Veteran theatre director René Richard Cyr makes his feature film directorial debut with Nos Belles-Soeurs, opening Thursday in Montreal.
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Les Belles-Soeurs is unquestionably the francophone Québécois play best known to anglos here, which is why the creative team behind Nos Belles-Soeurs, a musical adaptation of the Michel Tremblay classic, are hoping they might actually have a local franco film that we blokes will go see.
It opens in Montreal on Thursday, and a copy with English subtitles begins a run at the Cineplex Forum on Friday. The title in English is Sisters and Neighbours.
“Les Belles-Soeurs is the Quebec play that has been performed the most all over the world,” said veteran theatre director René Richard Cyr, who makes his feature film directorial debut with Nos Belles-Soeurs. “People see themselves in this film. It’s a portrait of a working-class community. It’s not a bourgeois neighbourhood. It’s not the countryside.”
Added Geneviève Schmidt, who plays the main character, Germaine Lauzon: “It’s a small story, but it’s also universal. It’s no coincidence that it’s the Quebec play that’s been seen by the most people all over the planet. Envy, jealousy, seeking happiness though material goods — these are all themes that are even more relevant now than they were 50 years ago.”
Les Belles-Soeurs premièred on stage at the Théâtre du Rideau Vert in 1968 and it forever changed the Quebec cultural milieu. For the first time, characters in a major play spoke in joual, the slang-filled language that working-class Montrealers actually spoke, and the other revolutionary aspect was the fact that all of the key people on stage were women.
The story is simple. Germaine Lauzon, a housewife without much money, wins a million trading stamps, and she’s convinced she’s now guaranteed lifelong happiness, given the stamps can be traded in for all the consumer items she can’t afford. She invites her sister, sister-in-law and a bunch of female friends to come by that night to help her paste the stamps into books to be traded in. You don’t have to have seen the play or the film to imagine that of course things don’t go quite as planned. Let’s just say the other women are seriously conflicted about Germaine hitting the golden jackpot.
The play was translated into English and other languages after it became a huge hit here in the late ’60s. Perhaps the most memorable version was done by Martin Bowman and Bill Findlay, who adapted it into the rough ‘n’ tumble contemporary Scottish spoke in Glasgow, calling it The Guid Sisters.
“That’s pretty well still my language,” Cyr said, referring to the salty street French of the original Tremblay text.
Cyr grew up in a blue-collar household in the east end, in precisely the same sort of not-so-rich ‘hood as the women in Les Belles-Soeurs.
“It was the first time we saw ourselves on stage,” Cyr said.
Then he corrected himself: “Not the first time we saw ourselves. It was the first time we heard ourselves on stage.”
The film is inspired by the musical version Cyr mounted at the Théâtre d’Aujourd’hui in 2010, with Quebec singer-songwriter Daniel Bélanger penning a batch of songs for the production. When Oscar-winning producer Denise Robert proposed to Cyr that he make a film based on his adaptation, he said it was an offer he couldn’t refuse.
But he soon realized the film would have to be significantly different, and he and Bélanger significantly cut back the amount of music, feeling that simply wouldn’t work as well on the big screen.
The women still do occasionally break into some mighty catchy songs and there’s some fun upbeat choreography as well courtesy of the local dance duo Team White.
“I hope people forget that it was a play and a musical and come see a film,” Cyr said. “I didn’t make a musical. I made a film where sometimes a choir arrives and they start singing. Daniel Bélanger wrote new songs, he shortened songs. Four and a half minutes on stage is fine. Four and a half minutes on the screen is an eternity.”
The cast features a who’s who of Québécois actors, notably, in addition to Schmidt, Anne-Élisabeth Bossé, Guylaine Tremblay, Debbie Lynch-White, Véronic Dicaire, Valérie Blais, Pierrette Robitaille, Diane Lavallée, Véronique Le Flaguais, Jeanne Bellefeuille, and, in her first role in a film, singer Ariane Moffatt.
In some ways, the story is tough-as-nails. These characters don’t have easy lives. The women have abusive husbands, face poverty, bitter sibling rivalry and jealousy among the friends. But both Cyr and Schmidt underline that these are strong women and the last thing Cyr wanted to make was a dark drama. There’s a joyous resilience here.
“I wanted it to be beautiful,” Cyr said. “At the beginning of our conversation, you said it was a pessimistic play. Imagine that film — grey, brown, sad, dirty. I didn’t want that. At home, growing up, it was full of colour. It was a clean, tidy house. We lived five to a room, but it was clean. It was beautiful.”
And he loves the fact that it’s all about the women.
“It’s a tribute to our grandmothers, to our mothers, to women,” Cyr said.