The National Day of Quebec is a great opportunity to celebrate our works here. Here are some suggestions.
The period series Désobéir: Chantale Daigle’s Choice, which takes place between November 1988 and December 1989, becomes, alas, a series very much of its time, a time when struggles won for nearly 35 years are overturned. It’s very good, what the team behind this production has meticulously concocted, with remarkable attention to detail. In the main roles, Éléonore Loiselle and Antoine Pilon are killing the small screen.
They wanted to make us experience online harassment and digital misogyny from the inside. With real messages, actually sent. Really received, above all. They wanted to scare us. And let’s say that in terms of anxiety, precisely, it’s successful. The shock documentary by Léa Clermont-Dion and Guylaine Maroist, in which four women entrust the hell of online harassment, hits hard, certainly in broad strokes, but well.
Young Joey Bélanger brilliantly embodies this shy man who gains confidence thanks to his farmhouse. His two accomplices, Emma Bao Linh Tourné and Oscar Desgagnés, are also amazing in their respective roles: Alice, the determined and go-getter social media specialist, and Max, the brilliant entrepreneur whose idol is Joseph-Armand Bombardier. Coco Ferme is an all too rare opportunity for Quebec children to see young people who look like them on the big screen. An opportunity that all families should not hesitate to seize.
It may sound cliché on paper, but it’s not. Good morning Chuck winks at the world of television without however making it the heart of its concerns. The episodes talk about addiction and rehabilitation with humor and sensitivity.
I was turned upside down by the Mégantic choral miniseries, a neat and loaded production by Alexis Durand-Brault and Sophie Lorain. Truly, it’s impossible not to cry at the distress and horror experienced by the residents of Lac-Mégantic in the middle of the night on July 6, 2013, when a train full of crude oil destroyed their center -city.
There are so many elements to dissect in this abundant and baroque work by Club illico, as if the director, screenwriter and actor had injected everything that nourishes and inspires him: his favorite actors, the 1990s, his taste for the busy sets, his fascination with strong and painted female characters, his exploration of the middle class as well as his love of carefully chosen pop music.
It’s a pure joy to find them in the new episodes of A guy, a girl, version 2023. It’s funny, rhythmic, current and punchy. Yes, the magic is still working, 20 years after the last episode of this comedy aired in March 2003.
With a tone perfectly modulated by a formidable cast, which also includes Fabiola N. Aladin, Hamza Haq, Denis Houle, Marie Brassard and Martin-David Peters, Viking will delight admirers of Stéphane Lafleur’s cinema. As a fourth feature film, the filmmaker offers a completely original story, which reveals something of our humanity while eradicating the intrinsic humor that stems from it, sometimes even with poetry. It’s not that common.
About Antoine, it’s charming, funny and moving. It’s good to see characters on TV guided by good intentions, who tame each other and build healthy and caring relationships. Really, we watch the show, we laugh and we think: yes, it still exists, people who have their hearts in the right place.
If Pier-Luc Funk doesn’t land in the non-gendered acting categories of the upcoming Gemini Awards gala, Houston, we have a problem. The 28-year-old actor gives a breathtaking performance in the fourth season of the excellent miniseries Plan B. From one episode to the next, the actor goes from a finished asshole to a distressed adult that the we would feel like hugging.
If the show abuses folkloric characters, you know, the ones who express themselves so colorfully, the show seems to poke fun at people who live outside of urban centers. If the TV series depicts a rough environment, it is accused of amplifying prejudices about the poverty – intellectual and material – of the inhabitants of a package of villages in Quebec. Fortunately, Les pearls du Club illico avoids these pitfalls thanks to its sensitive, funny and poignant texts.
