Michel Marc Bouchard signs a poignant new fable about art and the family.
“Icitte, everything is made in scrap, made in cheap, made in junk food. Icitte, the beautiful, that cannot be taught. No, here it is the contagion of milk and no one can escape it. “Words as terrible as they are liberating which are pronounced by Béatrice, the battered mother of Michel Marc Bouchard’s most recent play, Kiss, which is currently playing at TNM.
In the shoes of this woman, owner of a fabric store in a region sadly devoid of appetite for beauty, a woman made for more passion and extravagance and who hoped for more thrills and bliss, Anne-Marie Cadieux is moving, particularly skillful when it comes to revealing the hope that remains under a spectacularly acrimonious exterior.
Despite the loneliness and the absence of customers, despite the fragile mental health of her son and the rumors of domestic violence against him, even despite the lawsuit hanging in her face for having slapped a woman in the middle of the shopping center, Beatrice resists. If she is still standing, it is surely thanks to her son, Hugo. “Him, beauty is his survival… and he is the only beauty I have left. The young man, whose recourse to self-destruction is matched only by his saving call for haute couture, is the beating heart of this room where Bouchard revisits his great theme, namely redemption through art, by employing this judicious mixture of everyday life and drama, of sweet fantasy and cruel derision. Interpreting Hugo, Théodore Pellerin is admirable in his conviction, expressing in his body and in his voice the ferocity of comedy as acutely as that of tragedy.
His interactions with the French fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, an alter ego camped with tenderness and earthiness by Yves Jacques, help to underpin the boy’s psyche and to better understand the complex nature of the link between him and his mother, a relationship made of seduction and rejection, of admiration and shame. One day, Hugo will have to transform his home port into a launching pad …
Some slag
As for the secondary characters, the teacher played by Alice Pascual and the policeman played by Anglesh Major, it must be recognized that they lack material, generally bordering on anecdotal. Most of their appearances weigh down the show, as do some of the choices of the director, Eda Holmes, from the one-upmanship of neon lights and tulles, to this habit of projecting the names of the protagonists in giant letters onto the set.
These few slags are far from preventing Michel Marc Bouchard’s fable from triumphing. Certain lines, about the relationship with the mother, are imprinted on us forever. “The perfect mother, she doesn’t exist. If it exists, it is only made of a set of bad seams, badly tied threads, hidden folds. The perfect mother is the one who has been condemned to the silence of her regrets and the stifling of her anger. “
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