Before she turns Antigonewhere we discovered the prodigious Nahéma Ricci, Stéphane Hogue (Indefensible) had contacted Sophie Deraspe for a feature film idea. Not being available, the filmmaker had revealed to him that he wanted to do television. After making the excellent series Black beastwritten by Patrick Lowe and Annabelle Poisson, where Stéphane Gagnon shone, here she is at the helm of Paradise Motela series of six episodes that she wrote with Stéphane Hogue.
“With Stéphane, we share a corner of the country in Lanaudière, explains the director we met at To have to. I know the area well; my father comes from the Magdalen Islands and I grew up in Bas-du-Fleuve. I love the excitement of the city, but we live less with our dead, our ancestors, atypical people and habitual criminals. In the villages, all these people are part of the ecosystem. This is what I like about communities, and what I had already illustrated in Wolves. »
Three years after the death of Noémie (Vivi-Anne Riel), her 14-year-old sister, Jen Paradis (Nahéma Ricci), who left her native Val-Paradis from her home, is the victim of a car accident following which she is having a near death experience. When she wakes up, she believes that Noémie, whose body has never been found, did not commit suicide. The young woman then convinces Alain Renaud (Stéphane Gagnon) to reopen the investigation. However, the latter was forced to retire for misconduct. What’s more, no one in Val-Paradis, where time seems to have frozen like at the motel of Jen’s mother (Isabelle Guérard), sees the idea of unearthing the past with a good eye. “It’s going to suck in Val-Paradis!” warns Sophie Deraspe.
I let myself go to create outrageous characters, strong personalities, people who speak without filter.
“Stéphane has a strong attraction, which I share with him, towards everything that belongs to those who lived their childhood in the 1970s, 1980s, motels and drive-ins. Motel Paradis is happening today, but it feels like it was forty or fifty years ago. All this is due to the choice of places, clothes and vehicles, which mark a lot what the characters are. »
An unusual investigation
Anyone familiar with Sophie Deraspe’s cinema knows that the search for truth is at the heart of the stories she tells, whether it’s an investigation into a missing painter (Search Victor Pellerin), the quest of a young woman in search of her father (Wolves) or the desire to know the identity of a correspondent (The Amina profile).
“I’ve always flirted with the genre, but here, I’m fully into it. It’s an investigation, but not a procedural investigation, where we get into the characters. From the start, we wanted it to be a police investigation into a disappearance, but to be an investigation of the soul that underlies it all. Since Search Victor Pellerin, what my characters are looking for is what is hidden voluntarily or not. I wanted a story with a lot of mysteries, secrets, intersecting links, underlying desires and even quasi-spiritual foundations, questions about our place in the universe, about the place of trees. »
Having surrounded herself with cinematographer Mathieu Laverdière, editor Dominique Champagne and musician Frannie Holder, Sophie Deraspe signs a striking atmospheric series populated by a plethora of characters that are both familiar and disturbing. According to the first two episodes presented at the Festival du nouveau cinema, by his way of playing with this picturesque universe between a nightmarish reality, hallucinated visions and premonitory dreams, Paradise Motel is reminiscent Twin Peaks.
“At Lynch, the atmospheres are very strong, the desires too, so that appeals to me. I really liked the series Top of the Lake, by Jane Campion, where you really feel the place. Tarantino is also an inspiration; With him, it’s very dialogical, the characters take you to really amazing places, and he’s not afraid to bring drama and humor together, to have fun with eras and musical choices. »
If the drama told in Black beast had brought her to more sobriety, Sophie Deraspe affirms that she wanted to have fun this time: “I let go to create outrageous characters, including Polo [Larissa Corriveau] and Rich [Gildor Roy], which arrives in the third episode, strong personalities, like Noémie, people who speak without filter. There won’t be a sequel, but I love my characters so much that, for me, they still exist and live other stories. »