Golden age

After attending Concordia’s 2010 student film festival, Pascal Plante says he was disappointed by the negative way his peers portrayed the elderly. He set out to film a more lighthearted view of seniors.

“I remember sitting there and thinking, ‘That’s not at all how I see the elderly. Many of them around me seem to be having a blast.’ So I got the idea to make a musical,” says Plante, a third-year student in the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema.

Plante’s film, La fleur de l’âge, was presented with Concordia’s highest film honour, the Mel Hoppenheim Award for Outstanding Overall Achievement in Film Production. The honour was bestowed at the school’s annual awards ceremony on May 5, and the film was featured at the 2011 student film festival.

“It was an impossible project,” says Louise Lamarre, Plante’s professor. “On paper, no one believed that it could be done.” His proposal involved a cast of non-professional elderly performers, singing and dancing in a seven-minute choreographed production.

Despite warnings from his professors and other students that the film, only his second as a student, would be difficult, Plante persevered. It took a while to find a location that would work, one with a staff willing to switch from working in a seniors residence to a film set.

Shot over three days in a Longueuil retirement home on Montreal’s South Shore, the film is “dense and complex,” according to Plante.

“When I first presented my script in class, eyebrows around the room were pretty high,” says Plante. “It was a really ambitious project.

“People were trying to discourage me, not because of the screenplay, but because of the logistics and how hard it would be to create that musical. In the script, there were 24 actors required and I wanted to use non-professionals.” Plante had his prospective cast go through an audition process, even taking photos of potential participants and reviewing them with his classmates. The average age on the set was more than 80. The oldest cast member was 96 years old.

Hailing from a musical family (his father is an opera singer, and his brother wrote the score for the movie), Plante sought to balance the sounds and images in a program that he considers visually obsessed. “We don’t fall in love with films through dramas or other intellectually heavy films, we fall in love with lighter fare,” says Plante.

With 20 hands behind the camera, Plante’s organization helped set his movie apart from the others coming out of Concordia. “His first cut was almost the final cut,” says Lamarre. “Somehow he got it done.”
 

Pascal Plante's film, La fleur de l’âge, won him the the Mel Hoppenheim Award for Outstanding Overall Achievement in Film Production. His film, which is a musical, features 24 non-professional actors between the ages of 80 and 96. View the teaser: 

Related link:
•    Concordia's Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema