Synopsis
Pierre Perrault’s third feature film on Île aux Coudres, Les Voitures d’eau tackles the problem of the builders and navigators of wooden schooners, in an age of iron ships, international competition and monopolies. Men of the sea, as skilful in deed as in word, the captains of the river’s last schooners are experiencing the end of an artisanal era in which their sons can no longer find a place. The first part of the film theorizes the human and verbal knowledge and wealth associated with this science of wooden boats. The second part, taking stock of a tragic navigation season on the St. Lawrence, raises major questions about the economic and political integration of French Canadians.
A word from Tënk
After exploring beluga whale fishing and the quest for ancestors in the Old World, Perrault concludes his Île-aux-Coudres trilogy with the essential condition of the islanders: that of the navigator. There is no bridge connecting them to the mainland, only a ship, a voiture d'eau (water car). This automobile-related terminology is no coincidence, as the condition of the island’s inhabitants, as captured by the filmmaker, is once again confronted by modern progress—the evolution of both land and sea transportation. Memory, once more under threat, finds expression in a present tense charged with spoken words. For it is the speech, in Perrault's work, that fills the need to articulate what slips through one’s fingers. This leads the sailors into astonishing discussions, strikingly introspective and acute in their reflections on their condition and the legacy of their traditions. There is no romantic nostalgia when they decry, for instance, their lack of education… and find solace in the fact that their children, unlike them, “went to school, made it to grade 10 or 12, and know where to go.” But will these children leave the island? Will they abandon the harsh conditions their parents endured? Will they seek better livelihoods aboard the iron ships of large corporations, a metaphor for French Canada submerged in an anglophone ocean?
Les voitures d'eau is perhaps the most political film of the trilogy—political in the most philosophical sense of the term—with the islanders acting as true helmsmen. Like Plato’s Republic, they hold a rudder in their hands and debate the course of their collective destiny in this "film-ship-agora". In a world increasingly automated, divided, and screen-dominated, as we speed along in our iron and steel vehicles, let us admire the grace of these wooden water cars, built with heart and speech.
Emmanuel Bernier
Head of Acquisitions at Tënk
and loony bird
