Clara (Lou Thompson) and Sarah (Philomène Bilodeau) grow up in an evangelical Christian community in the heart of the countryside. Cut off from the outside world, prohibited from reading, music and technology, the two sisters, dressed in long black tunics, their hair pulled up in a tight bun, divide their days between household chores, gardening and prayer.
One morning, when Clara wakes up, she finds Sarah’s bed empty. The latter vanished, leaving behind only a sketchbook and a torn postcard in the trash, which fortunately reveals its destination: Montreal. Determined to find her sister and bring her back to “the right path”, Clara in turn flees to the metropolis. There she knocks on the door of her aunt Louise (Édith Cochrane), a free woman, but tortured and alcoholic, who welcomes her and offers her lodging for ten days, time, hopefully, to find Sarah.
Twelve years after the shocking Catimini (2012), where she explored the reality of young girls taken care of by the DPJ, Nathalie Saint-Pierre once again dives with tact and sensitivity into the psyche of an atypical teenager. Through her immersive and poetic staging, the filmmaker becomes one with the gaze and sensations of her protagonist, documenting through images as banal as they are evocative the reverberation taking place between the path she takes through the streets, the parks and alleys of Montreal and that which she creates deep within herself.
As Clara travels through the city, discovering the wonders and perils of the world, gradually taming the bitter taste of doubt and the intoxicating taste of freedom, her posture, her appearance and her perceptions transform, moving from doctrine to questioning. Around her, the metropolis, at first not very reassuring, both immense and stifling, becomes in her eyes a place full of laughter, learning, artistic vivacity and celebrations.
By accompanying her heroine in her slightest flinches, Nathalie Saint-Pierre infuses her film with a dynamism, a vitality and a quality of presence specific to youth, which unfold in an amplitude of images and facial and bodily expressions captured in landscape format, offering a grandiose immersion into the adolescent psyche.
Under the gaze of the camera, Lou Thompson – in his first major film role – and Edith Cochrane form a most endearing duo and multiply the interactions whose spontaneity is matched only by truth. In the eyes, limpid and expressive, of the first, fear, incomprehension, rebellion and agency follow one another, then, placed on her aunt, a woman destroyed and in perpetual mourning, but who forces her to accept doubt , they become only forgiveness, compassion and curiosity.
Even if what she denounces – indoctrination in all its forms – is clear, Nathalie Saint-Pierre turns away from the most common paths, preferring nuance, the plurality of experiences and the intelligence of her characters to clichés and hasty conclusions. A very beautiful film.