Third tale by Fred Pellerin adapted for cinema, The Harvester of time pushes the imagination of the Mauricie poet into a new dimension. Without denying either his verve or his Saint-Élie-de-Caxton, which he has been describing and fantasizing since time is time.
With pleasure, we find his characters, so familiar now: Toussaint and Jeannette Brodeur, owners of the general store, the blacksmith Riopelle and his daughter the beautiful Lurette, the priest Neuf without much authority – what a wig! -, Méo, the still alcoholic barber, not to mention Madame Gélinas, now mother of 472 children. Completely revised, the cast includes, among others, Pier-Luc Funk (as priest) and Marc Messier (as barber).
There is still something new, including the stranger “with spontaneous existence” called La Stroop (Céline Bonnier) – a pretty sonic anagram of Proust. As a liberated woman, aloof, she sows distrust; his powers are scary. The only one who appreciates it is the young Bernadette (Jade Charbonneau), the other novelty and central voice of the story.
After going through Luc Picard (director and actor in Babine and Esimésac), the lyric exuberance of the famous storyteller is this time put into images by Francis Leclerc. The result goes beyond the social chronicle. With the filmmaker of Barefoot in the dawn, horror hangs over the fictional Saint-Élie-de-Caxton. The Grim Reaper prowls around, threateningly.
Of course, a legend around death like that of The Time Harvester was more suitable for a horror film than Babine and her village fool in search of love, or thatEsimésac and the villagers’ dreams of money. Francis Leclerc could have fallen into a simple caricature, but he succeeds sufficiently in dosing the whole of anguish to terrorize us.
The sequence of the killing, a magnificent cinematographic find detailed by the director in an interview, unfolds a series of shots in which a black cape gradually covers the body of the deceased. Thrilling.
Between the Leclerc touch and the narrative tics of Pellerin (the voice over which tells, the puns, the convoluted explanations …), The Time Harvester superimposes points of view and voices – that of the narrator, that of Bernadette at two different ages, that of “little Fred” (Oscar Desgagnés, excellent double of Pellerin) who corrects the memories of his grandmother. It translates in many ways on the screen. We retain the double roles of certain heads and especially the sequences which take up a scene two and even three times. A nice nod to the tale, a narrative genre subject to oral transmission, to memory and its forgetfulness, to everyone’s interpretation.
Tale assumed, The Harvester of time nevertheless clashes with the realism of some of his images. These segments, which showcase Fred Pellerin’s youthful years, break the charm of even more magical settings, including those made of cardboard. It is an aesthetic and temporal retreat which nevertheless also contributes to making fun of death, to trying to flee from it. Time passes, faces remain. The legends too.