A filmmaker par excellence of rural life, Guy Édoin perhaps had no idea that when he bought his grandfather’s bicentenary house a few years ago, in his native town of Saint-Armand, in the Eastern Townships, where he had already shot three shorts and a feature, he would find inspiration there for his fourth feature film, Borders.
“What I like in the creation of a work is all the interconnections between the films, explains the director. Like all filmmakers, I have my obsessions. Sometimes I try to go somewhere else, but it always brings me back to the same place. I am not always master of my cinematographic desires. »
Exploration of bereavement, Borders shares its naturalist style with swamps (2011) and the short film trilogy tributarieseither The bridge(2004), dead water (2007) and The beat (2008), but moves away from it by its way of flirting with the supernatural.
“When we took possession of the house, there was an energy that we came to mix when we arrived. I don’t know what it is, but it was inhabited. My grandfather died in the house, my great-grandfather, who also died there, was born in my bedroom, my great-great-grandmother was exposed in the house. Of course, the phenomena we see in the film are fiction, but what certain characters experience, I have experienced. All this fed Borders. »
When my grandfather died in the house, my grandmother wanted to stay for a year to grieve and accomplish what she had to do there. Everything she said she witnessed ended up becoming a form of truth because she believed in it.
In addition to the paranormal phenomena experienced by his grandmother, the three houses of the Édoin farm inspired the director with his three central characters: “It was really a desire from the start to have this sorority. The three sisters arrived very, very quickly in the portrait, their mother too. Often, in the cinema, the woman is the stooge and I wanted to go against this fact a little by creating real characters, real proposals. I didn’t have the idea of making a feminist film, but of showing women who stand up, who rebuild themselves, who help each other, who don’t necessarily need others to show off or protect themselves. . »
Since the death of her father and the departure of her spouse (Patrice Godin) whom she kicked out, Diane Messier (Pascale Bussières) has lived alone with her daughter Sarah (Mégane Proulx). In the eyes of her younger sisters, Carmen (Christine Beaulieu) and Julie (Marilyn Castonguay), Diane has lost her mind because she claims that the spirit of the deceased haunts the ancestral home located on the family farm. At the same time, two American prisoners on the run threaten to cross the Canada-US border, while men dare to come and hunt on the lands of the Messier clan.
“The title of the film refers to the boundaries between life and death, good and evil, reality and madness. From the outset, the border is threatened; there was also this idea of the horizontality of the outline of the border which we brought back to the format of the film shot in cinemascope. We can watch the film with a reading in the psychosis, the madness of Diane, and take it back from the other side in its own truth, which rubs shoulders with this death every day. »
back to earth
Established in Florida for several years, Angèle (Micheline Lanctôt), the matriarch, comes to the rescue of Diane at the request of Carmen and Julie. Angèle will even go so far as to suggest that her daughters sell the farm and move into apartments. What Diane fiercely opposes.
“When my grandfather died in the house, my grandmother wanted to stay for a year to mourn and accomplish what she had to do there. Everything she said she witnessed ended up becoming a form of truth because she believed in it. So we had to create that for some of the characters and make everything plausible by playing with the codes of genre cinema. »
By the same token, Guy Édoin has fun confusing the spectator with certain strange details and defusing it with the words of the demented grandmother (Béatrice Picard): “I wanted to involve the spectator, that he be an accomplice. It was super important that everything be validated by another narrative aspect. It’s a movie that was fun to write. I realized that I was having trouble with an item, that it was slipping through my fingers. At some point, he seemed to go his own way. It was organic. I took the same path as Diane, basically. »
Reunion at the top
Having embodied Marie Santerre in swamps And Ville-Marie (2015), Pascale Bussières returns to the world of Guy Édoin in a role that required a great deal of generosity and abandon from her.
“I don’t think I would have been able to make this film with Pascale 10 years ago. For Pascale, it is a score without a net, it is an act of trust to dive into these abysses. She went far… The scene in the woods, we didn’t shoot it 50 times. As much as possible, we shot in continuity. Moreover, the final scene between Angèle and Diane, we shot it the last day, in the last hours. It was super emotional on set. »
On screen, the emotion is all the more intense since a little less than 40 years ago, Micheline Lanctôt brought Pascale Bussières into the world by giving her her first major role in Sonatina.
“I have chills… I was not naive in this choice of cast. Micheline is a bit like Pascale’s metaphorical mother. I don’t know their whole story and there are businesses that belong to them, but it was extraordinary for me to be able to play squarely in the history of Quebec cinema. This charge belongs to them, it already exists, I don’t need to create it. Each actor also carries all his roles; in the case of Micheline, there is that of Bernadette’s true nature. All this enriches the subtext. »
Borders will be presented at Rendez-vous Québec Cinéma on February 27.
In theaters March 3.