhero movies, and it’s heartening to know the province remains a small but influential centre of resistance to that global film trend.
Émond makes slow-moving, thoughtful dramas that are often meditations on spirituality, mortality and the resilience of the human spirit. Yup, it’s a long way from Iron Man. Émond is very much in the tradition of great big-screen auteurs like Krzysztof Kieslowski and Roberto Rossellini, with a bit of the Dardenne brothers’ social realism thrown in for good measure.
Pour vivre ici had me from the get-go, opening with a shot of a beautiful snow-covered lake. Then you see a snowmobile heading across the lake. C’est pas un film, c’est l’hiver. And that’s the way Émond rolls. He takes his time with every shot, lingering on images and often not burdening us with an excess of dialogue.
Élise Guilbault — who starred in three of Émond’s previous films, La femme qui boit, La neuvaine and La donation — is, as usual, brilliant, playing Monique, a woman who is coming to terms with the loss of her husband. She leaves her home in BaieComeau to visit her grown-up kids in Montreal, but her son and daughter basically give her the cold shoulder and she ends up connecting in a much more meaningful way with Sylvie (Sophie Desmarais), a former girlfriend of her other son, who died 15 years ago.
Émond does have a mighty pessimistic view of the universe, and I don’t share his view that parents have more trouble relating to their children than ever before. Yeah, it’s tough, but not impossible. I just like that he’s made a film that raises those kinds of questions and that doesn’t make any compromises to please the lowest-common-denominator crowd.
SHONK’S EMO TOUR
When I met up with Quebec City-based singer-songwriter Gabrielle Shonk in the fall, around the time of the release of her self-titled debut album, she told me she’d been a big fan of punk and emo when she was a teenager and that one of her fave bands at the time was emo darling Dashboard Confessional. So it’s only fitting that she is now on a national tour opening shows for none other than … Dashboard Confessional. There are 11 shows, mostly in theatres, including a date at Montreal’s Corona Theatre on March 9.
“They were a big inspiration for me,” Shonk said by phone last week. “I started writing music when I was a fan of (Dashboard Confessional). It really inspired me to play guitar and write my own songs. It was really cool when we got the opportunity to open for them. It’s kind of a teenage dream come true. Honestly, when my manager proposed it to me, he said, ‘Well, we have this offer and I don’t know what you’re going to think of it.’ And I literally flipped out in his office.”