The need for love

In Annie croyait aux esprits (Annie Believed in Ghosts) <<note: the title of this film is now Délivrez-moi (Set Me Free),>> , Céline Bonnier takes possession of  the body of a love starved anti-heroine.

It’s Longueuil on the first day of autumn. All the neighbourhood cats have arranged to meet on the pavement opposite and are watching the scene with great interest. Journalists are chatting about the temperature, the location catering menu and the war of the film festivals <<note:  the New Montreal FilmFest vs the Montreal World Film Festival – viv >>. They’re killing time, waiting for the assistant director to shout “cut!”.  A few moments later a radiant Céline Bonnier emerges from the apartment building where filming is taking place, wrapped up in a huge black Polar jacket.

It would take a full day to explain how a woman kitted out in unbecoming leggings, bootees and an electric blue mini-skirt could brighten up an early autumn afternoon in autumn.  The contact is friendly, the eyes genuine  and … very blue. 

“Annie is hard, in the way a teenager needs to be hard,” she explains. “She’s been raped and is so deprived of love.  In fact she’s a little softy who has only her daughter to hang on to,” she continues, swatting off the stray flies that the wind persists in wafting in front of her eyes.

This is not Céline Bonnier’s first character who hasn’t been dealt a good hand in life.  After hanging up her guns in Monica la Mitraille and playing a junkie mother in the TV series Tag, Bonnier finds herself in the role of a woman who has spent the last ten years in jail for murdering her husband (Pierre-Luc Brillant).  Annie croyait aux esprits tells the story of a woman who, once released, has to win back her daughter’s affections and exorcise the ghosts that haunt her.

“But prison life hasn’t made her bitter. Annie comes out of jail thinking everything’s going to be alright, that she’s going to get her daughter (Juliette Gosselin) back and go off to Vancouver with her.”  Of course, real life is nothing like the movies.

In his film, director Denis Chouinard (Clandestins (Stowaways), L’Ange de goudron (Tar Angels)) continues his exploration of the world of life’s victims.

“And really this is what is most fascinating,” says the actress.  “Annie’s light and shade come from the same source – her lack of love.  She has a childish side with all the energy this implies, but she’s also someone who’s so lacking in life skills that killing is the only way she’s found of saving her own skin.”

A little like the prisoner she visited while preparing for the role. 

“I spent a couple of hours in Joliette with a woman who caused the death of her husband … let’s say it was disturbing to meet in the flesh someone who’d done that.   She told me that at one point in her life she decided to finish it.  She wasn’t a criminal, but she told herself, “It’s either him or me.”

You don’t have to believe in ghosts to believe in her suitability for the part.  You just have to look in her eyes to see all the love she has to give to these stricken souls.

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