New parents Pierre (Patrick Goyette) and Elisabeth (Suzie LeBlanc) struggle to deal with the arrival of a baby in Rodrigue Jean's Lost Song. (Mongrel Media)

Montreal-based filmmaker Rodrigue Jean has been trying to think of a way to tell the tragedy of Medea to modern audiences for more than two decades. Given that the Greek tragedy by Euripides deals with nothing less than the murder of two children by their mother — an act of tortured vengeance directed at an unfaithful husband — it's not surprising that it took Jean some time to figure out how he would pull it off.

In Lost Song, no exchange is deemed too insignificant — the decision to switch the baby from breast milk to formula, for example, takes on Freudian implications.

“My big question was, what would Medea be in this world? And also, what would she be in Canada, a very urban society,” Jean explains in the Toronto offices of his distributor.

The result of Jean's introspection is Lost Song, which took home Best Canadian Film Award at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2008. This French-language film tells the story of Élisabeth (Suzie LeBlanc), an affluent new mother spending the summer at a cottage in the Laurentians with her husband, Pierre (Patrick Goyette), their newborn baby and her well-intentioned if meddlesome mother-in-law, Louise (Ginette Morin). This seemingly simple narrative, however, becomes a sustained exploration of the darker tensions that lie dormant in intimate relationships. It becomes, in other words, the material for tragedy.

In Lost Song, no exchange is deemed too insignificant — the decision to switch the baby from breast milk to formula, for example, takes on Freudian implications. The first few seconds of the film offer a clue that this summer retreat is not going to be tranquil or uneventful. “Ça va?” (“How are you?") Pierre asks Élisabeth as they make their way to the cottage. The action that follows this mundane query shows us just how not okay Élisabeth is. In fact, as the film progresses, we learn that both are struggling to deal with the change that a baby has brought into their lives.

For Jean, who also wrote the script, Élisabeth provided an opportunity to refute portrayals of motherhood that dominate in film and TV. Well aware of the current fascination with the joys of childbearing and overall yummy mummy-ness — celeb weeklies are on “Bump Watch” 24/7 — Jean sees the film as a “bridge” between that press-friendly fantasy and the more complex human reality.

The New Brunswick-born auteur seems baffled by idealized portraits of childhood and childbearing; he finds the fascination hypocritical when so many children live in poverty. He also takes issue with the assumption that women are natural nurturers, calling the idea a “construct.” Jean feels that if you’re not being controversial, you're not doing your job as an artist, and it’s his extreme points of view that inform the film.

Louise (Ginette Morin, left), Pierre's meddlesome mother, joins Pierre and Elisabeth at their summer cottage in Lost Song. (Mongrel Media)

Élisabeth is certainly a new type, and LeBlanc’s portrayal of her establishes the contradictory emotions a new mother experiences. Neither an angel nor a devil, Élisabeth is simply troubled. Her affection for her child is evident, but so too is her unconscious resentment for the isolation that results from her new role. Her inability to handle the corrections of her mother-in-law and her silent endurance of her husband's sexual demands only intensify her unhappiness. Élisabeth’s sole act of independence in the film has tragic consequences for all.

It’s not easy to watch Élisabeth’s prolonged victimization; at times, it’s downright frustrating. Perhaps it’s that desire to know what’s wrong with her that has led some reviewers to conclude that she’s suffering from post-partum depression.

“I was quite surprised [by that reaction], but people see what they want,” says Jean, who feels that Élisabeth is the sanest, most human character in Lost Song. “You make a film like this because you want [viewers] to make up their mind. But I wish people to see other things — the tragic [element], the war between the sexes.”

Love is another ideal that intrigues the director. In fact, he is still tickled by a clip of French feminist Luce Irigaray he saw years ago. “It was a film done in Quebec on women who are in porn films. They interviewed [Iragaray] at the end about love and all that. And she said, ‘Real love between a man and woman hasn’t happened yet. It’s something that will develop in the future, possibly.’ But she said the real meeting hasn’t happened yet. I thought that was very pretty.”

Lost Song, like its director, doesn't shy away from provocative perspectives. One of the filmmaker's greatest feats is taking cottage country's most liberating symbols — the swaths of great tall trees and dense forest that surround the cottage and the deep dark lake — and transforming them into moody visual metaphors for the murkiest depths of the human psyche.

Ultimately it's that certainty — translated into a compulsively grim narrative drive and a consistently anxious tone — which can make the plot seem inevitable. Some might call that drive the film's success, but for me, it felt like all the oxygen had been sucked out of the story. The film's lead characters seem to take no pleasure in life — sex is automatic, and children are simply a vehicle for neurosis. An afternoon swim becomes an opportunity to drown in self-absorption. This tenor undermines the film’s impression of reality, and oddly enough, the final tragedy. For Jean, however, the consistent tone and relentless drive reflects a view of tragedy that goes back to the Greeks.

“They say that tragedy is like an infection,” he begins. “You put a germ in the social body and for generations the deed will just unfold. That was the intention. The couple gets infected by something, and there's nothing stopping it. Everyone tries to do their best and yet, like tragedy, it grows and unfolds.”

Lost Song opens in Toronto on Feb. 27 and opens nationwide throughout the spring.

Flannery Dean is a writer based in Toronto.