SPOILER ALERT: INTERPRETATION FOLLOWS
This film is slow and subtle. Ostensibly a character study, the film is really an allegory for Quebec—it's inward, alienated present, its relations to the rest of Canada, its sad and difficult past, and most important, its painful recognition that its choices threaten to destroy any chance it might have at a future.
I particularly liked the lead actor. Taciturn and lumbering, Patrick Drolet embodies wasted potential. Sensitive in his work but farouche in company, Drolet conveys as much through omission as he does through action—the emotion he feels but refuses to express, the poetry he imagines but cannot write, the decisions he understands but fails to take. Émond's direction is everything he is not.
The film also alludes cleverly to literature. Balzac's "Lost Illusions" is the most obvious parallel as a story of squandered talent, but I also caught references to Racine's "Phèdre" (who won't dirty her hands) and Goethe's "Wilhelm Meister" (who slowly comes to acknowledge his responsibilities). In this line, Émond is the Turgenev of Quebec: critical in analysis but generous in sympathy.
