By Quebec standards, it's a blockbuster movie. It runs for 2 hours 8 minutes and cost $6.4-million to make, with a promotion budget of more than $2-million in bought or donated publicity. It opens Nov. 29 on some 100 screens.
No Quebec film ever hit the market so ambitiously. It features several stars of Quebec's screen and stage. Radio-Canada television, a financial partner in the enterprise, broadcast a full hour in Sunday night prime time while actors, director, producer and other participants told how they made the film.
It's titled Séraphin: Un homme et son péché in French, and Seraphin: Heart of Stone in English (with subtitles). What it also has going for it is that the film retells with contemporary sensibility a singular classic of Quebec literature, Claude-Henri Grignon's 1933 novel Un homme et son péché ( A Man and His Sin).
That novel was a huge success. It quickly went through eight editions. No other story so captured the imagination of three generations of French Canadians as that of Séraphin Poudrier, the aging village miser who marries a young woman and then, by his appalling stinginess, starves and freezes her to death.
The book came out in the midst of the Depression when French Quebec recoiled against capitalism and the city, promoted a back-to-the-land movement, and paid the unemployed $600 over three years to relocate in virgin land of northern Quebec.
The novel was set in Sainte-Adèle in 1890, when that Laurentian village was still in its pioneering phase. Life was hard and precarious, and Séraphin the village usurer soon had most peasants in his grip. Above all, he kept in fear and near-starvation the innocent, pious young woman that his wealth enabled him to marry.
Séraphin was mythical for the extremity of his avarice and his exactions on his saint of a wife. The underlying story, in a rural Quebec setting, was implicitly the Greek legend of the minotaur, half man and half bull, that devours the virgin brought to him by fearful parents hoping to propitiate him.
This stark tale was expanded into a serial that ran in 15-minute segments three times a week -- later, five times a week -- between 1939 and 1962. It was rebroadcast in 1963 and 1965. Plays, drawn from the serial, were put on stage repeatedly between 1942 and 1953.
The story was twice turned into a movie, in 1948 and 1950. In 1956, it returned to life as a television series that ran half an hour a week, later a full hour, until 1972, with repeat broadcasts in 1972 and 1977-78.
It turned Séraphin into such a household name in Quebec that anyone considered a miser was called "a real Séraphin."
The current movie plays up the rural pioneer setting, with stunning scenes of the landscape through four seasons. But it plays down the extreme religiosity of 1933. The village priest, instead of being a heroic man of God, now becomes an all-too-frail sinner who eventually abandons the priesthood.
Séraphin's wife, Donalda, is no longer the terrorized victim who feared God and her husband equally, and prayed in her last illness: "Come, Lord, do not delay. . . . O my Jesus, may I be forever crucified with you."
In her 2002 reincarnation (played by the beguiling 18-year-old Karine Vanasse), Donalda is torn between her husband and the man she loves. She is confident of being reunited with her lover in death.
Quebec has changed fundamentally since 1933, but Séraphin reigns again as one of its enduring myths.