Waterworld
>> The tides stop in Manon Briand’s mystical romance La Turbulence des fluides

by MATTHEW HAYS

In Manon Briand’s last big-screen feature, ’98’s 2 secondes, a female protagonist must reinvent herself after leaving behind a successful stint as a racing cyclist. In the film, Briand pondered fate, the power of romance and how we shape our own destiny.

Now, the director seems to be at an equally challenging moment in her own life. As we speak, she’s preparing for the world premiere (at the World Film Festival, which wrapped this week) of her latest, La Turbulence des fluides. “It’s always stressful,” she confirms of the opening-night jitters. “People are expecting this film to be better than my last one. When you make a first film you’re totally free and light. You’re in the lightness of being creative. You can fail. Then when they say the first one was so great, the level of what you have to do to be better feels like so much more pressure.”

The day the tides stood still

And indeed, the first one was extremely well received, netting four of the World Fest’s main awards and making Quebec audiences and critics swoon. This time around, Briand’s auteurial hand can be felt, but, while some of the themes remain the same, she’s shifted ground a wee bit. Taking a page from The Twilight Zone, Briand offers up a stranger-than-strange fictional twist. In this movie, scientist Pascale Bussières is sent back from Tokyo by her bosses to investigate a bizarre phenomenon. It seems that Quebec’s tides have stopped, with no explanation at all. Since Bussières was born in Baie Comeau, they logically determine she should be the one sent in to figure it all out. The ever-excellent Bussières plays the role well, embarking on a romance and rediscovering an old friendship (with her lesbian buddy) as she figures out what the heck is going on.

“I knew this one would be different,” reports Briand. “My preoccupations, again, but with a different energy. I had such strong reactions to the script—people loved it so much, that was scary too. I felt like people who read it had made their own films up in their minds, I was worried about disappointing them.”

Twists of fate

And the inspiration for this tideless wackiness? “I got a flash of ‘What if?’ What if the impossible happened? What if the tide stopped? What if something we take for granted, something utterly predictable, suddenly became unpredictable and chaotic and disordered? It’s a metaphor, an allegory for something else. For life, destiny, the unexpected.

“We take for granted that we’ll be alive tomorrow. And then, suddenly, you’re dead or someone else is dead. How do we find a reason for that? Is it pure coincidence or hazard, or is it preprogrammed by some power outside of us. Very heavy themes, yes, but I wanted to make them alive in a more entertaining way.”

Briand, a graduate of Concordia’s film program who says she wanted to infuse her film with polar opposites (“gay and straight, yin and yang, inside and out, the timid and the outspoken, the dry and the wet”), acknowledges filmmaking itself is predicated on opposites. “Filmmaking is always a struggle. You’ve just got to free yourself and hope people like it. Filmmaking is weird, because it’s both: it’s a very egoistic thing, but at the same time, it’s like creating a gift. What would be the gift that you could give? They give me the power to create. Obviously, I want to do something good with all the money I’ve been handed.”

With Turbulence, Briand says she was handed a number of gifts. The performances of her entire cast, a group she says were “amazing.” As well, the continued collaboration with producer Roger Frappier, Quebec’s feature guru who produced 2 secondes as well as Cosmos, the anthology film that Briand contributed to. “He’s so passionate about film. He’s so invested in it. It’s the best kind of relationship I could dream of. He’s the kind of producer who says ‘Never censor your own dreams.’ He tells us to think of our wildest dreams, and then let me try to find the financing for it. I wouldn’t have dared to send my script to Geneviève Bujold. It was a total fantasy of mine for her to take the role. He sent her the script and she said she loved it.

“What a dream.” :

La Turbulence des fluides opens Sept. 6

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