While lining up at Steinberg’s cashier, I automatically picked up a TV Hebdo ( Québec TV Guide) just to kill time. I came across an article on the controversy in the casting for the role of Émilie, being directed by Jean Beaudin from Cousture’s best seller. I could not imagine selecting Marina Orsini for Emilie’s role (but I was proven wrong, because she gave us a beautiful Emilie). I did not care so much for Lance et Compte and I has not seen l’Or et le Papier. So I was sharing the majority of people who has in mind somebody else to play the school teacher whom we had imagined when reading the novel. I had no idea as to would be best to play this character, but I was happy to see Beaudin as the director, since he had done Mario (film) which pleased me very much for the casting of the two brothers Xavier Norman Petermann ( a young unknown actor) and Francis Reddy, an actor that I particularly like. It made my day, when I read that Roy Dupuis had been casted for the role of Ovila. I must jumped up in the air as I was so happy to learn that. He would at last get a break where he was able to measure up to. I had still in mine his presence in Un oiseau vivant dans la gueule and was so thrilled just to think that he would be playing that role. He would become the character’s alter ego. I could imagine him physically in the role of Ovila Pronovost. Insanely in love with the wilderness and with Emilie. I was in agreement with his casting, giving a chance to the viewers to appreciate his talents.

A lot can be said about Caleb’s daughters. It was a beautiful gift by Beaudin. A painting of our heritage. Everything is in there. A perfect reflection of this era. It gives me vertigo. It is a real portrait of ourselves, the land and the scent from the land are ours, mild and demanding. Jean Beaudin, I want to thank you.

Let me describe the work piece by piece, because it deserves such a treatment. First a word on the novelist. In Québec is like a large family. The ties between us are knitted so tightly that often we are not even conscious about it.
I remember Arlette Cousture, the author of Caleb’s daughters, when she was in her twenties and our English teacher in third year of high school at Mont-de-la-Salle in Laval. I still picture her just a few years older than we were, with her long brown hair floating on her shoulders. She talked just about everything ; the West, the Inuits. She was a marvelous story teller. And if I do not remember much of her teaching of Shakespeare language but I have excellent memories of the stories that she told us.

 

First, let’s talk about the era, an era which is not too far away. It starts in the early 1890 when Emilie was a teenage. My grandparents were born before the end of that decade. So it is not a so distant past and somehow I feel that I belong to it. Québec came in late into the modern world and we remember dearly that time, reassuring for its traditions, its wisdom, the happiness in the comforting company of the family, their daily support. Religion, the land, manual work, the contact with nature, life and death, our ancestors austerity in which they lived, the close contact with the land which saw them come to life and die. The intuitive knowledge about their environment and themselves. All these sentiments were present in the series and I felt them deeply. The above description is an icon. I have read that many scenes were filmed with a "Burnt Sienna" color filter. The whole series is nailed to the land, to the plant and animal life, the prairies green in July, the sparkling white snow in December, the warm light that filters the head of tall maple trees in March, the subtle yellow of October. The wind always blowing, the terrible wind of the North blowing in the snow and that will also clear up the sky.

Beaudin is always sensitive to the wind, because he makes it his ally. Perhaps, he is playing Eole. I do not know all his secrets. But this conniving wind also belongs to Emilie and Ovila when return from Telesphore funerals, when Ovila returns from work to meet Emilie and the children, near the clothes line. Also, when Emilie and Berthe met for a final goodbye. The wind is always present when it forces Emilie to give birth in the snow, it blows on the prairies when Ovila holds Emilie in his arms, the summer before their wedding, it caresses Ovila’s face when he hear the call of his lover, Emilie, rushing down the pathway to meet Ovila...We often forget the present of the wind because it is as natural as life and the air that make us and the land breathe. Wind or no wind, it carries our moods just as the land carries us.