Adapted from a play by his compatriot Michel Marc Bouchard, whose work has already inspired his film "Tom à la ferme", this psychological thriller of five one-hour episodes arrives Monday on Canal +, a few weeks after the platform Canadian Club illico.

It follows Mireille (Julie Le Breton), a renowned embalmer, back in her hometown to embalm her mother "Mado" (Anne Dorval, Dolan's favorite actress), at the risk of rekindling a trauma that occurred 30 years earlier. ...the night Laurier, his brother Julien's (Patrick Hivon) friend and neighbor, "woke up."

Camping the youngest drug addict of the siblings, Xavier Dolan, 33, also appears in the cast, largely identical to that of the play for which he had "love at first sight" in 2019.

"I immediately wanted to adapt it into a series", explained, during a videoconference, this jack-of-all-trades who "grew up with TV", with a mother who still follows "a lot of soap operas".

"It's a medium that has accompanied me throughout my existence even though I had only made films until now", adds the director of "Mommy" and "Laurence Anyways", whose references go from "Buffy against the vampires" to "Six feet Under" via "Mare of Easttown" and "The night of".

"It was a new challenge for me that carried me through the pandemic, during which I started writing the series" and was able to "question myself".

To buckle the buckle

"Sensitivity", "emotion"... "We find everything that we like about Xavier Dolan", summarized the director of the original creation of Canal +, Olivier Bibas, welcoming the filmmaker's ability to monopolize the "format serial".

In fact, the series oscillates fluidly between the present and the 90s and plays with codes specific to the genre such as "cliffhangers", "sometimes perhaps deliberately coarse end-of-episode hooks", according to its creator, who has also took the time "to reveal the characters in their vulnerability".

Embellished with a soundtrack by Hans Zimmer ("Interstellar", "Gladiator") and David Fleming, it mixes the filmmaker's favorite themes: dysfunctional family where we want to "scream very loudly + I love you but I hate you+", repressed desires, self-quest, ostracism, "life, death, mourning"...

To the point that the Quebecer believes he has "completed the loop of (his) obsessions".

And intends to "take time" for him, "exhausted" by filming the series and eight feature films since 2009.

"I feel like I'm coming to a point in my life where I no longer have any ideas, any desire to tell these ideas", explained the director, whose last two films, "Matthias and Maxime" and "My life with John F. Donovan", did not draw crowds.

"I need to rebuild my desire for this environment, for this profession, for all the sacrifices that entails, especially at the end of the project. Because the preparation, the filming, it is always exhilarating for me", but not after, specifies the one who wants to "travel" and "develop other passions, be interested in architecture, interior decoration".

Xavier Dolan also questions the “relevance” of his art, focused on “the intimate” and “the infinitely small”, in “a pandemic, belligerent world, in total perdition, where everything goes a little balls. I have the impression that people now tell stories that are much more political, social and engaged, and I don't know if I would do that kind of cinema."

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