Mommy Is at the Hairdresser's

Summer 1966, in Beloeil, Québec. For Élise the holiday means complete freedom. Then her mother leaves the family for a journalism job in London, having been set in motion by overhearing a conversation between her husband and his male lover. One brother shuts himself in the garage building a racing car, the youngest withdraws into himself, and the father is simply flattened. Élise takes it on herself to hold the family together. Léa Pool made the film from a screenplay by Isabelle Hébert, drawn from her own childhood, and Marianne Fortier plays Élise. The telling stays at the child’s height, which means it is not interested in explaining the mother’s departure so much as in the silence it leaves in the house.