The True Nature of Bernadette

A subversively light-hearted movie in which Bernadette, a Montreal housewife, leaves her lawyer husband to practice vegetarianism and free love on a dilapidated Quebec farm, while her disapproving and less romantic neighbour, Thomas, gets on with the harder task of earning a living from the land, and trying to form an agricultural union to combat the indifference of the federal government. Carle's script finally brings his heroine (an engaging debut performance from Lanctôt) down on Thomas' side; but the interest of this quirky movie lies less in the director's avowedly political moral than in his eclectic and often ironic method. Religion, factory farming, the sexual liberation of a group of old men, the disposal problem of a removal van full of 'possessions', all become loosely but satisfyingly involved, with Bernadette - revolutionary mother, saintly whore - radiating an infectious optimism and a joyful, open-hearted sexuality.