Vanishing lines | When the friendship balloon explodes

Emily Cott
Journalism

“How comfortable friendship can be, but it is poisonous and boring. With her usual candor, Mariana Mazza could not have summed up the plot of the film better. vanishing lineswhich will open on July 6.

Dans cette comédie hautement dramatique, inspirée de la pièce de théâtre de Catherine Chabot, qui cosigne le scénario de son adaptation au cinéma avec Émile Gaudreault et qui porte le chapeau de coréalisatrice avec Miryam Bouchard, trois amies du secondaire se retrouvent à Montréal pour faire la fête. Or, la soirée dégénère rapidement en règlement de comptes et conflit de valeurs.

Fille d’immigrants, Sabina (Mariana Mazza) travaille en finance et fait beaucoup d’argent. Elle habite à Montréal, tout comme Valérie (Léane Labrèche-Dor), chroniqueuse culturelle pigiste dont les revendications sociales et écologiques cachent une jalousie face à l’argent. Quant à Audrey (Catherine Chabot), elle vit en Beauce, où elle s’occupe de sa mère malade et mène une vie trop rangée à son goût.

Les retrouvailles des trois amies commencent au vernissage d’Amber, la copine de Sabina (une anglophone francophile de la Colombie-Britannique interprétée par Victoria Diamond). Valérie et Audrey sont accompagnées de leurs amoureux.

Plombier, amateur de chasse et propriétaire d’un pick-up, le personnage de Maxime de Cotret (le fiancé d’Audrey) incarne « le gros bon sens » et l’authenticité. Pour sa part, Mickaël Gouin se glisse dans la peau d’un professeur de philosophie qui roule à vélo. Pauvre, il se considère néanmoins comme intellectuellement supérieur à la moyenne et il prône un couple ouvert avec Valérie…

Bien que tous cherchent à avoir du plaisir, leurs conversations finissent toujours par tourner au vinaigre en abordant des sujets chauds de leur génération comme l’environnement, la parentalité, l’argent et la reconnaissance, mais surtout, la dualité entre l’image et le bonheur.

Le concept de Lignes de fuite vient du philosophe Gilles Deleuze, a expliqué en conférence de presse Catherine Chabot, qui incarne une jeune femme anxieuse qui voudrait une vie « moins prévisible ». « C’est d’écouter la voix intérieure qui crie en nous […] To listen to the impulse to be ourselves. »

Catherine Chabot says she has absorbed all her “fears and contradictions” to fuse them into six characters who have a “crossroads” in their thirties. “That evening, everyone is going through a crisis and they have blind spots.”

Despite their big differences, they all ask the same questions. “Am I in the right place and made the right choices?” she continues.

One thing is for sure, tension builds throughout the evening of the reunion. “We feel the Presto is going to explode,” Catherine Chabot said well.

Make you laugh and think

Catherine Chabot worked in co-production with Myriam Bouchard (My Circus, December 23). I love the latter that the film addresses environmental anxiety with humor. to use his words, vanishing lines It makes us both “laugh and feel really guilty.”

We won’t tell you more about these famous scenes… but know that vanishing lines It lives up to its comedy-drama title.

Shock of the characters’ values ​​leads to delicious dialogues that can remember those of Decline of the American Empire.

For Léane Labrèche-Dor, the film denounces the status quo we endure day in and day out until the balloon “pops”. She is pleased to see imperfect characters in the cinema, including her own. Like Valerie, we’re all jealous of our friends at one point or another in our lives. The film subtly makes us understand “we don’t want to be.”

In fact, there are us and our surroundings in each of the six personalities. “We all have an anxious friend or someone else who makes boring comments,” Mariana Mazza confirms.

Mikael Guinn adds: “We all had an evening where alcohol arrived and started telling facts we shouldn’t. What I love about the movie is that no one is right and no one is wrong.”

“Humour is often the best way to approach a topic,” adds a person who is as happy to be in a movie as funny as it is clever.

Closed session for 45 minutes

It turns out that the scene leading up to the end was behind closed doors for about forty minutes. In order for the game to be as compelling as possible, director Myriam Bouchard notes that the actors and actresses trained a week before the cameras were turned on and that filming was largely in chronological order. “It was a wonderful luxury. »

from his side, Mariana Mazza wanted to thank Catherine Chabot for the role that she gave her without an audition, “on a silver platter.” “You saw my sensitivity,” she told him.

At a press conference, Mariana Mazza also said that she admires Léane Labrèche-Dor and Catherine Chabot, who were breastfeeding their babies during filming.

Say Catherine Chabot originally wrote vanishing lines Because she wondered if she could have children in our warm world…

“The answer is he is 16 months old and his name is Josephine. So yes, there is hope!” she concluded.

vanishing lines It hits theaters July 6th.