The film Arsenault and son, is the story of a family of poachers who, using their garage as a front, elude wildlife authorities for years. It is also the story of two brother-opposites: Adam, a gentle giant with a community spirit who yearns for a better half, and Anthony, a toxic heartthrob, deceitful and hotheaded. When Émilie, a charismatic radio host, arrives in the village, the first begins to dream before the second decides to get involved. But there is more, much more… This project, the filmmaker Rafaël Ouellet matured it for a long time.
“I come from Bas-du-Fleuve and it happens at home. The first ten pages I sent to producer Stéphanie Morissette [Les affamés]it was in 2010: I was still looking for funding for Truck. »
Which explains thatArsenault and son is in line with this point in the continuity of this magnificent predecessor, which also featured two brothers. The background brings, however, new considerations.
“When I was young, poaching was still tolerated, but there was much less than before. There were a lot of spectacular anecdotes related to this past. A wildlife officer told me current, modern stories, with surveillance cameras, wars… He told me so many that I could have made a TV series out of them — maybe I will. But in short, I focused on one aspect. »
This aspect is the clan: “The family name of the characters in Truck, it’s Racine, recalls the director. I always come back to that, to where I come from. I’ve been a Montrealer for 25 years, but I don’t want to tour the city. My region is what I like to revisit; it is what is strongest in me. The brother-brother and father-son bond interests me: it speaks of me, it speaks of us, of our territory, of what we are as a people. It’s the same for sister-sister and mother-daughter relationships… Of course, we can mixer that. Looking ahead, what do we want to perpetuate, and what do we want to part with? »
This is the whole dilemma of Adam, a poignant character who harbors dreams that at first glance are achievable (adapting the garage to electric cars, starting a family, etc.), but which we gradually understand are illusory. In fact, Adam is a prisoner of his environment. In Emilia, he believes he has found a soul mate as much as a buoy. The pas de deux in which Guillaume Cyr and Karine Vanasse engage, all in innuendo and speaking silences, is a lesson in acting.
Gender Merger
Preliminary versions of the scenario, the framework remained essentially the same, indicates Rafaël Ouellet. “The first names and the title remained, as did the desire, the idea and the basic inspirations. However, I was going for a film with even more family drama, anthropology, picturesqueness, “this is what it’s like to live a life as a hunter in the Bas-du-Fleuve”. I refocused, but honestly, I found my pleasure in it. »
We readily believe it, and this pleasure is in this case contagious. Not thatArsenault and son be a joyful work, but it really is an excellent film, full of strong scenes, heartbreaking sentimental considerations, tension that smolders and then explodes…
The opening sequence sets the tone in this regard and is brilliant for many reasons. We see Adam carefully installing a surveillance camera not far from his hunting hide. With him is Anthony (Pierre-Paul Alain, a revelation), who has just returned home. There follows a striking “ride” in pickup on a forest road at the end of which Anthony kills a bear using a rifle hidden in a secret compartment of his vehicle. It’s not the season and, reluctantly, Adam agrees to help his brother dispose of the carcass.
Said sequence, therefore, announces several tricks. Firstwe see in front of the virtuosity deployed that the cinema missed Rafaël Ouellet, and vice versa.
“I’ve been sucked into TV these years. I have produced about 80 hours of television in ten years. The major difference between TV and cinema is time. The time to think about the scenes, to make them…”
Second, we guess that an interesting fusion of genres is taking shape. Indeed, in the music, we recognize the clear influence of Ennio Morricone: there is western in the air. However, from developments to twists and turns, it is in the regions of film noir, rural and sylvan atmosphere as a bonus, that the plot ventures.
“During the financing process, the mixing of genres, which is fashionable, was embarrassing, and I was looking for a term to define the film. Criminal family drama? It’s not pretty, but it summed it up nicely. Then, I came across “country noir”, and it clicked. There is a tradition as much in cinema as in literature. It’s something that speaks to me, that I understand. I had fun with the tropes [conventions] ; I diverted them, “twisted” them. But all that, I stopped saying and writing it in my presentation materials, and I just do », Specifies the filmmaker, with a smirk.
What is Black Country? Movies Flesh and Bone (1993), by Steve Kloves, with Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan, and Winter’s Bone (2010), by Debra Granik, which revealed Jennifer Lawrence, are good examples. The context is contemporary, rooted in rurality with, often, themes of conflicting filiations and financial precariousness. As in film noir, anti-heroes run to their loss or nourish vain hopes of a better fate, of a better life, the criminal angle becoming a way out or an obligatory passage.
Outside of authority
In the case of’Arsenault and sonit is however an earlier title from this subgenre, i.e. At Close Range (like a mad dog, 1986), by James Foley, about a criminal clan – well, well – dominated by a Machiavellian patriarch (Christopher Walken), who most inspired Rafaël Ouellet. Also with the drama Heavy (1995), by James Mangold, where Pruitt Taylor Vince falls madly in love with the “too beautiful for him” Liv Tyler.
“These two films are in my veins, but I didn’t realize that until I started writing. I forced myself not to see them again so as not to be influenced even more. »
The result is a multi-layered film, both moving, stressful and entertaining in the first degree, and richly referential in the second. A cinephile filmmaker, Rafaël Ouellet multiplies tacit or explicit influences, but integrates them with finesse into a unique, signed whole, which grabs you from the start and keeps you captive until the end.
Full of acuity and devoid of any form of condescension in its portrait of a small regional community, the film is also enriched with a fascinating sociological subtext, the Arsenaults living on the fringes of the laws and hardly recognizing the authority: “The members of my family — I have a lot of uncles, aunts, cousins — for the most part don’t have a boss…”
The father (Luc Picard) uses an application to “prevent the police from listening to them”, and Anthony’s animosity is even more marked. We think about this party in the forest, during which the latter curiously resembles the fallen “Shaman” of the Capitol insurrection…
“This image of Anthony is from before the events on Capitol Hill, but in the scene, we see that one of the characters is wearing a QAnon t-shirt. Anthony’s entourage is more extreme than his family. »
But there again, Rafael observes more than he judges. For the count, his film does not really take sides either with law and order or with outlaws. Moreover, gray is better suited to “black”, whether classic or country.
The film Arsenault and son hits theaters June 17.