Playing a memory                     

Paulina Abarca-Cantin

role in Michka’s films

The Snail Position —  actress

MF: You were saying Michka cast you as the “mother” in The Snail Position because your eyes resembled her own mother’s eyes. Tell me about the casting process.

PA-C: There is some backstory. In 1996, my father died on his 55th birthday of a brain aneurism. The shock was so overwhelming that I decided to postpone grants I had received to direct a play. Then I spent the better part of a year with my grandmother abroad, who was the other person I loved most in the world. Eventually, I was strong enough to start acting again and landed a part in a TV series. The man who played my father had the same hands as my father. When I saw them, I was overwhelmed. I felt it was a sign that it was time to fly  home to take care of his affairs with my mother and brother. During that period in Montreal, I received a call from Michka. She explained that she had seen my picture in the ACTRA casting book, and thought I would be perfect for the “mother” in her film because we had similar eyes. I remember the reading was very brief. She looked at me and said, “You're perfect.” And then we started filming the next week. It was very quick. I had had a similar casting experience in the past  so I was getting used to following what life was bringing.

MF: When you started the production, you were still in a vulnerable state. What do you remember of the shoot?

PA-C: Michka was often telling stories to the actors about parts of her life as she was directing a scene and directing and inspiring the young lead. So even though the film may not have been autobiographical, she was sharing parts of her life with talent. And I don't think this lovely actress had done a lot of film acting so Michka was quite helpful in terms of where the camera was, angles and just general sort of overall inspiration.

MF: Do you remember the scenes you played?

PA-C: One was in an apartment on Sherbrooke Street. I remember we were shooting indoors in very tight spaces. Arthur, the director of photography, and Michka had good shorthand. I remember thinking, “Well, this is an interesting auteur filmmaker” because they took time to try out different things. They had some heated discussion about one scene, about how it should be done and so on, but it didn't seem like it was too rushed. They were really taking the time to think through the process.

The second day is the one I really treasure. It was on St Hubert Street in a beautiful house with a black balcony that resembled the architecture in France. We filmed the scene where the character is remembering her mother in Paris. I was costumed in a beautiful silk polka dot dress with, I think, a bow. We spent a lot of time on the hair and the dress. I remember Michka showed me some pictures of her elegant mother and her aunts on the beach. Even on the beach, they wore beautiful rings. That resonated because right up until the age of 100, my own grandmother also wore beautiful jewelry and carried herself with immense grace.

MF: In her handwritten scenario, Michka pasted several pictures of her parents to inspire her.

PA-C: I was very struck by the pictures she showed me. She mostly talked to me about her mother's personal elegance, her sense of class and culture. These were the things the young lead was channeling in remembering her mother. In the scene, I come out of the apartment and on to the balcony. I might have had a cigarette, I can't remember, but it wouldn't have been surprising. It was that kind of a scene. Very evocative. Then we took a couple of photographs because there was a photo of her mother in the girl's apartment that she would focus on from time to time.

Michka and I really connected on the set, especially because the lead character also had an issue with her lost father. I remember thinking it was interesting that all of this is coming to me at a point where I was connecting with similar emotions. The whole experience was magical, and I could just feel a lot of integrity on the set. She was warm and welcoming towards all of the actors. I remembered the experience but never got to see the film. I always wondered how it turned out.

MF: How is it that you didn't manage to see it? Most of her films were never released in commercial theatres, but this one was.

PA-C: I may have been travelling again that year.

MF: That makes sense because the film came out in March 1999.

PA-C: Then years passed and I got involved with legacy film via Encore +[1], and I was visiting the Réalistrices équitables website, when I  landed on an entry for Michka. And that's where I learned that she had passed away. It really floored me. I had no idea. And then I looked through her filmography posted there. Happily, it said that for more information, one could contact you.

MF: And here we are. Did you talk to Michka at the time about what you were going through?

P-AC: I told her a little bit. I think she was surprised that I was Chilean-Canadian. I can't remember what she thought my background would be. But if you visit Chile, you will always see people that could easily be Lebanese, Italian, Turkish or Palestinian, or even Israeli. I can't say there's a clear Chilean phenotype.

In doing the work with Encore +, before I arrived upon the site with Michka’s films, I was so struck by the vast number of really beautiful, high quality Canadian films that have been produced over the past 40 years. Many of those films are at risk of disappearing completely if we don't preserve them. To me, that has been an overwhelming mission for the past five years. I was so moved that we could bring back Michka’s oeuvre.

MF: It feels totally appropriate that you were playing the mother in a flashback. You were essentially playing a memory. And then through Encore +, you brought Michka’s films back into memory. It's really beautiful to me and I'm grateful we managed to connect.

P-AC: Absolutely. It's funny how memory works because I had forgotten about that casting story completely. And then as soon as you prompted me, , it all came back.

MF: When Michka went to film The Snail Position in Tunisia, she told everyone that she didn't know how to speak Arabic. One day, she went with a driver to a food stall and Arabic words came out of some deep recess of her mind. Ironically, she did not really have a lot of memories of Tunisia. Yet the ones she retained were clear. If her mother went out in the evening, she would leave her pearls with Michka in the crib. She could feel them on her face and fingers. After her parents divorced, and her father remarried, it took years before Michka saw her mother again in France. She couldn’t name the objects as pearls, but she did have a memory of the experience. Her mother looked at her, incredulous, and said, “How could you possibly remember that? You were too young.” And yet she did.

 P-AC: I think I'm wearing pearls in the film. Maybe that's where the conversation about jewelry came up. I'm not sure. The photograph that she showed me was so unusual because it was four or five women on a beach wearing their jewels, but wearing one-piece bathing suits.

 MF: I know the photo.

 PA-C: I was struck by it because they seemed subservient, all covered up like that, yet they also seemed free because of the jewelry. That's how I read it anyway, at the time.

 MF: In one of her notebooks for The Snail Position, she had a page called “Ideas”. She had imagined a scene where the mother gives the daughter a plate of couscous that is smaller than everyone else’s. She's wants the daughter to stay thin without anyone noticing.

 PA-C: Now that you say that, I remember that scene in the apartment on Sherbrooke had a tagine. They messed around with the couscous for a really long time. It was a long process. So that storyline is there somewhere.

MF: Well, couscous was a big part of her culture, and it comes up in the strangest places. In fact, Jean Derome, who wrote the music for The Snail Position, talks about meeting Michka for the first time, and how she had made a lamb couscous for dinner. He remembered it in great detail. It made a huge impression that she was both knowledgeable about jazz and also a talented cook. She actually wanted to open up a café-club called “Jazz and Couscous”.

P-AC: That's wonderful. A quick biographical question: did Michka come to Canada by herself?

MF: No.

P-AC: She came with her dad?

MF: No, she left her father when she was 13 or 14. She literally ran away not just from home but from Tunisia. She orchestrated the whole departure with her older sister. They were horribly abused by their stepmother. There are stories in her book, La Lune des coiffeurs, about this. With the aid of her mother's sister, I think, they managed to escape Tunisia and went to France.

PA-C: That's where her mom was.

MF: In the south of France, yes. Her mother had remarried and converted to Catholicism. Michka didn't even know she was Jewish until she went to France. She came to Canada, specifically Quebec, with her boyfriend at the time. After a few months, Guy went back to France and she stayed. But they remained close all of her life. The two of us are still friends.

PA-C: So he lives in France?

MF: Yes, we shared a pied à terre with him for years in Paris. He's an artist and worked on films as a set designer. I discovered that he helped raise some money for The Snail Position. The poster for Spoon is based on one of his paintings, and the one for A Great Day in Paris is based on his photo. The cover of La Lune des coiffeurs is also based on one of his paintings.

PA-C: When I hear this timeline, Michka must have come when she was already a young woman.

MF: She was in her late twenties.

PA-C:. If I ever had fantasies about being a film director, Michka was pretty close to what I thought I might be. She was facing some adversity but still getting it done. That's what I treasure to this day about her, and — let's say it — she was sexy to boot. She was gorgeous and had a real sensuality about her on the set as a person. And imagine I got to play her mother! Wow! Such an honour. 

[1] The Canada Media Fund launched Encore + as a pilot project in 2017 to give a second life to Canadian films and television series. Led by Paulina Abarca-Cantin, the project curated, restored, and digitized more than 3,000 pieces, which were made available on YouTube. The project ended on November 30, 2022. Between June-November 2022, four of Michka Saäl’s films appeared, in English and French, on Encore +: Far from Where?, A Great Day in Paris, New Memories and China Me. During that time, they were viewed, at least in part, 5,000 times.