Vanishing lines | When the balloon of friendship bursts

The film vanishing lines, which brings together Catherine Chabot, Mariana Mazza and Léane Labrèche-Dor, recounts the reunion – which goes wrong – of three high school friends. The work seen by its creators and performers.

Emilie Cote
The Press

“How comforting, yet toxic and boring friendship can be. With her usual outspokenness, Mariana Mazza could not have summed up the plot of the film better. Vanishing lineswhich opens July 6.

Dans cette comédie hautement dramatique, inspirée de la pièce de théâtre de Catherine Chabot, qui cosigne le scénario de son adaptation au cinéma avec Émile Gaudreault et qui porte le chapeau de coréalisatrice avec Miryam Bouchard, trois amies du secondaire se retrouvent à Montréal pour faire la fête. Or, la soirée dégénère rapidement en règlement de comptes et conflit de valeurs.

Fille d’immigrants, Sabina (Mariana Mazza) travaille en finance et fait beaucoup d’argent. Elle habite à Montréal, tout comme Valérie (Léane Labrèche-Dor), chroniqueuse culturelle pigiste dont les revendications sociales et écologiques cachent une jalousie face à l’argent. Quant à Audrey (Catherine Chabot), elle vit en Beauce, où elle s’occupe de sa mère malade et mène une vie trop rangée à son goût.

Les retrouvailles des trois amies commencent au vernissage d’Amber, la copine de Sabina (une anglophone francophile de la Colombie-Britannique interprétée par Victoria Diamond). Valérie et Audrey sont accompagnées de leurs amoureux.

Plombier, amateur de chasse et propriétaire d’un pick-up, le personnage de Maxime de Cotret (le fiancé d’Audrey) incarne « le gros bon sens » et l’authenticité. Pour sa part, Mickaël Gouin se glisse dans la peau d’un professeur de philosophie qui roule à vélo. Pauvre, il se considère néanmoins comme intellectuellement supérieur à la moyenne et il prône un couple ouvert avec Valérie…

Bien que tous cherchent à avoir du plaisir, leurs conversations finissent toujours par tourner au vinaigre en abordant des sujets chauds de leur génération comme l’environnement, la parentalité, l’argent et la reconnaissance, mais surtout, la dualité entre l’image et le bonheur.

Le concept de Lignes de fuite vient du philosophe Gilles Deleuze, a expliqué en conférence de presse Catherine Chabot, qui incarne une jeune femme anxieuse qui voudrait une vie « moins prévisible ». « C’est d’écouter la voix intérieure qui crie en nous […] to listen to the impulse to be ourselves. »

Catherine Chabot says she took all “her anxieties and contradictions” to integrate them into six characters who have the “crossroads age” of their thirties. “That evening, everyone is going through a crisis and has blind spots. »

Despite their great differences, they all ask the same questions. “Am I in the right place and have I made the right choices? “, she continues.

One thing is certain, the tension mounts throughout the evening of reunion. “We feel that the presto is going to blow up”, as Catherine Chabot puts it so well.

Make you laugh and think

Catherine Chabot worked in co-production with Miryam Bouchard (My own circus, December 23). The latter liked that the film tackles eco-anxiety with humor. To use his words, Vanishing lines makes us both “laugh and feel really guilty”.

We won’t tell you more about these famous scenes… But know that Vanishing lines lives up to its comedy-drama title.

The shock of the values ​​of the characters gives rise to tasty dialogues which can recall those of the Decline of the American Empire.

For Léane Labrèche-Dor, the film denounces the status quo that we endure day after day until “the balloon bursts”. She is delighted to see imperfect characters in the cinema, including her own. Like Valerie, we are all jealous of our friends at one time or another in our lives. The film skilfully makes us understand “that we don’t want to be that”.

In fact, there are us and our surroundings in each of the six characters. “We all have an anxious friend or another who makes boring comments”, underlines Mariana Mazza.

“We have all experienced an evening where the alcohol arrives and we start to tell truths that we should not have said, adds Mickaël Gouin. What I like about the film is that nobody is right and nobody is wrong. »

“Humor is often the best way to deal with a subject”, adds the one who is delighted to be in a film as funny as it is intelligent.

A closed session of 45 minutes

The scene that leads to the end turns out to be behind closed doors for about forty minutes. For the game to be as convincing as possible, director Miryam Bouchard points out that the actors and actresses rehearsed a week before turning on the cameras and that the filming was done largely in chronological order. “It was a great luxury. »

On his side, Mariana Mazza wanted to thank Catherine Chabot for the role she gave her without an audition, “on a silver platter”. “You saw my sensitivity,” she told him.

At a press conference, Mariana Mazza also said she admired Léane Labrèche-Dor and Catherine Chabot, who were breastfeeding their babies during filming.

Say Catherine Chabot originally wrote Vanishing lines because she wondered if she could have children in our warming world…

“The answer is 16 months old and is called Josephine. So yes, there is hope! “, she concluded.

Vanishing lines hits theaters July 6.