Luc Picard - Babine AKA Babin (2008)

http://img146.imageshack.us/img146/7849/babine2008269805f.jpg

http://img21.imageshack.us/img21/5333/imdbimage.jpg

The Gazette (Montreal): Fred Pellerin is totally amazing. He sells out fair-size venues across Quebec - and is starting to do the same thing in France - with an act that essentially consists of this rather goofy-looking fellow standing on stage telling stories.
That's it, that's all. He occasionally picks up a guitar for a little musical interlude but the centerpiece is the story-telling, with Pellerin spinning tall tales of magic realism, Québécois style, set in his home village of St. Élie de Caxton. I saw him for the first time last year and it's just astonishing to see how this guy has a full theatre transfixed for a couple of hours with nothing but a steady stream of words describing his wildly surrealistic impressions of life in his native village.
Now actor-turned-director Luc Picard has stepped up to the plate for his second feature as a filmmaker to try to capture that magic on the big screen. Babine, perhaps not surprisingly, isn't nearly as captivating as Pellerin live on the stage and it is far from obvious that any film could do justice to this story-teller's unique art. But Picard still succeeds in making one highly original film that's part adult fantasy, part old-fashioned folk tale and part parable about the dark side of the Catholic Church's influence on this province in the past century.
Set at some unspecified time in the past, Pellerin, who narrates the flick, notes that "It was a time when people still told stories," and that brings us right to the start of this particular story. Like any self-respecting fairy tale, this one begins with the birth of our hero. Babine enters this world under rather traumatic circumstances - when else? - one stormy night.
His mother (Isabel Richer) is known as La Sorcière (The Witch) and her reputation as the local black-magic woman is the main reason poor old Babine (Vincent-Guillame Otis) is treated like the village's mouton noir (and we're not talking about the TQS TV network here).
Anything bad that happens is blamed on Babine, who is, how should we put it politely, a few sandwiches short of a picnic and far from the brightest bulb in the patch. He is very close to the local priest (Julien Poulin) and when Le Vieux Curé dies in a suspicious fire in his church, the new priest on the block (Alexis Martin) makes it his personal mission to rid the village - and the world, for that matter - of Babine.
The problem is that Pellerin's wonderful larger-than-life characters - like Madame Gélinas (Marie Brassard), who has been pregnant for 20 years, or Méo the drunken barber (René Richard Cyr) - just seem a little, well, silly when we actually see them rather than try to imagine them in our minds based on Pellerin's words. And the focus in the second half on this fire-and-brimstone priest becomes a tad tiresome and comes off as a bit of a subtle-as-a-sledgehammer attack on the church.
But that won't stop you from enjoying some mighty fine performances, including director Picard as lovably eccentric Toussaint Brodeur, and at least getting some sense of what makes Pellerin's homespun story-telling so unique.