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La Donation (The Legacy)

• Directed by Bernard Émond
• Starring Élise Guilbault and Jacques Godin
• Classification: PG

“It’s austere,” says an old doctor in La Donation, looking out over the cloudy landscape in the Abitibi region of Quebec, but, as he goes on to explain, he finds beauty in the stark environment.

Those of similar temperament may find some subtle pleasures in the latest film from Bernard Émond (The Necessities of Life). But anyone allergic to a lot of grey skies and a slow pace may find it hard slogging. Like the great French director Robert Bresson, Émond aims for a simplicity of style that records the pedestrian facts of life while suggesting deeper meanings about the human place in the order of things.

Though Émond describes himself as a non-believer, La Donation (The Legacy) is the third film in a trilogy focusing on the Christian virtues – with 2005’s La Neuvaine (The Novena) representing faith, 2007’s Contre Toute Espérance (Summit Circle) representing hope, and now a new story representing charity. La Donation revolves around a female doctor who leaves a Montreal emergency room to do a month-long locum in the depressed former mining town of Normétal.

When Dr. Jeanne Dion (Élise Guilbault) arrives, she is greeted by the aged Dr. Yves Rainville (Jacques Godin), who is going to take a trip. Dr. Rainville, who has been in the town since the early 1960s, is intimately involved in the lives of his patients, making regular house calls and comfort visits to the elderly. Working with his all-purpose assistant, Jeanne also finds herself getting inside the secrets of the community – the drug-addict mother, the pregnant teen, the man trying to con workers’ compensation and the abusive husband.

Guilbault, also in Émond’s La Femme Qui Boit (The Woman who Drinks), is an excellent actress whose emotionally closed performance conveys both her observant intelligence and hidden sorrows. There are no emotional fireworks here, just a lot of quick muscle twitches and flashes in her eyes to suggest inner turbulence. Her past is a blank; she appears to have no family ties or friends back home. To understand the full story requires a familiarity with Émond’s La Neuvaine, where the doctor is established as a pediatrician thrown into suicidal depression after witnessing a murder.

The structure of the drama is episodic, studded intermittently with telling moments. Although most of the film concerns Jeanne’s reaction to the community, we also follow Dr. Rainville on his visit to his sister, a nun, for a discussion about the role of duty and contentment in life. Then he comes home, has a heart attack and dies, leaving Jeanne to decide if she will replace him in the town or return to her old life.

There’s an intriguing interlude when Jeanne is suddenly summoned to take a private plane to an old mining boss who is now living in isolation in the woods, where he spends his time suffering from muscle spasms while drinking heavily. He becomes the drama’s example of how not to live, surrounded by creature comforts but no human contact.

She also develops a friend, a well-educated and philosophical baker (Eric Hoziel), with whom she can share comforts and thoughts, although this is not the film’s happy ending. Their relationship does not represent a solution to Jeanne’s dilemma or a conclusion to the story.

Throughout, La Donation circles around questions of cruelty and loss and the attempt to ameliorate them through a devoted kindness that, if not overtly religious, is the expression of a similar deep intuition.