Le Démantèlement (The Auction)
Spring 2014 Features series
Sunday, May 25, 2014 at 8:00pm
Acadia Cinema's Al Whittle Theatre
450 Main Street, Wolfville, NS
Directed by Sébastien Pilote
Screenplay by Sébastien Pilote
Starring Lucie Laurier, Gilles Renaud, and Gabriel Arcand
Rated NR ·
1h 51m
Canada
French
Le Démantèlement (The Auction)
This poignant family drama from Sébastien Pilote explores the sacrifices of one working-class man in economically depressed rural Quebec, a region struggling to hold on to its past.
Le Démantèlement follows rugged sheep farmer Gaby (Gabriel Arcand; Congorama) as he tends stoically to the quotidian needs of his isolated family farm, and watches as his neighbours sell off theirs. One day, his eldest daughter, Marie (Lucie Laurier; Bon Cop, Bad Cop), arrives from the city and announces she is getting a divorce. Oblivious to her father’s own financial constraints, she asks him for a large loan so she can keep her home. Gaby agrees to help his daughter; then, without telling her, sets out to sell his farm, dismantling the only life he has ever known.
The beautiful pastoral landscape, so warmly captured by Pilote, makes the undoing of the farm all the more sorrowful. Arcand, in a world-weary, King Lear–inspired role, delivers a subtle, moving performance as Gaby. Like its protagonist, who is caught between a vanished past and an uncertain future, Le Démantèlement looks both backwards and forwards. Pilote seems to tenderly channel the spirit of Quebec’s ethnographic filmmaking of the sixties and seventies (Michel Brault, Pierre Perrault, Claude Jutra), while examining the changing state of rural Quebec in the wake of its vanishing agrarian legacy.
“Shot on 35mm film, Le Démantèlement looks gorgeous, with the rolling lakeside landscape of Gaby’s farm seemingly bathed in a permanent golden twilight.” (Stephen Dalton, The Hollywood Reporter)