PLAYING LA BOLDUC WAS AN EDUCATION IN EARLY FEMINISM
Star of biopic says legendary Quebec singer is an example of a ‘real pioneer’
Debbie Lynch-White admits she didn’t know all that much about La Bolduc when she landed the lead role in the biopic about the legendary Québécois folksinger.
“I knew her name and I knew two or three of her songs,” Lynch-White said in a recent interview at a restaurant in Old Montreal.
“But I didn’t know anything about her life,” she said. “I think there are many here who don’t really know that much about her. So that’s what’s great about the film — that it lets us know so much more about her.”
La Bolduc opens in cinemas across Quebec on Friday, including a version with English subtitles at the Forum. It’s directed by François Bouvier and written by Frédéric Ouellet, in collaboration with Benjamin Alix, who had the original idea. It co-stars Émile Proulx-Cloutier, RoseMarie Perreault, Bianca Gervais, Mylène Mackay, Serge Postigo and Yan England.
It recounts the life story of Mary Travers, a.k.a. La Bolduc, a folky singer-songwriter who became a huge star in Quebec during the 1930s with her homespun songs about the lives of working-class people.
“I think La Bolduc was an important woman in our history,” said Lynch-White. “She comes from a working-class milieu and she broke through a lot of doors in an era when women didn’t really have the right to break through those doors. And she did it out of necessity. She didn’t do it saying, ‘I’m a feminist.’ She did it because her kids had to eat. She was in the end a feminist, in her actions, and I think it’s important that young people realize who she was, because there’s still work to be done for women’s rights. For the status of women, for equal salaries. If we want to move forward, we have to know where we came from. La Bolduc was a real pioneer.”
Until now, Lynch-White was best known for playing prison guard Nancy Prévost in Unité 9, the phenomenally popular Radio-Canada drama about female prisoners, and it was a huge deal ici this past fall when her character was killed off. She is now set to branch out in a couple of new directions. She sings all the songs in La Bolduc, and the producers released a soundtrack in late 2017. Following that experience, she is preparing her first musical show, Elle était une fois, which is built around songs by female songwriters. It will play in 10 cities in Quebec next year. The première will be at Théâtre Maisonneuve of Place des Arts on Feb. 22.
Lynch-White is also putting the finishing touches on her first book, a series of essays, which will be published in the fall.
MAGASIN GÉNÉRAL
This week, producer Roger Frappier and director Christian Duguay announced they are preparing to adapt the ultra-popular graphic novels Magasin général into a feature film.
The books were created by Régis Loisel and Jean-Louis Tripp, and are set in a small village in Quebec at the end of the 1920s. Both authors are French, and the comic-book story first appeared in a newspaper in Belgium and a magazine in France. More than a million copies of the books have been sold in France, Belgium and Quebec.
The cast will include Niels Schneider, Catherine St-Laurent, Roy Dupuis and Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin. Magasin général tells the story of a young widow who has to run the general store in the village after her husband dies.
Duguay’s previous feature, Un sac de billes was a monster hit in France, pulling in 1.3 million moviegoers. Duguay also directed the films The Art of War and Jappeloup, and the TV miniseries Joan of Arc, Hitler: The Rise of Evil, and Human Trafficking.
ALLURE
Montreal brothers Carlos and Jason Sanchez have mostly been known for their fine-art photography, but they have diversified into feature filmmaking with Allure, which opens in Toronto and Vancouver on Friday and in Montreal on April 13. It had its world première under the title A Worthy Companion at the Toronto International Film Festival last September, and was released in the U.S. last month via Samuel Goldwyn Films.
Allure stars Evan Rachel Wood as Laura, a woman who works as a house cleaner for her father’s company and is one unhappy camper.
The story revolves around her meeting with a frustrated 16-year-old woman, played by Julia Sarah Stone.
Owen Gleiberman had high praise for the Sanchez brothers in his review of Allure in Variety, published during the Toronto film fest: “This is their first feature film, and they have a knack for imagistic atmosphere, for how to use a setting — like Laura’s boxy home, with its dilapidated decor and humdrum lighting — to suggest all kinds of things about the person who occupies it. In their low-key way, the Sanchezes understand the train-wreck drama of dysfunction. They keep the audience off-balance the same way Laura does.”