A Respectable Woman (Bernard Émond, 2023)

Despite a 20-year career, Quebecois director Bernard Émond remains a bit of a mystery even to many of the most hardcore cinephiles. While on some level this is simply the fate of all but a very select few Canadian directors, Émond may be a special case. Having seen three of his features, I can say that he seems to have mastered a low-key narrative formalism. His films sneak up on you. At first they seem stylistically neutral, but they are actually unusually still. Not "slow," exactly, but patient, often centered on characters whose emotional repression becomes a false virtue, a way in which intelligent, sensitive people engineer their own misery.

A Respectable Woman is a period piece, set in Trois-Rivières, QC, in the midst of the Great Depression. While most people around her are struggling, Rose Lemay (Hélène Florent) is living a quiet life of luxury. The daughter of an industrialist, she has a comfortable inheritance, making her a pillar of the town. But we join Rose's life in medias res. Many years ago, her husband Paul-Émile (Martin Debreuil) ran away with a younger mistress, started his own family, and yet they never formally divorced. Rose has adjusted herself to this solitary life, but is then approached by two of her closest acquaintances, her financial manager (Normand Canac-Marquis) and her priest (Paul Savoie), who inform her that her husband is penniless and needs her help.

At first, Rose could not care less. But the priest tries to appeal to her sense of Christian charity. She agrees to see Paul-Émile and give him some money, but soon things begin to spiral out of control. Paul-Émile's mistress Mary (Marilou Moran) is dying of tuberculosis, and soon the couple's three young daughters will be both motherless and destitute. Rose, faced with an untenable situation, does something almost unthinkable. She agrees to let her husband and his children move in with her, presenting herself as a loving "aunt." 

A Respectable Woman is much more compelling than it may sound, because Rose is not self-abasing or anti-feminist in her demeanor. The reasons behind her decision to take the family in are never made explicit, but Florent's delicate performance conveys a host of mixed emotions. While some part of her still cares for Paul-Émile, she rejects him absolutely. Although her outward behavior suggests piousness and generosity, we also see a passive-aggressive streak in Rose. She not only wants to show Paul-Émile the life he gave up, but clearly aims to provide the girls a better mother than they had before. Her imitation of Christ has a cold, judgmental streak, even as she treats the three girls with genuine affection.

In its depiction of a conflicted psychology, the desire to do both harm and good at the same time, A Respectable Woman recalls the Dardenne brothers' masterpiece The Son. But Émond's tonal control is miles away from the brothers' muscular realism. The stilted, confining environment of Rose's home, and the combination of languor and emotional tension, owes a bit to Terence Davies. But Émond has nothing of Davies' Romantic sensibility. Although I have seen very little -- just clips, really -- of the films of Jan Troell, they seem to possess an atmosphere that is closest to that found in A Respectable Woman.

But in addition to being an inward, downcast bourgeois drama, Émond's film is also a subtle examination of Canadiana. The film is broken into chapters that correspond to about seven months, from the winter to the start of spring. As we move through the calendar, Émond provides expansive views of the Quebec landscape. These shots of frozen rivers, snow-covered hills, and barren trees, are clearly inspired by Canadian painting of the first part of the 20th century, in particular the works of Emily Carr and the Group of Seven. The film's exteriors -- wintry, but expansive -- provide a sharp contrast with the stifling, museum-like rooms of Rose's home, in a way that implies that Rose's prim Catholic rectitude has already been transformed by its proximity to English-Canadian Protestantism. Rose works to accommodate herself to a family that is not her own, much like Quebec must learn to modulate its own identity and become appropriately "Canadian." Respectability, it seems, is hard-earned.