Juniper Tree

Le piège d'Issoudun

Canada

2003

85 Min

Color

French

Currently 2.5/5 Stars.
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CAST Sylvie Drapeau, Frédérick de Grandpré, Shanie Beauchamps, Pierre-Luc Lafontaine, Ghislain Tremblay

Set over the course of one quiet winter day, the film begins with a sober but shocking scene, after which a torn mother tries to kill herself on the highway, but fails as she gets pulled over by a cop. What could have been a simple routine task for the cop soon evolves into a weird relationship; when he sees that the lady’s visibly disturbed, he tries to help her and understand what’s going on.

Intersped with scenes from a Grimm play that deals with matricide, this movie is built in a subtle tone, and its contemplative nature adds a certain beauty to the “horror” of the initial situation. Frédérick De Grandpré and Sylvie Drapeau are well chosen for this dramatic duel, cast as the father & mother that are both separated from their children in different ways. –IMDb

Director

Micheline Lanctôt

Micheline Lanctôt (born May 12, 1947 at Frelighsburg, Quebec, Canada) is an actress, film director, screenwriter, and musician.

Lanctôt’s post-secondary education was in music, fine arts and theatre at Collège Jésus-Marie in Outremont, and in art history (at the Université de Montréal and the École des Beaux-Arts de Montréal) before switching to film animation, which she did originally at the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) and then at Gerald Potterton’s studios, Potterton Productions, where she remained for four years.

Lanctôt began her acting career in 1972, winning an Etrog (now called a Genie) award for best female performance for her starring role in Gilles Carle’s La Vrai Nature de Bernadette. Since then, she has appeared in a wide variety of film and television roles, such as Les Corps Célestes (again by Carle); Ted Kotcheff’s award-winning The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Blood Relatives (by Claude Chabrol) and Guy Fournier’s Radio-Canada TV series, Jamais… read more