Les Filles Du Roi: A Canadian History Musical Beyond the Walls

I certainly owe Kat McCormack a debt of gratitude for bringing Corey Payette and Julie McIsaac’s musical film Les Filles du Roi to Eastern Front Theatre’s Stages festival this year. It is all of my favourite things: an original Canadian musical, historical fiction set in Canada, and a re-imagining of historical events through a different, more nuanced, and arguably more accurate, perspective. If you enjoy contemporary musical theatre you need to find a way to see this film. I was completely riveted by the storytelling and bought the cast album before I even left the theatre.

Set on the land of the Kanien’kehà:ka people, known also as the Mohawk, in what was just starting to become part of what the French called “La Nouvelle France,” and what is today called Montréal, in 1665 siblings Kateri (Kaitlyn Yott) and Jean-Baptiste (Raes Calvert) are trying to negotiate the changing landscape of their world with the expanding arrival of young women to the new French fort settlement. Instead of the European presence being limited to scattered lone fur traders keen on adventure and curious about the new-to-them land, who sometimes might even marry into the Indigenous communities, now women are coming over with the intention of building a permanent settlement and imposing their well-established way of life and culture on the land here without considering the way of life and culture that already exists. With the English and the Dutch doing the same nearby, Jean-Baptiste and Kateri are finding it difficult to live a life separate from (sometimes unwanted) interactions with the newcomers.

Marie-Jeanne Lespérance (Julie McIsaac) is one of nearly eight hundred “filles du roi,” women who really emigrated to La Nouvelle France under the tutelage of King Louis XIV between 1663 and 1673 with the sole duty of marrying once they arrived and starting a family to colonize the territory. What I love so much about the way that McIsaac and Payette have written this story is that they have done research, but also really imagine realistically what this scenario might have looked like in practice. While young girls may have been fed romantic illusions throughout their royal tutelage about being the matriarchs of a new community in a visually stunning unblemished landscape, it is worth considering who the men might be who would be excited about leaving the comforts of a country they knew to live somewhere with no established laws, no tangible government, where they are to be matched and bred like animals anyway. It is not unlikely that many of these first settlers, and especially those with positions of power within this new settlement, were not the most refined or the “best” of French society. McIsaac and Payette deeply consider the ways that power corrupts from imagining the ways soldiers and sailors might take advantage of young naive girls on a transatlantic journey who have no fathers, brothers or husbands with them to look out for them, to the way that the Captain’s wife, Marjolaine Savoie (Claire Johnstone) might become drunk on her own power and status, especially if she truly believes everything she is doing is the Lord’s work, and that she can justify everything she does as being sanctioned by Him as well.

Out of this nightmare of a fanatical Catholic death-grip on one side and barbaric feral misogynistic violence on the other Marie-Jeanne meets Kateri and Jean-Baptiste and is surprised to find the gentleness and respect that she craves with them. Unfortunately, however, the Catholic death-grip will not let Marie-Jeanne go so easily.

The story is told in a beautiful crisscross of French, English, and Kanienʼkéha (Mohawk), where the French and Kanienʼkéha help to ground the characters in their historic context, but also even more vividly in their disparate cultures, while the English seems to exist more for the benefit of the audience, but it also works as a sort of ominous reminder of what is to come- for both the French and Indigenous characters. The music also is a beautiful mixture of cultural influences; at times it feels extremely contemporary, while other parts, especially those built around the Catholic prayers, and certain moments in Kanienʼkéha feel much, much older. I think sometimes when we discuss the clashing of cultures in colonialism here we use Confederation as a marker, which can be problematic for many different reasons, but it’s interesting to remember that, initially, here we have one culture with thousands of years of history meeting another culture, also with thousands of years of history, and while Marjolaine sees only “les sauvages,” Marie-Jeanne sees the profundity of this place and its people, and this offers her sanctuary. The actors all have beautiful voices, and I loved the way the more rigid soprano was used mostly for Marjolaine, and Marie-Jeanne while in prayer, while some of the songs in Kanienʼkéha and English sung by Jean-Baptiste and Kateri have a more contemporary pop-musical theatre feel to them, which to me suggests that while Kanienʼkéha may also be a very old language, it also is one that belongs to the present and the future here.

The film is adapted from Payette and McIsaac’s stage musical of the same name, which debuted at the York Theatre in Vancouver, produced by Fugue Theatre and Raven Theatre, in association with Urban Ink and the Cultch, back in May of 2018. It was filmed as opposed to being adapted to tour in 2021 due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The film gave the creative team the opportunity to expand the cast, although they used the score they recorded from the original stage production for the film. It has been described as a sort of film-theatre hybrid. There are a few flashback scenes that are filmed in a blackbox theatre, very similar to the way they were presented in the stage version, while most of the film takes place on location on the land, and within both an Indigenous village, and the French fort. To me it felt like being able to watch a play staged outside, like we are used to seeing here at Ross Creek, but being able to move seamlessly from location to location to location. It really became the best of both world’s for me, although I would be curious to see the stage version, of course, as well.

It’s clear in this film too, that this story is very specifically about the history between one Indigenous community, the Kanien’kehà:ka, with those who came from France and settled in this specific place. We hear in the film about how there are other Indigenous communities surrounding this one in all directions and how each one is unique with its own distinct relationship, to the French, to the English, and to their Indigenous neighbours. None of this is a monolith, and this history is complex, localized, at times confusing, nuanced, detailed, and difficult. As someone who knows Acadian history quite well, but who doesn’t know Quebec’s history well at all, this musical helped me make sense of the bigger context beyond Mi’kma’ki, which enriches my understanding of the ways in which these histories connect and diverge and were also at times at odds with one another.

The musical could have realistically ended with an impenetrable wall between the Kanien’kehà:ka and the French, but instead, it offers us the hope of building bridges. We know, of course, the future, and it is not the happily ever after at all that we would wish for these characters, but the story suggests that maybe that happier outcome is still possible. As Indigenous cultures start to see resurgence in music, language, art, mythos and storytelling, and other traditions, and of course, with the return of land, all too slowly, like Kateri realizes while her brother comes to her when she is sick, hopefully, eventually, “the cold [won’t be] permanent.”

You can see a screening of Urban Ink’s film Les Filles du Roi at the following festivals; and keep checking this website for what will hopefully be many more screenings- everyone should go see this film. It’s beautiful.