By Isa Tousignant.

"Do you know what’s so remarkable about this project?"

Charles Binamé asks rhetorically one winter morning.

“This is the first time I’ve worked on something that has such incredible resonance. There are people who were directly involved, actors in previous interpretations, who are still alive. I was constantly shifting from the reality that I was creating with my film to that other reality, the one that’s true and vibrant for all these other people. It was fascinating.”

With Séraphin : Heart of Stone (Séraphin.: Un Homme et son péché in French), Binamé took upon his shoulders, more or less, the entire weight of Quebec culture. There are few tales so entrenched in the province’s identity.

Written by Claude –Henri Grignon, and originally published as a novel in 1933, Un Homme et son péché was adapted by its author into a serialized radio drama then as a screenplay, with director Paul Gury made as two features; Un Homme et son péché (1944) and Séraphin (1950). A sequel, Donalda, was planned but never shot. Then came a popular 15- year television series based on the same material produced by Radio-Canada.  With the novel still an unavoidable element on all Quebec high-school reading list, it’s not surprising that the story of Séraphin, Donalda, Alexis, et al,  feels like it’s part of the upbringing of most French Canadians.

The durability of its appeal may have to do with the period it explores. Set in 1880s and 1890s, at the time when the pays d’en haut in northern Quebec were being actively colonized thanks to an initiative by Curé Labelle, Un Homme et son péché is a story of hard times and survival against dire odds. The land was a cruel lover for many Quebec agriculturist who fought to draw fruit from the dry,  northern soil. Poverty was rampant and personal savings became de rigueur, however, the character of Séraphin is an example of that principle gone awry. He (played brilliantly by Pierre Lebeau in this version) is a power-hungry miser, a greedy manipulator of people, who robs the inhabitants of the town of wich he is mayor. In order to save her family’s finances, the general-store owner’s (Rémy Girard) beautiful young daughter, Donalda (Karine Vanasse), accepts his demands for marriage. But she is in love with Alexis (Roy Dupuis), a rugged, good-spirited colonist who is away breaking new ground northward for most of the year. Theirs is a tragic love story.

For a director like Binamé, best known as the author of what has been termed an urban trilogy-Eldorado (1995), Le Coeur au poing (1997) and La Beauté de Pandore (2000), films that deal with the emotional existences of disaffected city dwellers –Séraphin is a marked departure.

Although he has worked on period pieces before (notably with two hit television, Blanche, 1993, and Marguerite Volant, 1996, this one differs because of its heavy folkloric associations. And while some would shy away from such cultural baggage, Binamé took a bite out of history. He maintained that the story’s richness would persevere and reveal itself to be universal and timeless in its appeal.

And boy has he been proven right! On the morning of interview, Binamé is beaming. He woke up to a front-page story in Le Journal de Montréal –the city’s most widely read daily –exclaiming Séraphin’s box-office victory over Les Boys (1998), the province’s previous biggest financial success.

At press time, the film had grossed over $ 7 million, whereas Les Boys capped at $ 6,1 million. “It’s as if it’s become a national duty to see it,” Binamé laughs.

It must be an amazing feeling for you.

I don’t know. It’s too abstract. I was happy to top the three-to-four million mark, which backed the project from the start. After that ….I see it float, go up and up, but it’s really difficult to feel anything when you’re in the middle of it.

What was Alliance Vivafilm’s role in the project’s initiation? Did they come to you?

Yes, it was Alliance and (producer) Lorraine Richard who were trying to figure out what in Quebec’s cultural baggage could be made into a popular film that wasn’t comedy.

Although he has worked on period pieces before (notably with two hit television, Blanche, 1993, and Marguerite Volant, 1996, this one differs because of its heavy folkloric associations. And while some would shy away from such cultural baggage, Binamé took a bite out of history. He maintained that the story’s richness would persevere and reveal itself to be universal and timeless in its appeal.

And boy has he been proven right! On the morning of interview, Binamé is beaming. He woke up to a front-page story in Le Journal de Montréal –the city’s most widely read daily –exclaiming Séraphin’s box-office victory over Les Boys (1998), the province’s previous biggest financial success.

So it was really a conscious effort from the start?

Yes, it was her intention. It heard word about the project and right away I said: “I want to do it”. Why? I could have felt the same reticence many others had already felt, in the sense that the character of Séraphin Poudrier, you know... for French Canadians of a certain generation, images come straight to mind.  His story represents something quite folkloric, something passé, so why be interested in it? But my intention was that we had a sort of Jean de Fleurette on our hands. I reread the novel, and effectively it was all there. There are definitely characters in Balzac’s style –large than life, the product of their time, examples of a certain form of perversion brought to bear through the craziness of colonialization.

Is that what interested you in the project?

Yes, there are such strong characters in the original novel. That’s why I said ‘yes’. I told Lorraine: “I want to do it”. She said: “You, Charles? Aren’t you the guy behind the urban trilogy and all that?” But I’m an emotional guy. I’m a good- story guy, and this is a good story. What was a difficult from there was selling that idea. Radio-Canada jumped on board from the start, it found the project interesting in itself, and it coincided with its 50^th anniversary. Séraphin was originally show. And Alliance was already sold, since it originated the project. So I had the two essential components to bring to Telefilm  and SODEC, but that’s when it became a little more difficult. The people I was meeting were paralyzed by the images of what Séraphin had been in the past...they had OD-ed on it, you know. It was too much. Fifteen years on television is enormous. We can hardly imagine what it represents today. And it was on-air when there only two channels to watch! Plus there was the previous features  and 15 years on the radio before that. It was branded, you know? So I faced the difficult of detaching people from the old images they had in their heads-that they liked-and I had to offer an alternative. In that sense words were powerless. It wasn’t until brought in my actors in an effort to change those mental images –when they saw Pierre Lebeau, and then Roy Dupuis and Rémy Girard, and heard them talk about the film like an adventure, the adventure of revisiting a classic-it was no longer something banal. The challenge was to make the classic relevant for today.

And presumably appetizing to a contemporary audience as a work of entertainment.

Yes, which meant incorporating more naturalism. I tried to understand the tale better, to dig deeper into its characters, to try to understand the undertones, the hidden face, what Séraphin was made of but without resorting to “psychologizing” or hackneyed attempts at explaining everything. As you can see in the early scenes, I tried to hint at things. His first sexual experience was linked to death, to decomposition, to the sight of a woman being abused, and then paying for that abuse. These are certain elements of his character. We are all made up of elements.

Was the visual tone of the film-that replacement of the image you were talking about that’s associated with the previous versions- present in your mind’s eye  from the start?

What you see on screen, that’s how I saw it. Right away.  It was crazy. It was as if it were of an extreme density, then it exploded and all that was left to do was pluck the floating parts to make the film come together.

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