With a beating heart | Final destination for Gabrielle and Christophe

The episodes that led to the grand finale ofWith a beating heartwhich will end for good on Tuesday evening, were difficult and trying, but the grand finale of the popular - soap opera will be bathed in light and gentleness, assures author Danielle Trottier.

At least, in the last minutes, punctuated by the magnificent song The day ahead is brand new from the group With no headphones. I saw this final episode, already online on the ICI Tou.tv Extra, and all the strings are tied up, not without breaking our hearts one last time, which was the signature of this series loaded, the most political of Danielle Trottier.

Because the good psychoeducator Christophe L’Allier (Roy Dupuis) ​​has been struggling for three months. His brother Patrick (Jean-Nicolas Verreault) shot himself in the head in front of him, “so that he feels guilty forever,” slips Danielle Trottier.

Christophe L’Allier also met sex offender Bertrand Carignan (Normand Canac-Marquis), the man who attacked him from the age of 3 and who slept with his incestuous mother Édith Leclerc (Micheline Lanctôt), accomplice of all the abuse. It was Edith, remember, who took the photos and who performed sexual acts on Christophe to excite his pedophile lover, what a screwed family, let’s not be afraid of words.

In short, the final ofWith a beating heart starts with a mentally and physically exhausted Christophe, vulnerable, fragile, irritable and paralyzed by his painful past. Last week, the scene where Christophe walked in the rain with the ghosts of his sister Julie (Larissa Corriveau), his brother Patrick and his mother was magnificent. “Christophe carries his family within him. He will never get rid of it,” explains screenwriter Danielle Trottier.

Parenthesis: when the naughty Edith was struck down by a heart attack, she grabbed the telephone to call for help, then changed her mind. She threw the device on the ground and chose to let herself die, alone, with nothing holding her back to life.

I was afraid that our devoted Christophe would suffer a tragic departure similar to that of all the members of the L’Allier clan. Without revealing the plot, Danielle Trottier had cooked up another, more joyful plan for her community hero, whom we knew as a speaker at the Marie-Labrecque school in All life.

“I knew I was going to end up leaving my main character happy. I knew I was going to end on a positive note. Christophe had a thick shell because he needed it to survive. I never thought about killing him,” explains author Danielle Trottier, who wrote 48 episodes ofWith a beating heartspread over two seasons.

The last episode of the soap opera obviously shows the meeting – expected and hoped for – between Crown prosecutor Gabrielle Laflamme (Eve Landry) and her father Hervé Dubois (Marc Messier), which does not go as planned. For the record, Hervé murdered Gabrielle’s mother, in front of her, when she was 12 years old, by giving her 52 blows with a steak tenderizer. Would you be able to forgive an act of such violence?

A porcupine lawyer, Gabrielle has, like Christophe L’Allier, evolved for the better. She completed her sessions with the D^r Windbourne (Roger Léger) and stopped his use of anxiolytics.

On the other hand, neither Gabrielle nor Christophe will have been a couple in With a beating heart. This possibility for the two protagonists was never even mentioned. “I didn’t see the need for one or the other to be in love with someone,” explains Danielle Trottier. Love is multifaceted. Gabrielle and Christophe are happy when they take action towards non-violence. There are people who are not meant to be in a relationship. They focus instead on friendship and their commitments. »

Every Tuesday evening, With a beating heart also highlighted a type of woman less present on Quebec television, that is, the tricked-out mother, manipulative, heartless and stripped of the slightest maternal fiber. Micheline Lanctôt was amazing in this detestable role.

“Motherhood is another thing we have overrated. It is not true that all mothers have maternal feelings. I even softened Edith’s character. I knew mothers much worse than Edith during my research,” notes Danielle Trottier.

Happy events marked the road to the final ofWith a beating heart. Investigator Fabien Gauthier (Maxime Mailloux) married his Sylvie (Sasha Migliarese), whom we met last year, when her ex-husband (Guillaume Champoux) smashed his shin with a baseball bat .

The worker Roxanne (Catherine Paquin-Béchard) has returned to the Violence Prevention Center, where she will form a great team with Marc (Dominick Rustam) and another person whose identity I will not reveal.

Murder of elders, infanticide, tortured dogs or sexual torture, With a beating heart has never been into lace. And despite the heaviness of the themes she addressed, Danielle Trottier does not carry all the misfortunes of the Earth on her shoulders. “I don’t need a lot of light to see hope,” she says.

Danielle Trottier is an important screenwriter for Quebec television. With breath, rhythm and a good sense of punch, she explored the conditions of women prisoners (Unit 9), adolescent motherhood (All life) as well as domestic violence, which was put at the center of his latest soap opera.

No, the author does not spare our (beating) hearts, but she never bores us. I prefer cathodic tachycardia a hundred times over televisual bradycardia, where there is no more sound, no more image and nothing on the monitor.