Cinema of the World

synopsis
Dr. Rainville, an old country doctor who has a deep attachment to his patients, is
about to retire and is looking for a successor. Jeanne Dion, an emergency doctor
from Montreal, agrees to come to Normétal to replace him for a few weeks, without
considering staying any longer than necessary in the remote Quebec village.
Normétal is a town in decline whose only large employer, a mine, closed three
decades ago. Life is hard there, and a doctor’s relationship with his patients is
much closer than Jeanne is used to after her experience in a large hospital’s
emergency ward. When the old doctor dies, Jeanne must decide whether to stay
and accept a responsibility that comes with much more commitment than she had
planned on.








Normétal
Normétal is located at the northwestern end of the Abitibi region, 750 km from
Montréal. Built near a copper mine that was active from the late 1930s until 1975,
the village had 2,500 residents at its peak in the 1960s. Today its population is
about 1,000.





Director's notes
After La Neuvaine and Contre toute espérance, La Donation completes a trilogy
about the theological virtues of faith, hope and charity. Many people have asked
me why a non-believer would take on the virtues. I have answered that question
in countless ways, but the best one belongs to the Quebec essayist Pierre
Vadeboncoeur, who writes that these three virtues are universal to the human
condition and work to turn things on their head. They go against the grain, against
fate, against the established order of a jaded, heartless world.
Despite its religious references, La Donation is a film in which there is no god.
In response to the question of how one should live, it gives a thoroughly secular
answer, in which the only transcendence is that of human values. If we truly are
alone in the darkness of the world, all we have is whatever we can give. There is
only the logic of charity to prevent the desert from spreading and making it
possible to re-establish a humane order of things. Charity is what we have when
there’s nothing else left.
Why did I revisit the character of Jeanne, the doctor from La Neuvaine? That film
ended with a kind of stasis, in which all the questions raised remained unanswered.
Jeanne, having been cured of her death wish, had decided to live. But how was she
going to live? How would she give meaning to the rest of her life? In La Donation,
Jeanne answers those questions by changing her life, leaving everything behind,
giving of herself.
The film is built around Jeanne’s discovery of Abitibi and its people. At first glance,
this remote part of Quebec has nothing to recommend it. The landscapes are stark
and despoiled, the urban environment is barebones and dull. But something about
Abitibi exerts a strong pull on Jeanne. A certain light, a particular spaciousness in
the landscape; and, among the people, dignity, openness, generosity, authenticity.
There is something profoundly melancholic about the Abitibi landscape, with its
feral land and its villages not yet a century old but now dying out. It is a metaphor
for a world in ruins in which beauty manages to survive.
In La Donation, as in all my films, the locations are deeply important. I knew that
I would make this film in Abitibi even before I had envisioned its story. Something
about it attracted me, so that is where I looked for and constructed the film’s
narrative. As with La Neuvaine, the setting preceded and determined the story.
The settings in La Neuvaine were the foundations of Quebec: the church and the
village. In Contre toute espérance, it was the anonymous urban and suburban
streets of a modern Quebec severed from its roots and forgetful of its past. La
Donation takes us into the end of Quebec history, in a manner of speaking, or at
least into the end of a Quebec history, in which the church and the village are
dying, natural resources are exhausted, the land is abandoned. And yet something
perseveres. The film says nothing more than this: we will survive if we want to. As
Pasolini wrote, “I mourn a dead world, but I the mourner am not dead.”
After resisting, Jeanne becomes Normétal’s doctor, replacing Dr. Rainville, taking
on her responsibilities, fulfilling her duty. The concept of duty encompasses those
of debt and legacy. The film often returns to the notion that we owe a debt to our
predecessors and a duty to those who will follow us. Many of the film’s scenes
evoke ties (whether existing or severed) to the past, to the land, between generations.
At the end of the film, Jeanne accepts her debt and her duty. She agrees to
be tied to the land and its people, to their past and their future. And that is why in
the final shot, as she stands alone in the Abitibi landscape, she is holding a child
in her arms.
Bernard Émond
may 2009




Review
Eye Weekly -Jason Anderson
The final part of the Quebecois director’s trilogy about hope, faith and charity is certainly as weighty as its predecessors. The spectre of death looms over nearly moment of this story of a Montreal ER doctor who contemplates every taking over an elderly colleague’s practice in an economically moribund rural region. With its catalogue of miseries and air of severity, the film is heavy going to say the least, but the effect is uncommonly powerful whenever a ray of sunlight breaks through the grey.

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