Don’t go looking for a nice priest in Ababouinéthe new film by André Forcier: you won’t find any. The only priest who shows empathy towards his flock soon defrocks himself. It’s 1957, in the Faubourg à m’lasse, where a child in love with poetry will soon bring a revolutionary wind. Read: secular. This, to the great displeasure of a vicar, who would like to keep those he calls “the little people” in the great darkness, while himself loving to be in the full light. In this film as funny as it is fiercely anticlerical, nostalgia is hard to bite. André Forcier continues his poetic, fanciful exploration of the Quebec of yesterday. And he does it with his family.
As usual, Linda Pinet, with whom André Forcier — Marc-André to his friends — forms a couple, produced the film. A film that the filmmaker co-wrote with their sons, Renaud Pinet-Forcier and François P. Forcier, as well as with Laurie Perron (who forms a couple with the latter) and friend Jean Boileau. In short, it is tightly woven screenwriting, if you will.
Recently unveiled at Fantasia to an enthusiastic audience (the applause and delighted cries when the vicar gets his due towards the end!), Ababouiné is in line with the previous ones I remembera union story set in the Abitibi mining world in 1949, and Kiss me like you love mea joyfully twisted family chronicle set against the backdrop of conscription, circa 1940.
To reveal André Forcier, met before the release: “At the origin of the film, there are two very simple things: the desire to make a film without cell phones, because I hate them, and the nostalgia for the time when you could smoke in movie theaters – hence this teacher who smokes a pipe in class, in the film. And then, I wanted to talk about uncle Marcel, who had finished first at the École du meuble, under Borduas. He was anticlerical before his time. He inspired the theme of the film. Uncle Marcel was deeply anticlerical, so at the time, he caused a scandal in the Forcier family. The film is dedicated to him.”
This uncle became André Rochette, the said teacher (Martin Dubreuil). A poet, André is preparing to publish a dictionary of lost or forgotten words entitled Ababouinéan adjective characterizing a ship immobilized on a sea that has suddenly become calm. Prolaic, André refuses to teach religion in his class.
Talking about childhood
The discussion held in the wake with François P. Forcier and Linda Pinet clarifies the writing process.
“When we start a story, it’s often based on one or more memories of my father,” confirms the first. “His memories are anchored in reality, but from there, we take off. History with a capital H, we do a bit what we want with it.”
And François P. Forcier uses the image of a funnel from which only the best ideas emerge.
“It doesn’t matter who the ideas come from,” says Linda Pinet. “There are no egos at the script stage.”
The Pinet-Forcier household, François P. Forcier compares it to a “convenience store” and to a “ shop “, that is, a place where the family both lives and works, without there being any distinction between the two activities.
“It’s completely intertwined,” he sums up. “When we went on family trips as children, between 4 a.m. and 8 a.m., my father and mother worked and wrote. Ever since we were little, my father has only talked about cinema: we were born into it, into this passion. And that’s also my relationship with my father. There are children who go fishing with their father. I write screenplays with mine.”
After a pause, François P. Forcier continues: “My father talks a lot about childhood these years. I have the impression that he feels a certain nostalgia. It’s normal: the older you get, the more nostalgic you become for your childhood. I think that’s why the main characters in this film are children.”
In fact, the plot is centered not on the teacher-poet, but on two of his students with opposing values: Michel Paquette (Rémi Brideau), who walks with canes because of polio, not that it stops him from annoying the clergy, and Angèle Moisan (Maïla Valentir), a holy water stoup frog. Everything separates them, and yet…
Shattering reality
In addition to Michel, Angèle, the teacher Mr. Rochette and the vicar Cotnoir (Éric Bruneau), the film is full of colorful characters, from Cardinal Madore (Rémy Girard) to the publisher Archange Saint-Amour (Gaston Lepage), including his daughter and associate, Rose (Mylène Mackay). And there is Délima Paquette, Michel’s adoptive mother (Pascale Montpetit).
Not forgetting Le Matou, this half-man, half-cat teenager (Miguel Bédard)… Let’s not forget that Forcier’s work already includes a mermaid (Kalamazoo) and a cyclops (The Countess of Baton Rouge), among other examples of this magical realism that we love so much in the filmmaker.
“Marc-André loves cinema where we can explode reality,” explains Linda Pinet. I remember, Kiss me like you love me Or Ababouinéit’s his way of telling the history of Quebec. The era depicted in AbabouinéMarc-André and I, we experienced it: the Family Rosary On the radio, we knew about it. Then the Quiet Revolution… I mean… I remember the day my mother decided to stop going to church: after five children, she was threatened with excommunication because she refused to have any more!”
In this respect, by setting the action during the pivotal period just before the key date of 1960, when a desire for secularism was beginning to emerge, the film paints a pre-revolutionary portrait. However “fractured” the reality it presents, Ababouiné is nonetheless a microcosm of the society of the time.
Referring to his recent series of films exploring the Quebec of yesteryear, André Forcier concludes, half-jokingly: “Linda told me earlier that I would be ready for a modern film.”
What if he had already realized it? Indeed, the concept of secularism continues to be at the heart of many quarrels, Ababouiné takes on an eminently current dimension.
The movie Ababouiné comes out on August 23.