The first two episodes of Heart beating: between discomfort and necessity
Danielle Trottier has been working on this series since 2019. She has visited many centers that help both victims and abusers. She was intrigued by the journey and the stories of men who commit violent acts in their families or couples.
What interests me is going to see who was producing the violence. I wanted to know why and how come they give themselves the right to hit or kill their wives.
After following him for three years at École Marie-Labrecque in All the lifewe find the psychoeducator at the Center for the Prevention of Violence (CPV), a community organization that works with violent men.
We help men control their violence and impulsiveness, even those for whom we think it’s too late.
We see it at work from the first episode. During a simple follow-up call, Christophe stumbles upon a man in crisis. Its speed of action makes it possible to avoid a drama.
Christophe L’Allier is devoted to his cause: non-violence. He does not take pity on men and does not feel sorry for them. He is firm, empathetic and, above all, finds the right words so that men take responsibility for their actions.
Gabrielle Laflamme, the lawyer who protects the victims
If Christophe L’Allier leans on the side of empathy, Me Gabrielle Laflamme (Eve Landry) is on the side of anger. She doesn’t understand how society lets all this violence seep into families. It strives to use all the legislative tools at its disposal to put aggressors out of harm’s way.
“Gabrielle represents my own anger […] She does me so much good! When she arrives on my screen, I can say what I feel as a woman in solidarity with other women. But I know that just anger will not be able to change things, ”explains Danielle Trottier.
The two characters have the same objective, which is to put an end to the violence, but their visions are different, which forces them to question themselves.
We live it daily, violence, and we get used to tolerating it to such an extent that we no longer see it; we endure it and it ruins our days. Violence is widely tolerated in society as a whole.
hard to see scenes
Even if the scenes of violence are neither gratuitous nor too graphic, you have to have a strong heart to watch them. It’s hard to see such a load of rage pour out on someone who eats the punches.
“I’m not here to magnify the more violent scenes. We already see a lot of violence on TV and in movies. So it’s very delicate each time, and we ask ourselves the question each time as to how we treat them, with the actors, how far we go, what we show, what ‘we don’t show… In the end, it’s the work of the contributors that interests us”, explains director Jean-Philippe Duval, who also worked on Unit 9 and All the life.
A little more about the family of Christophe L’Allier
We know that Christophe L’Allier had a difficult childhood, bathed in a violent environment. His dysfunctional family won’t be too far in With beating heart. We will see his brother Patrick (Jean-Nicolas Verreault) as well as his mother, Edith (Micheline Lanctôt).
You might think that this family has revealed a lot of things to us, but there are still a few hidden corpses left.
Drama series of 24 60-minute episodes
Primer of one episode per week on ICI Tou.tv Extra
Screenplay: Danielle Trottier (Unit 9, All the life)
Director: Jean-Philippe Duval
Producer: Fabienne Larouche and Michel Trudeau (Aetios)
Cast: Roy Dupuis, Eve Landry, Catherine Paquin-Béchard, Pierre-Paul Alain, Roc Lafortune, Maxime Mailloux, Élodie Bégin, Denis Marchand, Frédéric Boudreault, Isabel Richer, Dominick Rustam, Amélie Bernard, Alexandre Nachi, Andrew Albanese, Laetitia Isambert , Maxime Gibeault, Marie-France Lambert, Laurence Champagne, Robert Naylor, Vitali Makarov, Jayden Boyd, Jean-Nicolas Verreault, Micheline Lanctôt and Félix-Antoine Cantin
