After three seasons playing Christophe L’Allier in All the lifeRoy Dupuis is reprising his role — at least for two seasons — in With beating heart, a series filmed six months after leaving Marie-Labrecque school. Coming from a dysfunctional family, victim and producer of violence in the past, Christophe decided to use his experience to help men understand the actions they have taken and lead them to master the violence that inhabits them.
This is how we rediscover him working in a violence prevention center (CPV) in the suburbs of Montreal. Over the course of the 24 episodes, 12 broadcast this winter and the 12 others in the fall, we will reconnect with Christophe’s mother, Édith (Micheline Lanctôt), his brother, Patrick (Jean-Nicolas Verreault), and his son, Rafaël ( Felix-Antoine Cantin).
Produced by Fabienne Larouche and Michel Trudeau for Aetios and directed by Jean-Philippe Duval, the new series by Danielle Trottier, which finds the same team as behind Unit 9 and All the lifealso features Ève Landry in the role of Gabrielle Laflamme, Crown prosecutor, who is not at all in the same boat as Christophe.
“These two characters allowed me to express very different emotions in relation to violence, explains the author during a press briefing following the presentation of the first two episodes ofWith beating heart. My capacity for empathy is Christophe; it is he who goes towards violence, who tries to understand it, to unravel it. Gabrielle, it’s my anger. Tell you how much I’m in tabarnak because it’s been around for so long and we don’t take care of it. She does me so much good! When she arrives on my screen and I can say what I feel as a woman in solidarity with other women, it’s extraordinary! »
While Christophe goes to see everyone, that is to say families, colleagues, neighbors, to understand the marital or family drama that has taken place, and try to make men aware of what they risk losing, Gabrielle wants the men to understand that their actions are unacceptable in the eyes of the law.
“For the series, I wanted Christophe and Gabrielle to afford the luxury of taking the time, to search the files to find out who they have in front of them. In this type of intervention, of human drama, we are in the intimacy of the relationship. You can’t get there in handcuffs and have it end there. Christophe and Gabrielle, each with their own tools, come together because they want exactly the same thing. »
At the roots of violence
At the origin ofWith beating heart, there is Danielle Trottier’s desire to understand why men produce violence. To this end, she met violent men and workers who came to their aid. The stories she collected inspired her to write the series: “The biggest question I’ve ever asked, and there’s no one who’s been able to answer me, but I swear I’ll finding the answer is: how come they have the right? Who gave them the right to hit someone? Who gave them the right to kill their wives? I’m going to get to the bottom of this because it’s fundamental. »
“I started working on the subject in 2019 and if I had written the series in 2019, I would not have written the same series at all that I wrote from 2021. It’s huge, the awareness that the public had between 2019 and 2022. I rewrote scenes as the environment had changed. There are things I couldn’t say anymore because we had evolved into something else. The landscape has changed enormously in the space of four years. My bet is that it will still change a lot. »
Moreover, the question posed by Danielle Trottier and which runs through the entire series, is to know what is our level of tolerance for violence. We see this very clearly in the first case of domestic violence. On her hospital bed, Charlène (Laurence Champagne) defends her partner Yoann (Pierre-Paul Alain), who beat her in front of their son Noa (Jayden Boyd).
“Violence, we live it on a daily basis and we get used to tolerating it to such an extent that we no longer see it. We endure it in all of our interactions, but it ruins our days. Since 2019, I have read everything that has been written about it. It has been shown that a woman will go through the cycle of violence seven times before filing a complaint. Seven times ! We have a fairly high tolerance for verbal, physical and sexual violence. This is a question that will confront even those who do not experience it and who can experience it in the office, with their neighbors. »
“Charlène just doesn’t see the gesture that happened the night Yoann kicked her. She sees the father who is good with his son, who is good in the house, who she works with and who she loves. She sees many facets of this man, she can’t just see the violence. She thinks it’s getting too serious and she’s going to lose everything. And yet, he could have killed her. »
The second case of domestic violence featured in With beating heart concerns the wife of a policeman (Jérémie Jacob), Lina (Blanche-Alice Plante), colleague of the investigator Gauthier (Maxime Mailloux): “I’m not going to hit the same nail often, but when I hit the nail, I’ll hit once, but I’ll hit solid. It has been shown that it is the professional community that is known to have a lot of domestic violence, but that does not mean that a police officer who intervenes in a case of domestic violence is going to be pocketed; it will be very good. As the commander says, “he just beats his wife”. He is violent with the person he does not want to lose control over; the others, he means them no harm. »
Varying degrees of violence
At the CPV, Christophe and his colleague Roxanne (Catherine Paquin-Béchard) will lead group therapies where homophobia will be discussed in particular: “The guys who start a process of 20 meetings, they are not the most aggressive cases, the more violent. I had to find a kind of dosage, that’s the difficulty of the first six episodes. »
About the potential rehabilitation of characters, Danielle Trottier explains that the more a character appears, the more likely he is to be rehabilitated because the more Christophe will intervene with him. “They are not all rehabilitable, I do not live in a unicorn world. Men are very afraid to go to these centers because they don’t know what they will find there. Since the women did not know what awaited them in prison, they were shown it with Unit 9. One of the strengths ofWith beating heartis that the guys will see what a violence prevention center is and what the process looks like,” concludes Danielle Trottier.