Though the facts are hazy, Monica Proietti's life and death as a bank robber made her a folk hero in Quebec. A new film spins its own version of her action-packed tale

Monica la Mitraille is not a documentary. Yes, the Quebec film is based on the life and death of infamous 1960s Montreal bank robber (and local folk hero) Monica Proietti.

But everyone connected with the film, which will open on at least 100 screens across Quebec on April 30, is at pains to underline that this is by no means a straight, factual re-creation of Proietti's too-short life.

Proietti, dubbed Machine Gun Molly by The Gazette at the height of her fame as the queen of local bank heists, died at the age of 27 in 1967. She was shot dead by Montreal police after a high-speed chase through the streets of Montreal North after her last hold-up.

Celine Bonnier, who plays Machine Gun Molly in the film, says it's impossible to do a documentary-like biopic of Proietti because there are so many differing accounts of what happened in her action-packed life. Even her final minutes on Earth are the subject of controversy. The official version is that she perished in a shoot-out with the cops, but the finale of the film appears to support the oft-heard argument that she was lying defenceless in a crashed car when she was shot point-blank by les flics.

"She's very well known but not all that much is known about her," said Bonnier. "Everyone has their own version of the facts of Monica's life. Even we couldn't verify the exact details of certain events. She really is a Montreal legend.

"But at a certain point, we realized we didn't have all the information and we had to make choices about how we were going to tell the story. We don't know what the truth really is. For sure, there's a certain responsibility when you play a real person. But I had to forget that. It wasn't a burden that I carried around with me during the shoot."

The screenplay was penned by hot small-screen wordsmith Luc Dionne, who wrote the Mafia series Omerta and the biker miniseries The Last Chapter, and by Sylvain Guy, who's best known for writing the hit thriller Liste Noire. The script is adapted from the novel Souvenirs de Monica, by Montreal author Georges-Hebert Germain, a book that took some liberties with the Proietti story. For one thing, both the novel and the movie have changed Proietti's last name to Sparvieri, and fictionalized some of the events.

Producer Lorraine Richard had bought the rights to the story from Proietti's surviving family, including her brother and three children. But Proietti's sisters unsuccessfully went to court last November to demand that certain scenes be deleted from the film.

The film is the prestige Quebec release of the season. It is produced by Cite-Amerique and distributed by Alliance Atlantis Vivafilm, the same tandem behind Seraphin: Un Homme et son peche, the top-grossing film in the history of Quebec cinema. It marks the big-screen directorial debut of Pierre Houle, who is one of the province's top TV directors thanks to his award-winning work on Omerta, Tag and Bunker, le cirque. The flick also features a veritable who's-who of Quebec vedettes, including Bonnier, Roy Dupuis, Patrick Huard, Frank Schorpion, Remy Girard, Isabelle Blais and Marc Labreche.

The filmmakers decided to tell Monica's story via the three key men in her life, her husband, Michael Burns (Schorpion), and her two last boyfriends, Gaston (Huard) and Gerald (Dupuis). Burns was the guy who helped Monica claw her way out of a poverty-stricken existence in the slums around lower St. Laurent Blvd. and her two other lovers introduced her to the adrenalin rush of robbing banks back when Montreal was the undisputed bank-robbery capital of North America.

Dupuis says he made little effort to seek out the details of the real life of Gerald, who was Proietti's partner-in-crime in the last months of her life. It was with Gerald that she began taking a much more active role in the bank jobs.

"Gerald is not a famous character," Dupuis said. "No one knows him. So I go with the script. I knew pretty much what was interesting about this guy, where he came from and how he ended up. But it's still a movie. It's not real life. In the story, he's the guy she has the most complicity with. Together they nourish this drive (to rob banks). It's with him that she takes her life in her hands."

Dupuis insists he never worried for a moment about whether the public would be able to identify with violent crooks like Proietti and her lovers/criminal cohorts.

"I don't care if people sympathize with them," he said. "All she wants is to become someone. She wants to get out of the Red Light district. They're not bad people. They're just f---ed up. And they had tough lives."

Schorpion was hired only nine days before shooting began, so he simply didn't have time to find out much about the real story of Proietti's first husband. The one thing he did know was that Burns was from Glasgow, so he insisted on doing the character with a Scottish accent. It's hard not to be impressed that this anglophone actor, who originally hails from Winnipeg, does English and French dialogue with an accent that sounds remarkably like the voice of someone who grew up on the tough streets of Scotland's largest city.

Schorpion says that while these folks are tough criminals, you have to understand the hard-boiled background that helped push them into a life of crime.

"They're trying to get through life like anyone else," said Schorpion.

"There's so much emotion in the film. There's vulnerability and there's this desire for life that burns in her. She comes from a milieu where she was dying anyways. She has no education, comes from extreme poverty. These families didn't even have drinking water in their homes. So you do what you can."

Monica la Mitraille opens in Montreal April 30. Machine Gun Molly, the version with English subtitles, will open the same day.