René Richard Cyr hammered this home during the press conference preceding the theatrical release of Our sisters-in-lawan adaptation of Michel Tremblay’s legendary play. “My film is not a musical,” he said, specifying that the sung numbers became for him a dramatic engine rather than a pretext to sing a tune.
However, to fully appreciate the proposal of the filmmaker and producer Denise Robert, we must accept that we are indeed in a musicalwith all that this implies in terms of exaggerations, caricatures and excesses. Because if the essence of the theatrical work is preserved, we find ourselves here in front of a dynamic and colorful show that is highly entertaining, which puts aside any concern for realism.
Somewhere on the Plateau Mont-Royal in the early 1970s, Germaine Lauzon (Geneviève Schmidt), a housewife, mother and bingo enthusiast, wins a million Gold Star stamps. Already dreaming of the new furniture, appliances, clothes and toys she can get from the company’s catalogue, she invites her sister, sister-in-law and neighbours to a party of stamp collage; liqueurs, chips and sweets as a bonus.
Beneath the seemingly banal exchanges of gossip and confidences, lust boils and gradually increases the tension. Each in turn, the guests slip stamps into their handbags. What are a few rolls in this abundance? When Pierrette (Véronic DiCaire), the sister that Germaine has disowned, arrives in the middle of the party, the rumbling threatens to turn into a real earthquake.
Oscillating accurately between comedy and drama, René Richard Cyr’s screenplay manages to celebrate the flamboyance and resilience of women often condemned to a repetitive and colorless life, without losing sight of the extremely contemporary issues addressed in the original text. Even if Daniel Bélanger’s compositions do not all have the same striking force, the rhythmic and extravagant staging gives each one its reason for being and blurs the lack of experience of some actresses in dance.
The artistic direction, which relies on retro, exaggerated visuals, with pop and sparkling tones, fully assumes its cheesy side, notably through its frequent use of extremely emotional close-ups alternating with offbeat musical numbers taken in long shots, which sometimes recall Gene Kelly, sometimes the Quebec soap operas of the 1960s.
The result is funny, dynamic and gripping. Touching? Less than the play, perhaps, because subtlety is not the primary impulse. Or because it is extremely difficult to play the comic and the tragic at the same time, or to make characters based on archetypes human.
By choosing to keep Michel Tremblay’s body of work intact, René Richard Cyr manages to highlight all the financial, sexual, family and marital concerns of women prisoners of their condition without ever falling into didacticism, miserabilism and, above all, judgment. He celebrates these women, recalls their beauty, their courage, the power that resides in their bonds.
Then, when the actresses find the right tone — special mention to Geneviève Schmidt, breathtaking in the lead role, as well as to Véronic DiCaire, Pierrette Robitaille, Anne-Élisabeth Bossé and Diane Lavallée, impeccable in an uneven cast — we take flight, nothing less.