Michel Brault in Person

(Les bons débarras). Brault considered this pivotal work one of the greatest challenges in his work as a cinematographer: “The distress I had . . . lay in finding a style for the images. . . . In (screenwriter) Réjean Ducharme's work there was a certain distance, a certain interpretation, a certain vision of things, that is called style.” Set in an impoverished town in the Laurentian Mountains, Good Riddance focuses on a precocious, possessive thirteen-year-old, Manon, who broods over her favorite novel, Wuthering Heights, and fixates on her mother Michelle. Obsessed with monopolizing Michelle's love, Manon becomes increasingly jealous of the two men in her mother's life: slow-witted, volatile uncle Guy, and Michelle's new lover, the local policeman. Mankiewicz and his superb cast turn what could have been nothing more than a backwoods Gothic tale into a complex and absorbing work that functions simultaneously as horror story and political parable.