Whether workers from Sept-Îles, isolated citizens of Schefferville or even Beaucerons drenched in the maple syrup of their ambitions, or even French newcomers settled in the heart of Montreal, all the citizens presented by the series The most beautiful province have at least this in common: they embrace the idea, not always well tempered, according to which their success in society depends only on themselves.
It is the voice of filmmaker Denys Arcand that we hear throughout these four documentaries. Arcand’s choice is not innocent. “Arcand is not there for nothing. He likes the second degree of the exercise. He finds it very funny, ”explains Guillaume Sylvestre, the director of this series which opens on September 20 on the Vrai platform.
In some ways, this series is a little reminiscent of Comfort and indifferenceArcand’s film made in the wake of the 1980 referendum. The choice to entrust the narration to Arcand, as Sylvestre puts it in a mature formula, in any case allows us to hear “a voice in the second degree in a flight in first class “…
In Schefferville, the camera follows a couple who have come in principle for only a few months, just to make a quick buck. He works day and night as a taxi driver; her as a waitress and cashier.
“Schefferville is the Far West,” said Sylvestre in an interview with To have to. The city was closed in the early 1980s by the Iron Ore company. The infrastructures were demolished, just to avoid the company having to continue paying taxes. The Porlier family took control of the remaining buildings. “In the 1980s, it was with 12 coupes that it worked in this city”, recalls the director of The most beautiful province. “There is a period report from Radio-Canada on this. Schefferville is the world of Lucky Luke. The Innu and Naskapi are the majority, but it is still a small handful of whites who still control it. »
Julie, our waitress-cashier, says that the climate is good in Schefferville. Her lover has at most been attacked a few times with sticks. Everything is fine, she repeats. Even if, in this city, the consumption of drugs and alcohol constitutes a large beach where many existences will run aground.
“The word ‘reconciliation’ has never been so overused, observes Guillaume Sylvestre. And yet, there is something special about seeing Julie, in Schefferville, become friends with an Innu. At the same time, he notes that it is difficult to even speak of an Aboriginal community. “Everyone is walking on eggshells now. In the milieu where I am, some think that I did not have to make a film on Schefferville, quite simply because I am not Innu. Calms you ! It’s as if taking an interest in the other is now becoming suspect…”
North Africa
There would be, says Sylvestre, another documentary to be made on the African teachers engaged in Schefferville as elsewhere in northern Quebec. “African immigration in the North is something! It is often teachers more trained than at the Brébeuf college who find themselves there. Because we don’t want them in the South. The professor featured most in the film has a doctorate from Dakar and a master’s degree in sociology from a Swiss university, he says. “The shock was, for her, more thermal than cultural. In the North, among the Aboriginal peoples, she found values that are common with her African world: the community side, the great respect for elders, the sharing of everything, the fish from the fishery made, for example, available to all. To Aboriginal children, she talks about colonialism, while putting into perspective what she knows about it, from the African point of view, in a kind of stimulating shift.
One of the four films that make up this series is devoted to the French who arrive en masse to settle in Montreal. “It’s the absolute opposite of Schefferville,” says Guillaume Sylvestre. We are entering another world.
What to think of French people enthusiastic about the idea of gaining a imitation nature to photograph, with a telephoto lens, squirrels and marmots? In any case, these people also affirm that to achieve a better social situation, they can only count on their own efforts, bordered by a confidence that sometimes borders on jovialism.
The homeland of aluminum
In Sept-Îles, people from all over have found a second home within the walls of the Alouette aluminum smelter. The plant operates on them, as on ferrous metals, a very strong magnetism. Every day, these huge facilities consume as much electricity as the entire city of Quebec.
Among the characters that Guillaume Sylvestre’s camera lingers on is a worker whose metal locker door appears to be covered with bare-breasted idols lying on glossy paper. He doesn’t have his 5e secondary, he said. The man is surprised by his success, his salary, what seems to him to be good working conditions.
“Perhaps it is an inferiority complex that is transposed, sublimated, comments director Guillaume Sylvestre lip service. But in any case, for these people, working for Alouette is almost as important as being a Quebecer. »
Each employee seems convinced that there is a horizontality between the different human components at work in the factory. “There is a very Quebec idea that everyone starts at the bottom of the ladder. No one in there comes from a big family, explains Sylvestre. People haven’t studied. Nobody went to Harvard. That the worker and the boss both eat in the cafeteria, can that convince us that life is served to them on the same platter?
Free and American
In Beauce, the camera follows a hairdresser with fiery hair. At 29, she has seven children. On screen, she distills an enchanted speech in favor of entrepreneurship, planted in the middle of products, some of which feature Walt Disney figures.
Then, the magic of the camera transports us to the middle of another world that does not speak otherwise, that of the rich Dutil family.
“We go from left field to right field, but we feel the same Beauceron skeleton. They all talk the same way about success, a sort of Quebec dream that Hans Mercier perhaps illustrates in his own way by wanting Quebec to join the United States,” says Sylvestre.
With Parti 51, the lawyer Hans Mercier intends to make Quebec an independent state, but attached to the country of Uncle Sam. To illustrate the greater freedom that would result, one of his supporters explains that it must be possible, in a free country, to ride a motorcycle without a helmet. The notion of independence, in Beauce, first appears as a strictly individual project.
The camera captures business people, gathered under the aegis of a Dutil. They dance a pseudo-tribal dance with conviction, right in the middle of a workshop dedicated to comforting them a little more in the satisfaction they already feel about themselves.
Later, in a chic sugar shack where the ears of Christ are eaten with Bordeaux wine, the patriarch of the Dutil family affirms that, like his sons, he declares himself independent of everything and in everything. “We don’t ask permission! »
Does this series contain an overdose of irony? “Irony is a value that is being lost these days, the director simply drops it. I am not a columnist. I do not defend a thesis, any more than the characters we follow. People think what they want. »