Watch over me | Rock’n’roll and poverty

It’s always delicate and perilous to depict poverty on Quebec television without falling into crude caricature, burlesque sketches or worn-out clichés.

At Télé-Québec, dramatic comedy Do you hear me? explored deprived urban environments with the perfect dose of tenderness, humor and truth. A masterclass in television empathy.

This authentic and condescending approach also guides the poky characters of Watch over methe new Radio-Canada miniseries written by Pascale Renaud-Hébert, the brilliant co-writer of Do you hear me? with Florence Longpré. L’Extra de Tou.TV will release on Thursday the six one-hour episodes of Watch over mewhich tell a complex family story derailed by drug addiction, lack of education and material deprivation.

Bad funny program, joke to yourself between two sips of coffee prepared with a siphon. Yes, Watch over me stirs up big emotions. Guylaine Tremblay, one of the stars of the miniseries, summed it up in a sentence of dazzling precision: “it’s a hard story, but one that doesn’t crush you,” she notes. That’s exactly it.

In this fall social drama, which I really liked, Guylaine Tremblay plays Maggie, a single grandmother who struggled in the past, but who today leads a “clean and drunk” life, without alcohol. Maggie works double shifts in a family pizza and skewer restaurant, in addition to offering manicures at home to make ends meet.

And for three and a half years, Maggie has been taking care of little Zack (Jérôme Hébert), 4 years old, the child of her drug addict daughter Corinne (Pascale Renaud-Hébert), an inadequate young mother who abandoned her son to leave on a balloon. of drugs and drink.

In the first episode, after eight months of radio silence, Corinne returns home, sober and finally separated from her toxic partner Joey (Guillaume Laurin). Corinne, whom everyone calls Coco, reconnects with her mother Maggie and her heart breaks when Zack, her own child, does not recognize her. This is normal, because the little boy was raised by his grandmother.

Corinne, who dropped out of school in secondary four, now swears to her mother that she has changed, that she no longer uses drugs, that she is looking for a real job and a place of her own. Maggie has heard this speech too many times and is suspicious of it, rightly so. Why would this umpteenth weaning of Corinne succeed? Why break Zack’s routine and lug him needlessly from one apartment to another?

Beyond the dispute over Zack’s custody, there remain deep tensions between Corinne and her mother Maggie, who was not the mother of the century either. A recovering alcoholic, Maggie has long neglected Corinne, whom the DPJ placed in foster care at the age of 12. Cycles of violence and abuse are perpetuated in this dysfunctional family, which lives in a town – never named in the series – like Saint-Jérôme or Granby.

The vocabulary of the protagonists of Watch over me is peppered with church words and crude Quebecisms such as: calisse, toe, scream, moé, here, tabarnak and several “if I would have”. In the context, there is no reason to flood the complaints department of the public broadcaster.

The lighter part of Watch over me goes a lot through the sassy barmaid Samantha (Karine Gonthier-Hyndman), a friend of Corinne with clawed nails and a strong tongue. A flamboyant, endearing and very profitable character.

The first episode of Watch over mefast and compact, effectively sets up the plot and clearly draws the contours of the characters, who smoke and swear like carters. A good punch closes the first hour and the second concludes with the return of a noxious figure announcing nothing good.

You suspect that the fragile and volatile Corinne, despite all her good will, is at risk of “another slip-up”, to paraphrase her. And her ex-boyfriend Joey, who beat her, will continue to circle around her, hoping for her relapse.

Watch over mewhich will appear on traditional Radio-Canada television in January, presents a gallery of deficient characters who love each other, certainly, but who love each other very badly. Behind their strong shells, thickened by a difficult past, we detect their vulnerability and fragility. How can you adequately care for another person when you don’t have all the tools to ensure your own happiness?

Between a success by Martin Deschamps (When ?) and a bomb from Marjo (Wild cats), director Rafaël Ouellet (One way, Turn: double fault) does not wallow in aestheticized misery. Maggie’s (Guylaine Tremblay) apartment is clean, simple and stylish, to reflect the dignity of this fighter. It would have been incongruous to install this grandmother in a shabby, cluttered or filthy studio.

Because Maggie is a proud and strong woman, which has nothing to do with her financial insecurity. She even has a tattoo (faded and blue) of Coco stamped near her chest. Maggie loves her daughter, but she loves her against the light, like in a sad song by Julie Masse where no one responds to the cry of alarm.