Une Femme Respectable: An excellent, thought-provoking movie

Une Femme Respectable:

Recently, with the aid of English sub-titles, I watched Une Femme Respectable, a 2023 movie by Bernard Emond.   Set in Trois-Rivières during the Great Depression of the 1930s, this film is about a woman who hasn’t had the life she once hoped for, but tries to be a good person nevertheless. She is rewarded in a way she never expected to be.

Rose Lemay is an attractive, modestly dressed, middle-aged woman who has inherited a pleasant but not elaborate home, and some money, from her late parents.  In her parlour there are wedding and family photos, and as well, a table-top sculpture of a woman who might represent Diana the Huntress.   The Parisian sculptor, Jean-Antoine Houdon, created a famous bronze statue of this goddess in 1790, and copies may have found their way into middle-class Quebecc parlours of the 1930s.

As the novel opens, Rose  tells her hired-girl that she will served tea to her guests herself.   In her parlour are the priest and her lawyer, who have come to tell her that her husband is back in town again.  Rose knows, saying, “In Riviere du Loup nothing is secret.”

For the past eleven years, Rose has lived with the humiliation of being a deserted wife.  Her husband, Paul-Emile, has been away in the States living with his paramour and their three daughters.  He’s back now, and has an office job at the paper mill, the industry on which the town depends,  but isn’t paid enough to support his family, and has gone to the priest to see if he can persuade Rose to meet with him.  Rose, the priest and the lawyer all expect that Paul-Emile will ask for financial help. When Rose asks the priest what she should do, he says that God expects us to help others as best we can but He doesn’t expect us to go beyond our capabilities.   Rose then says he can bring Paul-Emile to see her.

Rose has confided to the priest that she'd wanted children, never denied her favours to her husband, and is not to blame for the failure of their marriage. The priest is on her side. When Paul-Emile comes to see her, he is  humble. He tells her that while travelling on company business twelve years earlier, he met Mary, the girls’ mother, at a roadhouse, and succumbed to her charms. When she told him she was pregnant, he felt a duty to look after her and the child, and took off for the States to “Little Canada.” There, they had two more children, though he tells Rose that the youngest child may not be his. Nevertheless, he loves all his girls, and for their sake he seeks Rose's help. 

Rose asks him to bring the children to visit her. Then comes a scene in the squalid one room apartment where he, Mary and the girls live. Mary, who has a bad cough, calls to her ten year old daughter, Claire, to bring her water. Paul-Emile arrives home while Claire is getting it. He has left the children at home with their ill mother while he went out for the evening.

Mary is agreeable that Paul-Emile take Claire to meet Rose, and braids the child's hair tightly. As they walk through a winter landscape, Paul-Emile tells Claire that they are going to meet her “aunt.” Claire is mannerly, bright and entranced by her surroundings.  Rose tours her through the house and offers to brush her  hair, which she secures with a ribbon. Back downstairs, both they realize they must return Claire's hairdo to normal or her mother will be angry.  As Rose and Paul-Emile sit behind Claire, and she takes half the girl’s hair while he takes the other half, their hands touch. He tries to kiss Rose’s hand, but she evades his lips.

Some weeks later, Rose goes to the priest to ask if he has heard  from Paul-Emile. Since the visit with Claire, she hasn’t seen him.  When the priest, a kind father to his flock, investigates and finds out that the girls’ mother has died, Rose goes to call on them and offers them a home.  The two elder girls respond to her kind attitude but when the youngest child clings to Paul-Emile,  Rose says, “Papa and Germaine will come later.”  Right away, the children appreciate Rose's maternal attentions, and are happy to comply with her rules. Paul-Emile sleeps downstairs, and promises not to bring liquor into the house.

Will Rose and Paul-Emile fall in love again and become good parents to the girls?  In a frank discussion with the priest, Rose considers other ways that things may go, since past behaviour, like a sense of entitlement and poor impulse control,  predict future behaviour.  Should she give her husband a second chance in the fullest sense? In one scene, Paul-Emile tells her that, when they were courting, he was afraid to come to her house because her bourgeois father didn’t like her dating a mill-worker’s son, even one who had been to college.  Rose, who had moved back into her father’s house to care for him in his last illness, agrees that he wasn’t an easy man to get along with.

Rose’s “respectability” is not mere conformity; it comes from her core beliefs.  She seeks guidance from the only available source of counselling, the priest, and avoids despair.  Anyone who has tried to live a thoughtful, responsible life can identify with her  The freezing and thawing of the river  represent the mixed emotions she experiences with Paul-Emile's reappearance in  her life.  Her heart and body are not made of stone, - or bronze -though she is prepared to use the bronze statue as a weapon if necessary. 

Inn the end, she leads the girls in a symbolic act of womanly solidarity.  Though the Rolling Stones’ song, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” is worlds away from the setting of the movie, its refrain applies to the outcome.