Do you remember the movie Four weddings and a funeral ? After watching all eight episodes of the series Megantic on Club illico, I thought we might rename it A wedding and 47 funerals.
This punchy series hit me hard. During these eight hours of intensive viewing, I had the impression of experiencing from the inside the mourning of the 47 victims of the tragedy of July 6, 2013. And a unifying marriage…
THERAPEUTIC FICTION
I say 47 victims, but we should say 48. Because a young man from Mégantic, whose girlfriend died in the train explosion, committed suicide shortly followingwards.
At QUB radio I interviewed Sylvain Guy, who wrote this series following having done a multitude of interviews with relatives and survivors. He told me that the mother of the young man in question approached him and said, “Why does every time we talk regarding Mégantic, we talk regarding 47 victims? Me my son committed suicide: the 48e victim, I’m tired of being forgotten! I would like that to be remembered”.
Sylvain Guy has therefore decided to devote an entire episode to him, the fourth. Impossible for you to stay dry-eyed watching these scenes that will tear your heart out.
One thing struck me: this series written by a man (Sylvain Guy), directed by a man (Alexis Durand-Brault), shows, as we too rarely see on TV, broken, broken, vulnerable men who cry, who talk to their shrink or who admit to their parents: “I don’t know where to go anymore”.
I was particularly touched by hearing a father who tells his firefighter son how proud he is of him or by seeing a father (the wonderful Luc Senay) who shouts on the telephone: “Is someone hears ? “. Or even two brothers who tell each other, with a simple nod, how much they love each other.
It’s quite striking to see a hyper-muscled man, built like a mirrored wardrobe, who looks pretty badass himself and says, “Hot, that’s tough speaking of what he saw in the disaster area of Lac-Mégantic.
Even the abbot, a man of the Church, is in doubt, vulnerable, shaken in his faith.
These men suffering from post-traumatic syndrome, who have lost their wife, their daughter, their friends, have nothing toxic…
Megantic also shows heroic men (the fireman who manages to open a valve; the construction guy who takes his truck to move a burning wagon).
Thank you Sylvain and Alexis for putting your masculine sensibility at the service of characters of complex, on edge men. Thank you Sylvain for having found (as you did in Confessions) dialogues that “ring true”: “I have too much pain, it hurts too much all the time”. “I’m not able to go up, how do the others do?” “.
THE GOOD MOMENT ?
The phrase we hear most often in Megantic is: “You have to give time to time”. Many people wondered if it was too early to make a series regarding this tragedy.
The answer is in the series: Megantic will make everyone who sees her aware of the excruciating pain experienced by loved ones.
It’s never too early to share the pain of the Méganticois.