After the poetry deployed in Le torrent (2012), based on the short story by Anne Hébert, and The little girl who loved matches too much (2017), based on the novel by Gaétan Soucy, Simon Lavoie returns to a more radical and demanding.
“If I had refined this script for 10 years, tried to obtain financing of 10 million, I would not have made this film. It had to be something instinctive, intuitive, for which I was going to bring together people ready for anything, like Jean-François Casabonne,” summarizes the director.
“For an actor or an actress, what Simon offers is a fantastic playground because in this film in particular, it’s an incursion into a space where you can explore your interiority, go into areas that you knows, but in a more drastic way,” says the actor, happy to have worked again with the filmmaker who directed him in The Little Girl Who Loved Matches Too Much.
Evoking the filmmaker’s achievements with Mathieu Denis, Laurentie (2011) and Those who make revolutions half have only dug themselves a grave (2016), Melting transports us, like Nulle trace (2021), in the not so distant future. While he borrowed from Bergman, Tarkovsky and Béla Tarr in his previous film, this time, the director turns resolutely to Pierre Falardeau, Pierre Perrault… and David Cronenberg.
“There were lots of desires for cinema that had been in my mind for years,” says Simon Lavoie. At the beginning, there was this old idea that I had, which goes back a long, long way with my brother. We imagined stories where a worm circulated from one cell to another. »
“What Simon is proposing is daring, it’s a strange, unusual territory,” believes Jean-François Casabonne. This film is a mixture of genres that we don’t often see here. What really interested me in this very particular film is that it highlights the entire construction of memory, how we bring it to life, how it can disappear and then be reborn. This angle is rarely addressed in our cinematography, but Simon dares to go there and I, as an actor, put myself at his service. »
At the same time prison drama, political fable, anticipation film, essay film and horror film set in a Quebec where only impoverished English is spoken, Se melter features the prisoner number 973 (Casabonne) who, with the complicity of a housekeeping attendant (Monique Gosselin), helps other political prisoners (Louise Laprade, Guy Thauvette, Luc Morissette, Fayolle Jean and Pierre Curzi) to escape a life sentence thanks to tapeworm that he carries within him. In the process, he thus collects the memory of the Quebec people.
“Horror cinema appeals a lot to the senses, both in sound design and in body horror,” explains Simon Lavoie. In Cronenberg’s cinema, we find this obsession with the parasite, with the excrescence; it’s something universal. »
“My character becomes the receptacle of this memory. I was very attracted by the metaphor of the worm because basically, if we stand up high and look at this great founding artery that is our river, we can compare it to a poetic worm,” says Jean- François Casabonne.
Supported by texts by Anne Hébert, Hubert Aquin, Fernand Dumont and other authors who thought and defined Quebec, Se fondre stands out for its way of carrying within itself the memory of great Quebec filmmakers. Thus, this prison drama was filmed in Sorel prison like Ordres (1974), by Michel Brault.
“It was fantastic to play in this place which is now a pot factory,” reveals the actor. Simon also shot with old leftover 16mm reels, which give an old-fashioned look to the film, which becomes like a kind of Polaroid of a past projected into a future. It’s clever, the idea he had of creating this procession of memory by bringing together the whole range of actors and actresses, who are treasures… Ferraris! »
“In this film, which is ambiguous, I admit, we see that the elderly prisoners are the guardians of this culture that must be preserved, like the copyist monks in the Middle Ages,” points out the director. We did not try to film in the same cells, but the fact of filming there was coherent in this entire network of visual, thematic, semiotic and symbolic elements. »
Furthermore, Simon Lavoie adds that anyone who has chosen Quebec as a territory can in turn be “custodian of this historical consciousness, this culture and this language that must be cherished and preserved”.
“It’s our way out of Quebec,” believes the filmmaker. For me, nationalism is eminently positive, vital and inclusive. The term, unfortunately, has become pejorative, but in Quebec, it does not have the same definition as in Europe after the Second World War, as in Trump’s America. It is this nationalism that created the Quiet Revolution, modern Quebec. I think we must assume it and claim it without embarrassment. »
