Rosalie Bonenfant | Dive into Inès as into oneself

For his first big role in the cinema, in the feature film Ines, by Renée Beaulieu, Rosalie Bonenfant is on every stage. Scenes where raw emotion is filmed very closely, for which the actress left a bit of herself. Interview with the director and the actress, on the eve of the film’s premiere, as part of Rendez-vous Québec Cinéma.

Marissa Groguhe
The Press

Dans le sympathique décor du bar Emerald, avenue du Parc, Rosalie Bonenfant et Renée Beaulieu prennent la pose pour les photographes de presse. C’est un mardi matin, il est tôt, mais l’actrice et la réalisatrice se prêtent au jeu. On les sent complices (Rosalie nous dira plus tard qu’elle considère Renée comme une « amie », « même si ça sonne improbable »), mais aussi enthousiastes à l’idée de parler de leur film, dont la sortie aura lieu le 6 mai.

Quelques minutes plus tard, attablée avec La Presse pour discuter de son premier rôle dans le film, Rosalie Bonenfant compare l’effet des flashs des photographes de si bonne heure à celui que nous avons dû ressentir en visionnant Inès la veille, tout aussi tôt le matin. « Regarder Inès pour commencer sa journée, ça doit donner un drôle de ton », lance-t-elle, tout sourire.

Regarder Inès à n’importe quel moment de la journée est une expérience potentiellement bouleversante. Rosalie Bonenfant confie avoir pleuré lorsqu’elle a lu le scénario pour la première fois, tout comme lorsqu’elle a vu le produit final, qu’elle a trouvé « tellement touchant ». Au premier contact avec l’histoire imaginée par Renée Beaulieu, elle n’a pas seulement été chamboulée. Elle a également su, tout de suite, que ce rôle était pour elle.

Rosalie was the last to audition and Renée Beaulieu immediately knew that she would be his Inès, says the director.

To be 20 years old

During filming, the director “totally trusted” her actress to immerse herself in the role. “Renée told me very early on that she was not going to mother me,” says Rosalie Bonenfant. She told me it’s something I had to experience on my own. »

So, Rosalie dove into Inès. “There was a parallel between what she saw and that moment in my life, adds the actress. It’s a coming of age story, and for me too. It was my biggest dream that was happening, I was 23, I was not that far from Inès. There is an interiority that I share with her, a great vulnerability that I don’t often show. The emotional path was one valve away from being accessible. »

Inès has just turned 20. His mother is alive, but an event has rendered her incapable of communicating. With her father (played by Roy Dupuis), the relationship is fusional, as if she had remained at the stage where she was when Inès was 10 years old and her mother’s head left her body. As an adult, the young woman searches for who she is. Addiction, sex, lack of sleep, mental illness form a destructive cocktail that will lead Inès to forfeiture.

“In my entourage, people lived through this passage quite hard. I think it’s a difficult time right from the start. But if we add mental health problems, we enter a state of great imbalance, ”says Renée Beaulieu.

Descent into hell

“There is a kind of gaping hole in Inès, but she does not necessarily know why, observes Rosalie Bonenfant. She searches for something to cling to, but it’s nothing. It is such an inherent distress that we should not seek to intellectualize it. »

“Everything happens in the eyes, there is not a lot of dialogue,” she adds. Indeed, Renée Beaulieu depicts the pain of Inès mainly through images, by filming her character very closely.

The interpretation of this “descent into hell”, as Renée Beaulieu describes it, asked Rosalie Bonenfant to leave a bit of herself there.

“Maybe because I’m not necessarily trained as an actress,” she adds, laughing. I didn’t learn to invent an emotion. I had no choice but to find my own emotions and lend them to Inès. »

After one of the most captivating scenes, she remembers, when she returned home, her body had not yet emerged from the state in which she had plunged it during filming. “I took off my makeup, I went to shower, I put on my pajamas. When I sat up on my bed, my hands were shaking and my eyes were watering. I wasn’t sobbing, but my body had suffered something and it didn’t stop right away. I was not in distress, but I told myself that something had happened for real. »

actress and more

Rosalie Bonenfant is an actress, but she is also an author, TV and radio host, columnist, screenwriter, lyricist. Between his work The time I wrote a bookhis role in the animation of Two Golden Men and Rosalie or his own show What is the trip?in addition to so many other projects, Rosalie Bonenfant could not let the game take all the place she wants in her life.

” [Être actrice], that’s what I’ve always wanted to do, she says. I never stopped wanting to do this. I even have the impression that it colored my gratitude in relation to my contracts in the last few years, because I thought to myself that it’s so much fun, that I’m really grateful, but that’s not it, my destiny, in the end. That’s not what I want to do the most. “Ready to try everything, she let herself be carried away by the opportunities, while fearing that we would forget that her passion, her goal, is the game.

Ines is therefore a turning point for the 25-year-old actress, who will be on the stage this year for The Corriveau, then go and shoot another film in France. His face on the poster is the best way to present himself. “It will pass or it will break. Either the movie is going to come out and people are going to say, “Oh boy, we understand why she chronicles that girl…”, or they’re going to be like, “Wow, that’s a great business card!” “, she launches, on this joker tone that she often has throughout our discussion. Be that as it may, she adds, “this film is a real tour de force and [elle a] can’t wait for people to see it.”

Ines will premiere this Thursday as part of Rendez-vous Québec Cinéma, then in all cinemas from May 6.