Bernard Émond is an artist, a real one, without compromise, as there are few. His words are unique, compelling and authentic. His films lack sparkle, but they shine in a different way, capturing the ordinary but profound drama in the lives of unnoticed people.
According to a popular criterion, one could say that nothing happens in Émond’s films, but in doing so one would miss the essence of this work which precisely seeks to capture the beauty of the permanence of human feelings in a disoriented world where everything happens. “It’s beautiful,” says Dr. Jeanne, the film’s main character The gift, in front of an Abitibi landscape. “It’s austere. There are a lot of people who don’t like that,” replies the old doctor Rainville, in a formula that sums up the spirit of Émond’s films well.
In Four family stories (Leméac, 2022, 128 pages), the filmmaker reconnects with the writing of fiction that he had already practiced in 2002 in his novel 8:17 p.m. Darling Street (Lux). In literature, Émond is not a novice. Screenwriter of all his films, he has already published, in addition to his novel, There are too many picturesand Comrade, close your post, two remarkable collections of essays published by Lux. While reading the most recent of these, I had also experienced a rare experience in the life of an essay reader: I agreed with everything. It will therefore be understood that I am an admirer of the work of the man I like to consider as the Quebec Chekhov.
Émond, it’s no secret, loves the Russian writer, whose short story An ordinary story (1889) inspired his film The Diary of an Old Man (2015), and this shines through in all of his work. The sober style, the twilight atmosphere, the slow rhythm which magnifies the silence, the melancholic gaze on a fading past, the uncertainty created by a time of transition and a kind of lucid hope of low intensity are characteristics shared by the two artists. It’s sad and fragile, but also beautiful and relaxing.
The characters from the short stories Four family stories are no longer young and drag existential wounds behind a peaceful façade. In the first story, Françoise, a 67-year-old biologist who has been living in the United States for decades, must return to Montreal following the death of her brother Paul, who died of a heart attack, at age 65, at the entrance to the Ontario Street overpass, in his childhood neighborhood.
Françoise hates her brother, a drug addict who has made those around him see all the colors since adolescence. While carrying out the usual funeral arrangements, Françoise was surprised to meet people who frequented and loved her brother. She learns that Paul worked in a community restaurant, cleaned the parish church for free, and was popular with everyone. “Your brother was a good man,” the nun in charge of the community restaurant even told him.
Francoise is shaken. “I had a good life, she told herself, but I wasn’t good. And in this hated brother, in this poor neighborhood that she wanted to flee at all costs, she discovers that kindness exists and feels born in her the desire to tell, in French, to her American children, the story of her past. Quebec.
This idea of “little goodness”, borrowed from the Russian novelist Vassili Grossman (1905-1964), is at the heart of Émond’s work. Unlike its grandiose version, embodied in Christian or communist ideals, “little goodness” is without ideology. It is the goodness of everyday life, the incomprehensible impulse that gently pushes us towards others, a kindness that may be motivated, Émond suggests in Comrade, close your postby “the gratitude that we sometimes feel in front of the beauty of the world, the richness of our heritage, or the simple kindness of a stranger” and which “commits us to give back”.
In the second short story of the collection, Mathieu, a retired music teacher in mourning for his wife, takes care of his first wife, a boosted and unattached nurse who abandoned her family years earlier to embark on humanitarian work. . In the third short story, Paul, an itinerant and solitary engineer, reconnects by chance, in Sudbury, with the children of his father’s second wife and finally has the impression, by associating with these modest people, “to return home”.
In the latest story, a sound engineer worn out by a life of patachon must welcome, in Montreal, the Chinese daughter of his banker and anglicized son, with whom he has hardly any chemistry. Despite everything, for the rest of the world, of his world, he will receive the young girl in English, but also in French, at the airport.
On the screen as on the page, Bernard Émond’s little music in minor key overwhelms and captivates worried souls.