The first work by the Canadian duo Sarah Watts and Mark Slutsky, You Can Live Forever (You can live forever in French version) is a film about coming of age (coming of age) sensitive and generous. It depicts the romantic encounter of two teenage girls living in a community in which religion reigns in the 1990s.
Set in Saguenay – but mostly in English – the film focuses on a local community of Jehovah’s Witnesses, including Jaime’s (Anwen O’Driscoll) aunt and uncle. It was after her father’s death and her mother’s depression that the young woman left Thunder Bay to live with them in Quebec.
Under the worried and moralizing gaze of those close to her, Jaime will meet Marike (June Laporte), with whom she will develop a bond that goes beyond friendship. The complicity between the two actresses is admirable and breathes a lot of reality into the romantic encounter. The film is punctuated by intense, powerful and intimate scenes, which are overwhelming thanks to a balanced tango between the performers.
Like many (too many) films about LGBTQ+ youth, You Can Live Forever revolves around trauma, heartbreak and pain. The work manages to overwhelm us, of course, but let us point out that it would be welcome to move further away from these themes to depict the life of people from sexual diversity in the cinema.
Strangely, the era in which the story takes place – the 1990s – seems to us sometimes in the spotlight, sometimes neglected. The hidden cigarettes, grunge and retro game consoles set the table well from the start of the film, but the dialogues seem to us rather anchored in 2023.
The desire not to make faith the antagonist and to present the point of view of Jehovah’s Witnesses fairly makes, at times, our adhesion to the narrative more difficult. All the same, we depict very intelligently the consequences, sometimes harmful, of dogmatic beliefs.
Although the film is a fiction, the fact that Sarah Watts herself grew up a lesbian in a community of Jehovah’s Witnesses surely has its share of credit for this empathetic and conscientious scenario.
You Can Live Forever is a successful first effort that has us looking forward to what the team of filmmakers will bring us in the future.
Indoors
Drama
You Can Live Forever (V.F.: You can live forever)
Sarah Watts and Mark Slutsky
With Anwen O’Driscoll, June Laporte, Liane Balaban, Hasani Freeman and Antoine Yared
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