And the Birds Rained Down: A touching love-among-the-elderly tale amid wildfire flames
By Jim Slotek
Rating: B-plus
And the Birds Rained Down is a moving, languid, often achingly-sad drama about second-chances amid the generations-long aftermath of a wildfire that all but destroyed a Quebec town.
Written and directed by Louise Archambault, from the novel by Jocelyne Saucier, the film was named one of Canada’s Top 10 films of 2019 by the Toronto International Film Festival. It begins and ends on a mordant note, in a story set amid some of the most beautiful lakes and forests in the province.
And the Birds Rained Down (the title refers to almost mythic memories of birds dying in the sky during the aforementioned blaze), opens with not one, but two deaths.
Charlie and Marie (Gilbert Sicotte and Andree Lachapelle) fall in love in advance of the flames.
We meet three aged hermits in the bush, Charlie, Tom and Ted – all of whom are splashing about naked in the sparkling water, apparently full of life. But when the three make it to shore and try to firm up their crumbling dock, Ted (Kenneth Welsh) has a fatal heart attack. Charlie (Gilbert Sicotte) and Tom (Rémy Girard) are suddenly alone with each other, their quirks and their respective dogs.
Meanwhile, an elderly, oddly-behaving woman (the late Andrée Lachapelle in her final role) is attending the funeral in town of a relative. Seems the woman has spent her entire life in a long-term psychiatric hospital because, at 16, she’d claimed to be psychic, and her father deemed her demon-possessed.
The funeral over, a nephew, Steve (Éric Robidoux) is assigned to drop her back at the hospital, but turns around when she begs him not to. Steve, it turns out, runs a barely-solvent lake resort and makes ends meet selling a bit of marijuana and supplies to off-the-grid bush-dwellers like Charlie and Tom.
Aware that he is harbouring an aged fugitive, Steve decides to hide his aunt (who has renamed herself Marie-Desneige) with the booze-swilling Tom (who objects to the intruder) and Charlie (who apparently falls in love at first sight).
Enter Rafaelle (Ève Landry), a photographer/historian who’s been hired by the town museum to take pictures and collect memories of the seminal disaster. She’s almost done when she hears about Ted, who residents remember disappearing after losing his entire family in the blaze.
The trail takes her to Steve (with whom she strikes a casual romance) and a profound secret that Ted had kept hidden even from his fellow hermits.
Oh, and it’s worth mentioning, another extinction-level wildfire in on the way.
For all this, And the Birds Rained Down really hangs on the love story between Charlie and Marie, he being a cancer survivor who refused to die and she mourning the life that was taken from her. Their romance slowly simmers and culminates in a tenderly shot consummation that is rare in movies about the elderly.
As for Tom, he’s kind of crotchety comic relief, and as it turns out, a guitarist and singer of some talent. At points we are treated to more-or-less drunken versions of Leonard Cohen’s Bird on a Wire and Tom Waits’ Time.
And the Birds Rained Down. Written and directed by Louise Archambault. Stars Andree Lachapelle, Gilbert Sicotte and Remy Girard. Opens in Toronto at the Cineplex Yonge/Eginton, Friday, January 24.