“I would never have been able to do that 10, 12 years ago,” says Philippe Falardeau. That is Raspberry timeseries of 10 episodes by Florence Longpré (Can you hear me ?, Audrey came back) and Suzie Bouchard, improviser, humorist and author, series carried by the music of Martin Léon. It is based on an original idea by the filmmaker, to whom we owe in particular Mr. Lazhar and My Salinger Yearand who signs here his first realization for television.
“I learned a lot from their writing. I arrived at the time when I was a down screenwriter, because I had assimilated the scriptwriting codes. I never considered myself a screenwriter; i like screenwriting and i think i am capable of scripting films, but it is not my drive first. Working with them allowed me to emancipate myself, ”he said during a press briefing at the Cinémathèque québécoise after the screening of the first two episodes of the series produced by Trio Orange.
Filmed mostly with a handheld camera in order to be closer to the actors, Raspberry time depicts a colorful family, the Conleys, who have just been struck by a great misfortune. Struck down by a heart attack, John (Anthony Lemke) is survived by his wife Elisabeth (Sandrine Bisson, who shows the extent of her wide palette), a municipal official thanks to whom the farm survives, and their sons, Junior (Elijah Patrice) , an image-conscious soccer player, and William (Xavier Chalifoux), who has been deaf since the age of two and speaks sign language.
At the Conleys, who switch from English to French from one sentence to another, we also find Martha, the imperial matriarch (Micheline Lanctôt), her son Denis (Paul Doucet) and her daughters — whom Elisabeth nicknames the crows — Rachel (Ellen David), Maureen (Anne Beaudry), Estelle (Nicole Leroux) and Peggy (Kathleen Stavert).
There are also the seasonal workers that Elisabeth confuses with each other: Francisco (Edison Ruiz), very attached to John, for whom he had worked for several years; Emilio (Jorge Martinez Colorado), who does not speak French despite his 10 years on the farm; and Luis (Johnny Cortes), Francisco’s best friend.
Without restraint
It’s in a field of beets, in 2005, during the filming of Congorama, that Philippe Falardeau had the idea to write about seasonal workers. Every morning, he saw a bus of migrant workers passing by on their way to the fields. Since no one is really interested in them, he wanted to know what their life was like.
“All the underlying issues of their working conditions are addressed in the series, in the details of certain scenes. Sometimes it’s as if there are remnants of the days of the cotton plantations in the southern United States. These issues are embedded in the decor until episode 10. We had given ourselves the mandate not to make it the dramatic engine of the series; it is more their humanity that interests us. »
For the needs of the series, which alternates fluidly between drama and comedy, Florence Longpré and Suzie Bouchard did a lot of research. Not without difficulty, they obtained confidences from seasonal workers. In Raspberry time, they wanted to talk about the beautiful and the ugly. And also incommunicability. Not only from that which reigns between the Conleys and their employees, whom they seem to keep at a distance, but also from that which slows down their own exchanges, which are often cacophonous.
Philippe Falardeau reveals that he had not encountered so much casualness in writing since The left half of the fridgehis first fiction feature film, which allowed him to ignore the constraints of television.
“I was told about drop-off points, commercial breaks; I thought to myself that I couldn’t do that because I wouldn’t be good and because the scenes had been written without the “what’s going to happen?”. It’s great the fun, but super nerve-wracking to bring an episode to a soft landing. Does it take the “what’s going to happen?” next episode? I am quite confident. The tension we create is not a tension of “there is a corpse in the ditch, who did it?” ; we do not benefit from this tool and we have not tried to create artificial ones. I really like the end of episodes, because they are sweet. »