From father to films | The Press

When you have lost your father rather young as happened to me, you become sensitive to all the father-daughter representations in fiction. I noticed that when Michel Côté died, people highlighted his many roles as a father where he only had sons, as in CRAZY Or From father to copoften forgetting My daughter, my angel, in which he played alongside Karine Vanasse. But I admit that it was not his best.

These father-daughter representations, I remember them perhaps because they speak a little for my father who was, like many men of his generation, a man of few words, who looked like he had come out of a movie. mute. But a picture is worth a thousand words, they say.

To tell the truth, my father had a hard time ordering pizza on the phone because he hated talking. So can you imagine saying “I love you”? He couldn’t, even if it burned his lips. His heart as big as the Earth was compressed by this sinister education wanting that a man, a real one, hides his emotions, like the heroes of Hollywood. And it was the heart that gave out.

My father never said “I love you” to me (but he wrote it to me), and I never saw him cry in front of the TV or in the cinema. When we watched a family movie, we knew he was emotional when he started coughing during a heartbreaking scene, and we held our breath. Until his death, I lived this suspense: what was going to make my father cry? In the end, it never happened. At least not in front of my eyes.

In the cinema, most of the time, the fathers protect their daughters and educate their guys, that gives an idea of ​​the filial relations. Protecting his daughter is the emotional basis of the most recent TV hit, The Last of Us, inspired by a video game, which came to get me, even though I couldn’t stand the post-apocalyptic series anymore, because there was this father-daughter relationship in the story. That of Joel (Pedro Pascal), a man who could not save his own daughter from death, and who gives meaning to his life years later by protecting Ellie (Bella Ramsey), a teenager who makes him think to his missing daughter. For that, he is ready to kill everyone, like my father wanted to crush with his tank all the guys who made me cry.

In a very intense scene, Ellie narrowly escapes being raped and when Joel finds her, he scans her eyes in anguish to see if the men he knows too well have not destroyed her. It reminds The road of the writer Cormac McCarthy, who died this week, in a strange synchronicity. This novel that you can not forget after reading it, adapted to the cinema in 2009, the writer’s greatest success, was in the thoughts when the smoke of the Canadian forest fires transformed the city of New York into a movie by Denis Villeneuve. The roadit is the story of a father who tries to preserve the humanity of his son in a world in ashes.

In The Last of Us as in The roadsons or daughters, what must be understood is that men have failed to preserve life, mothers are absent, and fathers must face the horror in the eyes of their children. We don’t need another hero, sang Tina Turner, in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome…

He never pushed me away when I called him “Daddy, little ray of sunshine” while taking him in my arms. It was my way of laughing at my dad and cracking his armor because he could look the dumbest on the planet at times.

We loved watching movies together, in silence. He was the last person who could speak over a film, which appealed to the young fundamentalist cinephile that I was. I sometimes see our favorite films again, to feel his presence, to relive these emotions shared with him. Mississippi Burning, Goodfellasthe documentary When We Were Kings…

As luck would have it, one of the last films we saw at the cinema, a few weeks before his death, was Barbarian invasions by Denys Arcand, in 2005. At the end, when Rémy chooses euthanasia and says his goodbyes, he receives a video of his daughter (Isabelle Blais) who cannot be present, because she is very far away on a boat, in the train to sail towards his destiny. She said to him: “It’s been too long since I’ve seen you, my dear papa. My daddy. My daddy. I will have missed you all my life. Tell yourself that I am a happy woman, I have found my place. I don’t know how you did that. »

I almost fainted when I saw this scene at the cinema with my father by my side. I was having difficulty holding back my emotion because I knew he was holding back his, and I wanted to protect him. But Isabelle Blais spoke for me. Even today, I cannot see this scene of Barbarian invasions without crying all the tears in my body.

And since then, it doesn’t stop, the tears, when I see a father and his daughter on the screen, and I cry for two. In the nine hours of the trilogy Lord of the Rings, the most dangerous bit for me is when Éowyn bids farewell on the battlefield to her uncle Théoden, who is a father figure. I envy the complicity between Daphnée and Pierre in the series From Peter to daughter on Tou.tv. I love George Clooney’s awkwardness with his daughters in Descendants like the very deep relationship between trainer Frankie and boxer Maggie in Million Dollar Baby by Clint Eastwood. For Father’s Day, and to carry on a conversation, maybe I’ll fix up When We Were Kings. It’s been too long since I’ve seen you, my daddy.