Article content Les Belles-Soeurs is unquestionably the francophone Québécois play best known to anglos here, which is why the creative team behind Nos Belles-Soeurs, a musical adaptation of the Michel Tremblay classic, are hoping they might actually have a local franco film that we blokes will go see. It opens in Montreal on Thursday, and a copy with English subtitles begins a run at the Cineplex Forum on Friday. The title in English is Sisters and Neighbours.
“Les Belles-Soeurs is the Quebec play that has been performed the most all over the world,” said veteran theatre director René Richard Cyr, who makes his feature film directorial debut with Nos Belles-Soeurs. “People see themselves in this film. It’s a portrait of a working-class community.
It’s not a bourgeois neighbourhood. It’s not the countryside.” Added Geneviève Schmidt, who plays the main character, Germaine Lauzon: “It’s a small story, but it’s also universal.
It’s no coincidence that it’s the Quebec play that’s been seen by the most people all over the planet. Envy, jealousy, seeking happiness though material goods — these are all themes that are even more relevant now than they were 50 years ago.” Les Belles-Soeurs premièred on stage at the Théâtre du Rideau Vert in 1968 and it forever changed the Quebec cultural milieu.
For the first time, characters in a major play spoke in joual, the slang-filled language that working-class Montrealers actually spoke, and the oth.