With a beating heart does not spare the hearts of its 1,024,000 viewers with stories of women “punished” with kicks in the stomach, shins shattered with a baseball bat and a gay man beaten to death by his partner in a hot tub.
Poor Noémie Cloutier (Stéphanie Desrochers) was also sexually tortured by her BDSM-loving boyfriend, who burned her, strangled her and subjected her to inhumane practices involving objects inserted “in every hole in her body”.
We look at these extremely harsh cases and find them appalling, tragic and heartbreaking. But we endure, we swallow our anger.
In the last three weeks, the soap opera With a beating heart addressed another type of violence which, this time, went down very badly with the Radio-Canada audience: that against animals.
“I like this series, but I find that it is not necessary to present us with the worst cruelties,” an angry reader wrote to me.
I received a bunch of similar messages. “I will no longer follow the episodes ofWith a beating heart. The one from yesterday with the martyred dog was the last straw,” another viewer pointed out to me, outraged by the atrocious fate reserved for the three adorable dogs of the lost and confused Clémence Boivin (Camille Massicotte).
Like thousands of you, I had this same angry reaction in my living room: Lord, let go of these poor, innocent Labradors, who were drugged, then hit with a shovel, before being euthanized. They don’t deserve this, save them, target!
Tuesday’s episode, already online on Tou.tv’s Extra, is even more difficult to watch, because it explores – without showing it explicitly – what takes place in the Dexter-style basement of the strange psychoeducator Arthur Fortin (Mickaël Gouin) and his submissive companion Clémence.
The moans and complaints of pain from dogs, honestly, are borderline tolerable. And our knee-jerk reactions to these scenes are extremely confronting, I find.
Why do we react so strongly to dog abuse when our level of outrage never rises that high when a human being dies in the same series? It’s disturbing, when you think about it. The persecuted dog aroused more revolt than the killed woman.
The author Danielle Trottier, very present on social networks during the broadcast ofWith a beating heart (Tuesday at 8 p.m.), has not received a single message from people furious about the assassination of Éloi Parenteau (Alex M. Dauphin), beaten to death by her lover (Guillaume Perreault). A raw, brutal and painful sequence to watch.
On the other hand, the minute Clémence’s mishandled dog was mentioned, the insurrection rumbled on X and Facebook. I’m boycotting the show, it’s over for me!
“During the first week, some viewers found it scary, yes. Then they self-regulated among themselves, they understood where the story was going. In With a beating heart, I’m talking about violence and animals also suffer from domestic violence. We were careful never to show the dogs being beaten. And it’s fake blood,” says screenwriter Danielle Trottier.
PHOTO MARCO CAMPANOZZI, LA PRESSE ARCHIVES
The screenwriter ofWith a beating heart Danielle Trottier
Who attacks the dogs named Luc, Mario and Léo within this cursed couple and, above all, why? The response will come out on Tuesday and it shines the spotlight on little-known behavior, you will see. There’s a lot of research behind the twisted characters ofWith a beating heart.
“I present facts and I trust the viewers,” explains author Danielle Trottier.
On Quebec television, hypersensitivity to animal cruelty is not new. Remember, in the winter of 2005, when Junior Bougon (Antoine Bertrand) sat on a cat and then dismembered the corpse, in the toilet, to get rid of it. The audience and the SPCA had climbed into the curtains.
With a beating heart is full of complex and tormented characters that we slowly tame, like the brothers Patrick (Jean-Nicolas Verreault) and Christophe L’Allier (Roy Dupuis), whose childhood traumas – and their unworthy mother (Micheline Lanctôt) – rot still their daily lives.
The police officer Patrick is having a hard time and he too is establishing a climate of toxic domination in the home he founded with the counselor Roxanne (Catherine Paquin-Béchard). Red flag, times a thousand.
I really like agent Morgane Harel (Élodie Bégin) and her sidekick Fabien Gauthier (Maxime Mailloux), conscientious, dedicated and rigorous police officers. Quite the opposite of the antipathetic Éloïse Pelletier (Catherine De Léan), who we like to hate. What a hateful woman, devoid of any form of empathy.
And you have surely noticed that Éloi Parenteau’s murderous spouse, who now calls himself Pierre Bélanger (Guillaume Perreault), is lurking around Christophe’s Violence Prevention Center.
The new speaker, Michelle Bédard (Océane Kitura Bohémier Tootoo), will detect something wrong with this gloomy man. But why hasn’t he been arrested by the police yet?
“Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten it,” assures Danielle Trottier.
We’ll keep an eye on him. He and the controlling father of teenager Amada Botha (Michaëna Benoit). We’re in a jam from monitoring so many crazy people.