” With Anna and Arnaud, we show viewers that there are people in the same city who are on the streets today, each with their own journey. For Nico Racicot, one of the two main actors in this bittersweet series about a mother and her falling son, it is essential that our vision of homelessness change. In 2022, it’s time to realize that our world is less sanitized than we want to believe.
“We have to reveal the real things to evolve as a society”, advances the actor that we discovered here in The blue Hour. The “real things” he evokes are all those elements that furnish the daily lives of homeless people in all the complexity of their reality. Some also sometimes left a family behind. Arnaud, the character camped by Nico Racicot, is of this water. Seriously wounded by a bullet, the young man comes to lose his bearings. Disoriented, he will go so far as to abandon himself to the street and to drug addiction.
Freely adapted from the novel by Francine Ruel, Anna and the old child (Libre expression, 2019), by playwright François Archambault, Louis Bélanger’s series depicts the relationship between this homeless son and his mother, Anna. Played by actress Guylaine Tremblay, Anna is a brilliant seamstress whose professional rise was abruptly interrupted following the accident of her son Arnaud. However, even on the mat, she never despairs.
“How to continue to live, to be happy, when your child is not? How to maintain the link between Anna and Arnaud without the latter, in turn, destroying itself? asks the actress, who immediately knew how to find her character in this story “of such beauty, such humanity”. The question is, according to her, organic. “As parents, we feel what our children feel, but we know deep down that we can’t save everything, that we don’t have all the solutions. »
If, in fiction, the mother is often at the origin of the worst evils, this is not at all the case here, affirms Guylaine Tremblay: “No, it is not necessarily the mother’s fault if everything does not work out. not going well for her child. We see it well in Anna and Arnaud. The filial relationship is quite normal, they love each other very much and they are good with each other. “They have a real bond, continues the actress. “For example, I love when they shop together because all of a sudden they just become a mother and son together again. We see what they could have been” if the worst had not happened.
As parents, we feel what our children feel, but we know deep down that we can’t save everything, that we don’t have all the solutions.
The anecdote is not trivial. She acts a bit like a glimmer of beauty and hope that counterbalances the ugliness, worry and terror that this courageous mother faces on a daily basis. This is consistent with this series which, she specifies, is in a constant search for balance. “Because life is also that”, ups and downs, which everyone goes through as best they can.
Until the last minute
This game of balance, Nico Racicot also had to tame it for his role of itinerant son, selfish in spite of himself, with qualities below that he himself no longer sees. “At the beginning, it was very hard for me to read the script because I saw the ingratitude of a son towards his mother, even if it is involuntary. So I wanted to tap into Arnaud’s sincerity, since the other characters speak of him as a benevolent person who cares about those around him. »
The challenges didn’t stop there for Nico Racicot. He indeed had to appropriate and embody the drug addiction of Arnaud, a universe which was as foreign to him as that of the street. “The drugs affect him physically and mentally. All his decisions are based on his consumption, his discomfort. And even though he was shot and lives in pain, his sense of humor is still there,” he explains.
This duality, this gentleness in violence, this tenderness in misery, Guylaine Tremblay hopes that it will be rich in lessons for all. She would like people to stop “looking for the flaw”, to reconsider homelessness as something more complex, broader too, it also affects the families of these people. “We cross the city seeing them every day,” she observes. Couldn’t we at least smile at them and say hello so that they are no longer just ghosts? »
It remains that the series is dark. Nico Racicot believes that some will find it difficult to watch Anna and Arnaud, precisely because the series addresses homelessness head-on. “You have to go to the end of the show to grasp all the depth and all the humanity of Arnaud”, he warns. To go further in the reflection, the actor also invites the public to listen to the podcast born of his meeting with Étienne, the son of the author Francine Ruel who inspired his book. It all led to a powerful discussion that still leaves him speechless to this day.