After bringing the life of La Bolduc to the screen, director François Bouvier continues in the same direction by focusing on another historical female character from the province of Belle, Victoire Du Sault, the first woman to live in 19th-century Quebec. Century worked as a shoemaker. Well acted and well directed, his film doesn’t avoid certain clichés, especially when it comes to the structure of the story.
The film “La cordonnière”, an adaptation of Pauline Gill’s best-selling novel series published between 1998 and 2003, takes us first to Montreal in the early 20th century. Victoire Du Sault (Élise Guilbault), who is suffering from cancer and is nearing her end, asks one of her sons to take her to the country where she grew up, in Pointe-du-Lac.
This pilgrimage will be an opportunity for them to relive their youth. Using flashbacks, the film takes us a few decades back to when young and fiery Victoire (Rose-Marie Perreault), 17, voluntarily dropped out of college to pursue her passion, shoe design.
But at that time in Quebec, the job of shoemaker was reserved exclusively for men. First, Victoire will make her laugh with her first creations. But her work and perseverance will eventually pay off and the young woman will be at the head of an empire (her business is the origin of the Dufresne family fortune).
love triangle
With the demands for stronger female characters in film and television in recent years, it’s refreshing to see a historical drama centered around the life of an unsung pioneer, one of the first women to start her own business in Quebec. With her courage and daredevil attitude, Victoire Du Sault has everything to inspire today’s young women who want to assert themselves in a male-dominated environment.
However, it is unfortunate that the film does not detail this daily struggle waged by Victoire Du Sault to get her business on track. Unfortunately, the screenplay, written by Sylvain Guy (Confessions, Louis Cyr), is more concerned with Victoire’s amorous torments, caught between her overwhelming passion for Georges-Noël Dufresne (Pierre-Yves Cardinal), a man older than her , torn was her sham marriage to the latter’s son (Nicolas Fontaine).
On the other hand, the film is very successful on a technical level. The implementation by François Bouvier is applied as well as the historical reconstruction (impeccable) and the acting (convincing) of the actors.
- note : 3 out of 5 stars.
- The Shoemaker, a film directed by François Bouvier and starring Rose-Marie Perreault, Pierre-Yves Cardinal, Nicolas Fontaine and Élise Guilbault.
- To see from Friday.