Too much of everything

just watch it!

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

Another wonderful drama out of Quebec - not enough recognition is given to the caliber of acting in this movie. Roy Dupuis of course is well known for his dramatic talent but Karine Vanasse also did a very credible job for one so young and inexperienced.Without giving away any plot detail, here is another classic example of a man without soul. What goes around comes around and the moral in the story is not belaboured but left to the watchers intelligence.Beautiful scenery and a good depiction of the hardship that the early Quebec settlers endured.Once again, this is a movie well worth seeing and you won't be wasting your money on it.

This had the potential to be a gripping and tragic tale but fell flat. Character development is weak, many scenes are pointless. What should have been a sad and tragic tale merely had me shaking my head wondering what the director was thinking. There is no sufficiently convincing case for Donalda to marry Seraphin; What, so her spineless father can keep his general store running? Once married to Seraphin, she for some reason feels compelled to remain true to this deplorable monster. The problem is, there is no convincing case made as to why she feels so bound to him - most of the town is on her side and sees her marriage to him as wrong in the first place. Pierre Lebeau's role as the utterly detestable Seraphin is convincing however, which makes the supporting roles that much more absurd.

Too many people thought this was going to be a splashy production of les Belles Histoires du Pays d'en Haut. Unfortunately that series is long gone and the main actors are no longer with us either. The series was a laundered version of Un Homme et son Peche (sorry no accents on my keyboard) which was a brutal novel about avarice. Avarice is one of the seven deadly sins and Claude-Henri Grignon (the author) wanted to show this in the context of a rural Quebec setting. French-Canada has a mythology and Seraphin Poudrier the mean and cruel became with the help of Radio-Canada Seraphin the miserable and sometimes ok tightwad. Otherwise the series would have become unbearable, I mean, how can you love a man who deforms his wife's dead body to fit in a cheap coffin??? Grignon worked on the series so it was done with his blessing and as a result French-Canada ended up with a sanitized version that became its best-loved series ever. Indeed, to this day, anyone over 40 will fondly remember the adventures of a group of hard working French Canadians in the colonial era during the late 1890's. They were easily identifiable and very human. Naturally those who did not read the novel were shocked at the baseness of the main character Seraphin Poudrier. Jean-Pierre Masson's magistral interpretation of his character in the series was nothing short of absolute perfection. Sadly he became so typecast that he died a drunken miserable person who tried to escape this identity with very few actually realizing that he was indeed a first-class actor.The French-Canadian society in Quebec is very selfish in a loving way and will not let its heroes go. Being so insular, it will raise its favorites to the highest level but at what cost. Anyway, the novel was a classic and must be studied to understand another view of French-Canadian rural mores. Today Quebec has become a dreary socialist third-world type society and frankly I miss the older more pictoresque place. The present day society: anti-religious, vociferously anti-English and very stupid about it, double names, silly socialism etc.. is not to my liking. Oh well...

The reason why «Un homme et son péché» got so much attention from the public and the medias was that the original story is a classic here in Québec. The movie is not truly a masterpiece, but it's still good to watch.The story was changed: there is a lot more sexuality in this version and, unfortunately, some things do not make sense because all the references to the importance of religion at that time in Québec are gone.I believe the dialogues sometimes sounded very fake, but it also depended of the actor. I think the girl that did Simone could really take some more acting courses (but it's only a small role) and Karine Vanasse also is not as superb as some said. I even found it difficult at some moments to understand what emotions she was trying to project.The music was beautiful and the scenery magnificent!I'd like to comment some of the actors performance: Lebeau was great, Seraphin really made me sick and it was the kind of performance that after, in each movie I see the guy, I see Seraphin, his greatest role (like when you see Audrey Tautou and you think «Amélie!»). Roy Dupuis's performance was better in this movie than in any one I saw before, he did quite a good job [for once]. Also some characters like the one Benoit Briere incarnates and also the priest were very convincing. And finally, I believe if Vanasse works a bit more, she'll end up being a quite good actress (hey, she's very young, so she has time to learn).The ending scene with the double-meaning scream of Seraphin «C'est moé qui brûle!!!» also brings a lot of emotion and some depth.