Acting
A beautiful stripper hires renowned criminals to exact revenge on those who raped her in her motel room.
A man obsessed with his award-winning lawn goes to great lengths to keep it looking great when mushrooms suddenly start appearing all over the yard.
A young boy learns the rituals of what his father and his friends perceive as manhood on a weekend hunting trip.
Bernadette has a yen to chuck it all and go back to nature, in this French-language Canadian film. That's just what she does after carefully leaving her wedding ring where her affluent husband, a lawyer, can see it. She has bought a farm, complete with a run-down farmhouse and a live-in cranky old man. Soon, because of the wonderful effects that her sympathy and her outsider's perspective have, her neighbors perceive great improvements in their lives. They attribute these changes to something miraculous (perhaps taking a cue from her name), and hordes of needy people descend on her farm.
Filmed in French, this Canadian film was based on a popular Quebec-based radio serial. The man of the title is miserable miser Seraphim (Hector Charland). Misanthropic to the point of insanity, Seraphim takes great pleasure in destroying the lives of everyone with whom he comes in contact. His current target is Alexis (Guy Provost), the ex-lover of Seraphim's long-suffering wife Donalda (Nicole Germain). Taking into consideration its daytime-drama source, it's understandable that Un Homme et Son Peche is plotted and paced like a soap opera. Star Hector Charland had previously spent 10 years portraying Seraphim on radio, so he's got plenty of "mean" at his disposal for this big-screen spin-off.
A robbery at the secluded country home of a wealthy old man goes horribly awry.
The film was produced and directed by Gratien Gélinas, who also plays the lead role of Fridolin, and who also wrote the screenplay. It is of course a parody of the novel by Alexandre Dumas fils, La dame aux camélias . As the press noted in 1942: “…the work is a real revenge of Quebec popular culture on French classical culture” or even “ Fridolin sticks his tongue out at France!”. The film is like a bomb. We must not forget that at the time of the premiere, Gratien Gélinas was one of the most influential authors in the province. His plays were performed in French in Quebec, and in English across Canada.
