In Louise Archambault’s new film, a priest takes homeless people on vacation by the river.
While his church is falling apart, Marc Côté (Patrice Robitaille), street chaplain, learns that he has just inherited the manor whose father was the steward when he was a child. Hesitating to announce to the homeless that he will soon have to drive them out of the presbytery which shelters them, the idealistic priest, with the complicity of the pragmatic sister Monique (Élise Guilbault), decides to take them to Gaspésie for the summer. However, the arrival of this colorful urban fauna does not please François Riendeau (Sébastien Ricard), Marc’s childhood friend and new steward of the opulent residence.
Street people, Marie Vien knows well. In fact, the screenwriter of Augustine’s Passionby Léa Pool, whose central character, a progressive nun, shows a certain kinship with that of the One summer time, volunteered for a few years at the Maison du Père. We also feel in the choice of characters not only the love and respect she has for them, but the imperative need she has to do justice to the different faces of homelessness in order to get them out, the time of ‘a pastoral episode, of anonymity.
Thus, all profiles seem to be represented in this social fresco produced by Louise Archambault, where we find the sensitive and benevolent look she cast on her atypical heroine in Gabriella and about his third age lovers in He praised birds. From Madame Cécile (Louise Turcot), a lonely and vulnerable widow, to Maître (Guy Nadon), a lawyer who lost everything in gambling, via Sam (Martin Dubreuil), a soldier who returned broken from Afghanistan, Julien (Cedric Keka Shako), refugee from the Congo, Molo (Pierre Verville), who has been stumbling all his life, and his guardian angel Angel (Marc-André Leclair), who fled his environment because of his sexual orientation and identity. Without forgetting Sébast (Justin Leyrolles-Bouchard), who lived from one foster home to another, and Miali (Océane Kitura Bohémier-Tootoo), an Inuit who wanted to discover the big city.
In fact, there are so many characters in One summer time to which we immediately attach that two hours seem very limited to tell their trajectory. Should we have sacrificed a few or chosen a format other than the feature film? Solidly assisted by the director of photography Mathieu Laverdière, attentive to the beauty of the river landscapes, Louise Archambault manages from the start to isolate them each in their bubble in order to underline their loneliness and their singularity. While the tensions dissipate in the disparate group, well defended by a cast in tune, the filmmaker creates beautiful moments where everyone is gathered without words being necessary to testify to their new solidarity.
From a premise that might seem cruel (why get people off the streets if it’s to bring them back to their misery two months later?), One summer time updated in the form of a luminous choral narrative that does good Parable of the lost sheep. Except that, in this case, the good shepherd also got lost along the way. What better than to follow the course of the river to find oneself or to dive into it to be reborn?