LES BONS DEBARRAS easily could have emerged from the studio ugly, depressing, and boring. Instead, director Mankiewicz has fashioned a film of lyrical and penetrating beauty. His diverse, lovely palette of lights and shades, broad afternoons and black nights, breathes freshness into every shot of a limited setting. His magnificent cast infuses humdrum, rather sad low-lifers with humor and elegance. Set in the Laurentian Mountains of Quebec and filmed in late fall and early winter, Les Bons Debarras (Good Riddance) possesses a certain steamily frosty quality, like the view through a window breathed on in January.
Charlotte Laurier plays Manon--a brilliant, brooding, exquisite, precocious little girl with saucer eyes, dark peekaboo bangs and an overfull heart--so letter perfectly that the actress cannot be separated from the role. Laurier is Manon: a terrible angel of a devil, hungry for something she can neither identify nor locate in her drab, shabby life. Absorbed in the poetic fierceness of Wuthering Heights. Manon alternates between sudden overwhelming emotional outbursts and sulking hostility. She is entirely too much for her mother Michelle (Marie Tifo), a big-hearted, big-boned woman of loose morality and easy virtue, to handle.
Unable to confront the fact that her own environment completely lacks the furious romantic grandeur of Wuthering Heights. Manon strikes out restlessly and blindly. She is fierce and jealous in her demands for her mother's love, but when she runs away from home for a day she flees something greater and more upsetting than a simple realization of her mother's independence. At 13, Manon chugalugs beer, puffs cigarettes and inhales pot, but none of these divertissements satisfies her. Indeed, they are completely irrelevant to Manon's dark, seething inner life.
ON THE OPPOSITE SIDE of the human spectrum from Manon hulks her retarded uncle, Guy (Germain Houde), a hideous brute of a man. He lives with Manon and Michelle, provides unwilling manual labor (the family sells firewood for a living), and is slobbering drunk most of the time. Guy's room exemplifies, in miniature, the unobtrusive excellence of the film: decorated with Playboy pin-up posters, invariably the squalid cubicle provides graphic regurgitative evidence of excessive drinking the previous night and hosts a snoring half-dressed lout who obviously never has come within 75 feet of a naked woman. Houde plays Guy with impeccable control. He neither exaggerates nor lapses and shapes a seamless characterization.
As Michelle, Marie Tifo is generous in body and spirit, a woman who likes to laugh and doesn't mind being laughed at. She takes what she needs and gives what she can, and expects no favors from anyone. She earns enough to pay for the roof over the heads of her brother and daughter, and to keep Guy in beer, but if she couldn't she wouldn't despair. She prefers to come up smiling (and what a wonderful smile she has); she guards no impenetrable depths; she revels in basic pleasures. Michelle seems unhappy only when faced with the accusing, recriminatory jealousy of Manon, but even then her unhappiness stems simply from bewildered helplessness.
The three main characters plus a business client and two lovers of Michelle's constitute the dramatis personae. Their story appears little more than a cluster of vignettes, a series of day-in-the-life SO STARE AWAY at Michelle bathing, at Manon padding about the house in torn outgrown pajamas, at Guy sweating and drooling in his sleep. The movie is so permeated by the crisp snap-crackle-pop of late autumn in the mountains, so unabashed before the imperfect facts of life (like flat tires, cracked boots and dirty dishes), that the ugliness takes on an indefinable glow, Les Bons Debarras tells it like it is, but in the process manages to make it magic.
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