Fear of Water (film)

The protagonist of the film is a simple police sergeant Andre Surprin. He lives with his only and beloved daughter in the Madeleine Islands . He is the most ordinary person from an incomplete family with stable earnings, the only unexpected feature of Andre is that he is afraid of water ^[2] .

A crime occurs on the island: Rosalie Richard, the mayor’s eighteen-year-old daughter, was found murdered and raped on a rock by the sea. Inspector Zhengra from Montreal was sent to solve such a case. From his point of view, the killer is a maniac, but Surpren does not agree with the way the inspector conducts the investigation. He himself decides to find the criminals and conducts his own investigation together with his new partner, officer Genevieve Savoy, who is secretly in love with him. All locals are under suspicion.

The film is based on the novel by Jean Lemieux, "In the end, you always have to pay." According to director Gabriel Pelletier, with this tape, he hoped to fill the vacuum in Quebec cinema due to the lack of police detectives. Initially, he wanted to film the first novel of the same author, “The Red Moon”, but since the rights to his film adaptation were already sold, he took up “In the end you always have to pay,” remaking it into a script with the help of an experienced screenwriter Marcel Beaulieu ^[2] .

The shooting took place in Montreal , Quebec , as well as on the Madeleine Islands ^[3] . Filming on the Madeleine Islands was carried out in the fall, because the director did not want events to develop against a too bucolic background; in the end, filming began during Hurricane Earl , and ended during Hurricane Igor ^[2] . The budget of the entire film amounted to 4.95 million Canadian dollars , but the company does not report the fees of the picture ^[4] .

According to the lead actor Andre Legendre, the detective story of the film is just a canvas, an impetus for the development of his character, who overcomes his internal limitations, symbolized by his fear of water ^[2] . The same point of view is held by film critics of La Presse newspaper Alexi Lepage, who writes that if you consider the tape exclusively as a thriller, the viewer will be disappointed. Instead, he suggests watching it as a romantic comedy with an action-packed background. According to Lepage, the most valuable thing in the picture is the “inner thriller” - the process of self-recognition of the main characters (Andre and Genevieve), who must, in extraordinary circumstances, find within themselves previously unexplored internal forces, but along the way they find love. Lepage sees in the film both more obvious references to the Coen brothers' film “Fargo” and less obvious parallels with another Quebec film - “The Great Seduction” of Jean-Francois Poilot ^[5] .

Newspaper reviewers l'Actuel and Journal de Montréal particularly note the successful work of Andre Legendre as Sergeant Surpren. Joanie Dufren of l'Actuel writes about the deep psychologism of his game, emphasizing that he plays such strong roles in the theater more often than in the movie, where he more often acts as a comedian. Dufren agrees with Lepage that “Fear of Water” is a deeper picture than just a thriller ^[6] . The Journal de Montréal focuses on the culmination scene of the film, in which the fearful Surpren water enters the fray with the alleged killer on board the boat; this scene should have been shot with a stuntman, but on the eve of the shooting, the director suggested Legendre to try to make it himself ^[7] .

On the premiere weekend in Quebec, the film raised $ 92,435, ranking ninth among the box office leaders in the province. ^[8]

• Victory - - Grand Prix ^[9]
• Victory - International Detective Film Festival in Liege - Best Actor (Pierre-Francois Legendre) ^[9]
• Victory - - best actor (Pierre-Francois Legendre) ^{[10] [11]}
• Nomination - Jutra Awards - Best Sound ^[10]
• Nomination - Jutra Awards - Best Supporting Actress (Sandrine Bisson) ^[10]