Les Nôtres: In Quebec Feature, A Community Rallies to Hide a Shameful Secret
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B
In Les Nôtres (Our Own), set in a fictional suburban Quebec town, a petite 13-year-old girl, Magalie (Émilie Bierre), collapses during a school dance class. Her family doctor determines that she’s pregnant, and well past the termination point. Her parents, school social worker, and neighbours demand answers but Magalie refuses to identify the father, as she becomes the focus of gossip, social media attacks, and pressure.
That this modestly budgeted French-language drama from sophomore director Jeanne Leblanc (Isla Blanca) is getting a wide release in the United States and Canada is due, no doubt, to its topicality. The combination of the post #MeToo media revelations on sexual violence over the past three years — and the recurrent reports of the abuse of minors by teachers, clergymen, coaches, and other men in positions of power — are crushing.
Or in the case of QAnon, literally crazy-making.
Can it really be as recently as 2000 that American Beauty, starring Kevin Spacey as a middle-aged man lusting after a teenager, swept the Academy Awards? Or perhaps what was old is new again. The story of the mystery pregnancy, the accusations of sin and punitive community conformity are all outlined in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 novel, The Scarlett Letter.
The mystery here isn’t the point. The viewer almost immediately knows the identify of the father of Magalie’s unborn baby. He’s the paunchy, middle-aged, married, utterly respectable town mayor, Jean-Marc (Paul Doucet).
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When Maglie’s father was killed five years before, Jean-Marc stepped up to help his widow, Isabelle (Marianne Farley) take care of Magalie and her little brother, Sam. How long he has been grooming Magalie isn’t clear, but his declarations of feeling for her indicate a history: a mixture of romantic flattery, emotional blackmail, and threat.
But where can he direct the blame? With Jean-Marc’s urging, Magali’s mother and the mayor’s wife Chantelle (played by co-writer Judith Baribeau), turn their suspicions on Magalie’s male best friend, Manuel (Leon Dicona Pelletier).
In what feels like one plot twist too many, Manuel is the elder of two Mexican brothers adopted by Jean-Marc and Chantelle two years before. The mayor’s wife soon guesses the truth about Magalie and her husband. Apparently willing to sacrifice her adopted son for the sake of her marriage, she stands by her man. In the film’s most skin-crawling scene, she tries to seduce her husband by reminding him of the “girl” she used to be.
Les Nôtres is well-crafted and movingly acted, especially when things aren’t directly said, particularly when Magalie, facing multiple pressure fronts, slips into her stone-faced survival-mode lockdown. For better and worse, the script has a clear depiction of contemporary good and evil and an efficient movie-of-the-week purposefulness, to the point where you half expect to see a helpline number before the closing credits.
Though the subject of sexual exploitation is treated with tact, the depiction of how the town scapegoats the young immigrant Manuel strains to make a point about how communities project their sins on others. Whatever dark secrets are kept in small suburban Quebec towns, anti-Mexican racism is probably not a significant one.
Les Nôtres. Directed by Jeanne Leblanc. Written by Jeanne Leblanc and Judith Baribeau. Starring Émilie Bierre, Marianne Farley, Judith Baribeau, and Paul Doucet. Available on demand and in select theatres June 18.