Sébastien Pilote tells new teen tale
An intoxicating swirl of strings envelops an early scene in Quebec director Sébastien Pilote’s third feature, La disparition des lucioles (The Fireflies Are Gone), which had its North American premiere Tuesday at the Toronto International Film Festival and opens in Montreal Sept. 21.
A teenage girl, Léo (Karelle Tremblay), is having dinner with her parents and godparents, but something is off. Though she’s all smiles, it soon becomes apparent the young woman’s words are dripping with sarcasm as she answers the adults’ questions about her post-high school aspirations.
Léo gets up to go to the washroom but instead grabs a lollipop and heads outside, where on a whim, she runs off to catch a passing bus. Cue the orchestral swell, which brings with it hints of old-Hollywood melodrama and a heady sprinkling of exhilaration.
“I wanted music that is too much,” Pilote admitted, “too grandiloquent for this kind of movie, something like those classic movies from the ’50s, scored by Bernard Herrmann. I was inspired by (Alfred Hitchcock’s) Vertigo love theme.
“It had to be astonishing; for me, film is an ambiguity factory. I like when people say they didn’t know what to think about a certain shot in a film. This music had to stick with you, and surprise you.”
La disparition des lucioles is surprising — a tender comingof-age tale from a director whose first two films explored the emotional and physical degradation of old ways of life in rural Quebec.
Pilote’s 2011 debut Le vendeur, about the existential crisis of a veteran car salesman, premièred at the Sundance Film Festival; while his followup, Le démantèlement, in which an aging farmer decides to sell everything, screened at Cannes Critics’ Week, where it won two awards.
In both those movies, Pilote showcased his ability to find resonance in the struggles of people forced into change as their simple lives are confronted by the harsh realities of the modern world.
Those realities remain but are viewed with fresh eyes in La disparition des lucioles, which premièred in June at the Karlovy
Vary Film Festival, in the Czech Republic.
“I wanted to make something younger,” Pilote said. “I’ve always had characters who were 60 or older, faced with the end of something; this is about someone at the beginning of something.
“Films for me always start with an idea. This started with a character leaving the scene unexpectedly, and thereby launching the film.”
Pilote hasn’t gone soft. Léo is angry at the world — at her parents, school and the small Saguenay town in which she lives. She finds solace in a stranger, Steve (Pierre-Luc Brillant), an older metalhead who lives in his mom’s basement, where he offers guitar lessons. Slowly but surely, she begins to change.
“I think I transposed myself into (Léo’s) character,” Pilote said. “I wanted her to incarnate my cynicism, and my fatigue with cynicism. When you get tired of cynicism, you want sincerity, naiveté, innocence; you want to stop judging and being cerebral. I wanted to be more generous.”
Léo has a lot to be angry about. Turns out the father figure at dinner was not her dad but her step-dad (François Papineau), an obnoxious talk radio host; while her father, a former union leader (Luc Picard) blamed for the closing of the local factory, has been exiled to work in the north.
Even in a seemingly innocuous family drama, social commentary is never far from Pilote’s mind. The paternal characters represent “two forms of populism,” explained the filmmaker, who isn’t afraid of a good metaphor.
“On the one hand you have the union leader, who was the king of the town at one time; now the kings in these towns are the radio hosts. Before that, it was the car salesmen.”
Caught between the flawed hubris of these men, and intrigued by her new friend’s gentle sincerity, Léo must chart her own path. But Pilote resists the notion that he has crafted a coming-of-age film.
“I didn’t even know the term before this,” he said. “People have compared it to movies like Ladybird and Juno. That was not my intention. I wasn’t trying to make a teen drama.
“I never sought to create a psychological portrait of adolescence; this is not a description of youth today. It’s a translation of my state of mind.”