“Twilight for a killer”: Éric Bruneau as an effective killer

UPGRADE DAY

His name is Donald Lavoie, he is still alive and lives, somewhere, hidden and anonymous.

It raged in the 1970s, when Montreal was a real “far west” as Éric Bruneau likes to point out in an interview. Murders and bank robberies were commonplace, it was necessary to get out of the endemic poverty of the time. And that's what Donald Lavoie (Éric Bruneau) did by putting himself at the service of Claude Dubois (Benoît Gouin). The big boss of the clan that bears his name asks him to kill, first “real” enemies, then those who bother him. And Lavoie complies. Executed. With alcohol and “coke”.

Few things make Lavoie a normal man. His girlfriend, Francine (Rose-Marie Perreault), with whom he has a child and Carl (Simon Landry-Desy) who lives off his hooks, accumulates “jobines” and shady schemes.

And There you go. One day, Dubois asks Lavoie to get rid of someone he cannot and does not want to kill. So he disobeys, robs a bank and tries to pass out in the wild. But there, it is the police who are on his heels in the person of Detective Sergeant Burns (Sylvain Marcel) who needs him to stop the whole gang in Dubois. And Lavoie finds himself stuck.

The story is partly true. Under the pen and in front of the camera of Raymond St-Jean, Lavoie is not just a contract killer capable of the worst without emotion. Éric Bruneau makes him a character in search of roots, of a father, almost of love. Fragile, broken, abandoned, Lavoie turns to “easy” work, a way to make money – a lot – quickly.

Éric Bruneau is perfect in this role that one would think thought out and written for him. Molding himself effortlessly into the psychology of the killer, he espouses its mimicry, posture, apparent coldness and implacable efficiency. If we deplore the absence of this “oomph” in this production from home, we remain riveted to the screen, incredulous in front of this extraordinary life and flabbergasted by the interpretation of Éric Bruneau which proves, once again, that the almost forty-year-old is certainly not lacking in talent.

Note: 3.5 out of 5