Antoine and Roxane, two actors, embody on screen the friendship between Brother Marie-Victorin and his student Marcelle Gauvreau. Faced with the chaste and mystical bonds shared by these lovers of Quebec flora, the two actors — who had a brief relationship — are forced to question their own relationships with intimacy and nature.
By agreeing to adapt for the cinema the correspondence between the man of God and his student – an epistolary exchange dating from the 1930s, which dissects and analyzes human sexuality and desires from every angle -, Lyne Charlebois (Borderline2008) was not content to delve into the most romantic aspects of this love story and to take up the classic codes of the biographical film.
By adding a current framework, she manages to underline what, even today, stands out in this relationship as sensual as it is intimate: the capacity to open up completely, to abandon oneself, to show curiosity. together.
Even if the transitions between the two eras sometimes lack fluidity, the game of mirrors achieves its objective by forcing the viewer to introspect and question the commodification and superficiality of contemporary romantic relationships.
This nostalgic approach fails to take a more critical look at an era where the same loves were crushed by the yoke of religion and where glaring inequalities led to much violence. A questionable choice, but fully accepted, which bets on tenderness, gentleness and romanticism.
To remain faithful to the words of the two correspondents and limit voiceovers, Lyne Charlebois decided to transpose the romantic writings of Marie-Victorin and Marcelle Gauvreau into dialogues. If, at first, we flinch at these poetic and extremely intimate impulses, we quickly allow ourselves to be caught up in the game of the proposition, more contemplative than oriented towards action, more literary than cinematographic.
The filmmaker thus pays homage to words and everything they make us see and think; love and sensuality, certainly, but also curiosity, knowledge and the religious and erotic memory of Quebec.
She is helped in this mission by her two main performers, Alexandre Goyette and Mylène Mackay, who declaim lyrical flights with conviction, and who lose no ounce of naturalness by reintegrating more contemporary speech and attire.
Through its staging which gives full space to the landscapes and flora of the province, it also recalls, as Marie-Victorin continually did, the equality of humans with nature, as well as their ignorance of it. here, creating a mirror effect between the beauty and fragility of nature and those of feeling.
“If this film is not good, it is at least very beautiful,” said the director in an interview with Duty last week. We can only nod and let ourselves be carried away.