In his new feature film, starring Hélène Florent and Martin Dubreuil, director Bernard Émond has decided to adapt a short story by Italian Nobel Prize winner Luigi Pirandello. An approach that definitely goes against the grain of Hollywood blockbusters. Explanations.
Adapting Pena di vivere cosi (All Life, Heartache), the feature film follows Rose Lemay (Hélène Florent), a 1930s trifluvienne who agrees to marry her husband Paul-Émile Lemay (Martin Dubreuil). and then taking him in with his three daughters after the death of his beloved, with whom he had fled.
“I’ve wanted to shoot in Trois-Rivières for a long time,” said Bernard Émond in an interview a few weeks before the film’s release in cinemas in the province. It was one of Canada’s largest industrial cities and Trois-Rivières was home to the world’s largest paper mill, the CIP, whose buildings have now been entirely removed, and which then employed more than 12,000 people. It was big.”
The confusion…
“This idea worked for me. Because it was both a bourgeois city – it is the city of Maurice Duplessis – and at the same time a large working-class city. And then there’s the whole hinterland. Mr. Lemay is the son of a “jobbeur”, i.e. an entrepreneur in the forest, he literally comes from the forest.
Portrait of Bernard Émond, Martin Dubreuil and Hélène Florent on the occasion of the release of the film “Une femme respectable” by Bernard Émond at the Château Versailles in Montreal, Thursday August 3, 2023. Photo Agence QMI / Joël Lemay
With this in mind, Émond resolutely portrays the confrontation between the two characters as a social class struggle.
“I liked it because we all know stories of girls from good families who fell in love with bums, it’s a classic.” It doesn’t always end badly, but it often does. What also interested me was that it’s both a love story and a power story,” he said.
On set, the actors have a single watchword: the confusion of feelings and intentions. “I told the actors the most important thing is that their characters don’t know what they want, they’re confused. Why is he coming back? For comfort? Because he wants his daughters to settle down? It is clear that he still desires her. And you? She wants this man. She will never sleep with him. The desire becomes clear in the film. I wanted to make a special film about emotional confusion.
With Une femme respectable, Bernard Émond takes his time. Portraying his characters, observing them, describing them, examining their contradictions, their doubts and hesitations.
“I know I don’t have time anymore. I have a producer who has been supporting me for 30 years. I can’t do anything other than what I do. I had the privilege of making the films I wanted. I know I’m not in my time. Was it better before? Yes, even if we are not allowed to say so. I’m not nostalgic knowing we won’t be going back.
72-year-old Bernard Émond – whom we could call our Clint Eastwood counterpart relatively speaking, although he published a collection of short stories last year – pursues the same themes in his work. . “My films are a conversation between filmmakers, actors and intelligent viewers. And that’s great. We belong to the responsible adults.”
But as he put it, “For the first time in my life, I’m finishing a film without the script for the next one being written. This may be my last film. It’s going to be difficult for me to run for funding. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining. But it’s becoming harder and harder for me to see that the kind of cinema I want to make is getting less interest from funding bodies.
A Respectable Woman hits theaters across the province on August 18.