Mégantic: “This punchy series hit me hard”

DAY

Remember the movie Four Weddings and a Funeral? After watching the eight episodes of the series Méganticon Club illico, I thought we could 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 it should be 48. Because a young man from Mégantic, whose girlfriend died in the train explosion, committed suicide shortly afterwards. 

IN QUB radio I interviewed Sylvain Guy, who wrote this series after doing a multitude of interviews with relatives and survivors. He told me that the mother of the young man in question approached him saying: “Why every time we talk about Mégantic, we talk about 47 victims? My son committed suicide: the 48th 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. You can't stay dry-eyed watching these heart-rending scenes. 

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 crying, talking to their shrink or admitting to their parents, “I don't know where to go anymore”. 

I was particularly touched when I heard a father who told his how proud he is of himself or seeing a father (the formidable Luc Senay) who shouts on the telephone: “Does anyone hear me? “. Or 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, looking pretty badass himself and saying, “Hot crap, 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 wives, their daughters, their friends, have nothing toxic… 

Mégantic 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 RIGHT TIME?

The phrase we hear most often in Mégantic is: “You have to give time to time”. Many people wondered if it was too early to make a series about this tragedy. 

The answer is in the series: Mégantic will raise awareness of all those who will see to the excruciating pain experienced by loved ones.

It is never too early to share the pain of the Méganticois.