Poet, playwright and novelist, Erika Soucy honed her skills as a screenwriter by participating in the writing of Leo, series by Fabien Cloutier. When she was asked to write her own series, the Côte-Nord native, who knows many women who had children before the age of 20, wanted to put forward a single mother as strong as imperfect mother at 16. Result Pearls, where, in 13 episodes, she tackles serious themes with finesse and lightness. And this, in an authentic language.
“It’s our language, our expressions, our sentence structures and sometimes even our accent,” explains the author. It is a very assumed choice. I can’t talk about the people back home in very heavy French; you had to go all out. What we hear there are things that my mother, my father, my aunts say. I think they will recognize each other. »
In Pearlswe meet the flamboyant Stéphanie (Bianca Gervais), who is raising her daughters Laurence (Cassandra Latreille), born of an unknown father, and Juliette (Anouk Tanguay), daughter of Yoan (Lucien Ratio) — an irresponsible teenager with whom her new blonde, Coralie (Camille Felton), dreams of starting a family.
Perfectly embodying this mother who goes through several areas of turbulence, Bianca Gervais knew how to create with her young playing partners, her “girlfriends”, such a bond that each scene she shares with each other turns out to be a moment of grace.
“There was a lot of work upstream, readings, rehearsals; we also had a lexicon recorded by Erika to pronounce the expressions correctly, says the one who started playing at eight years old. We had to rough stock to play, but we had established that we would stay in the fun. I wanted to give them what I would have needed at their age. We introduced the return of lunch dancing to get out all the drama. We also went to dinner together. The relationship you see on screen is not fabricated; we woven it before filming and while we were filming because we had to Pearls, it is solid, true and spontaneous. And there, we’re going to eat an ice cream cone! »
two solitudes
In the absence of being able to count on Yoan, Stéphanie can turn to her best friend, Cynthia (Sharon Fontaine-Ishpatao, revealed in Kuessipan, by Myriam Verreault). Unfailingly supportive, Cynthia sometimes tends to go overboard, which has the effect of putting Cynthia in trouble. Through this character, Erika Soucy wanted to address a part of the reality of the Aboriginals of the North Shore.
“Back home, a White and an Innu best friends, that doesn’t exist. In any case, I have never seen one, remembers the author. It’s a statement. It’s two solitudes. It’s changing, but there’s still a long way to go. Like Cynthia, the children in the series have been placed in non-native families; it was the only contact I had with the First Nations during my childhood because my aunts were foster parents. It is therefore through this prism that I write about them. I developed the character of Cynthia with an Innu friend from Mashteuiatsh, who took a writing course, attended all of our brainstorm and read all versions of the scripts. »
To bring Erika Soucy’s universe to the screen, content producer Patrick Lowe called on Hervé Baillargeon, to whom we owe the first two seasons of Simon Boulerice’s moving series, six degrees. “It had to move, reveals the director, who favored the shoulder camera for the sake of realism. I wanted moments of cinema, moments where it breathes. There are scenes where I would tell the actors to move as they wanted so that it would be natural. I really tried to marry the energy of the actors. »
Around Stéphanie evolve colorful characters, including the mayor of the village (Normand Canac-Marquis) and his assistant, whom we will love to hate, the formidable Mme Caron (Chantal Baril). Over the course of the episodes, we will discover the links that unite Stéphanie to the couple formed by Esther (Linda Malo) and Martin (Bruno Marcil), parents of Antoine (Isaac Brosseau), friend of Laurence. Without forgetting Donald (Claude Despins), father of Stéphanie.
Only small downside in this series with irresistible charm: some dialogues are completely inaudible. Sound or diction problems? Let’s hope that we will be able to solve this problem for the second season, already in preparation.