LES CAPRICES DE VICTORIA

Victorian Style B and B Beguiles with its Calming Beauty

Imagine staying in a Bed and Breakfast that harkens back to the Victorian era. This award-winning B and B stunningly captures a remarkable piece of this rarefied, bygone period. And it does so with charm and understated elegance. Located in the scenic Eastern Townships, it's only five-minute walk from the hub of Sutton village’s boutiques and restaurants.

 There are lots of happy "tweets" about Les Caprices de Victoria

Maryse Desrosiers

Owner, Maryse Desrosiers, has warmly been welcoming guests into her impeccably cared for B & B since 2007. Maryse’s gentle manner immediately puts you at ease the moment you open the door. Her winning smile, tempered with reserve and patience, may in part be due to her previous profession; she worked as a nurse in Canada’s Great White North for over 30 years. 

Les Caprices dates back to 1905! The plaque outside invites you to ponder its historical significance and the luminary family that once lived in it. 

Maryse shared some of her childhood memories with me. It’s clear, she appreciates all that is authentic and natural, including timeless architecture. Her renovations embody this. “I did a fair amount of necessary renovations, but I made sure to keep the integrity of this historical house to respect its character, original style and aesthetics. Even the slate roof was kept.  The plaque outside invites you to ponder Les Caprices’s historical significance and the luminary family that once lived here.

The interior exquisitely combines the old with the not-so-old. It referencesVictorian décor and its period humour while meshing Maryse’s own memories of the North. 

Antique furniture and original art form 

their own gallery of the past.

It all comes together to create a sublime cocoon of serenity and warmth.

  

All kinds of sculptures and carvings make you smile in more ways than one

Room Reverie

Modern comforts and privacy are key to each of the five spacious rooms located on the second and third floors. Note their iconic names: Josephine, Juliette, Hortense, Charlotte and Victoria. 

There’s a lot of hall space between the soundproof rooms too. Relaxing in all ways, three rooms feature electric fireplaces and luxurious, top quality beds: three rooms have Queen; two rooms have King (my Juliette room had one).  All rooms are lovely.

                                Luxuriate in your claw bathtub

                                      

Every object has original allure Three rooms have balconies. My Juliette room had a balcony, giving a sweeping view to the pastoral-like grounds. 

I wanted to call out to Romeo from it.

Breakfast is a Delicacy of Riches

Lots of fresh locally grown fruit starts your day with entrees flavoured in honey and rosemary or cointreau which brings a tasty zest to your palette.

I loved her stacked buttermilk fluffy pancakes layered with raspberries, soaked subtly in rosemary and honey and yoghurt.

Maple sugar and maple wine flavored them richly. In this delectable dish, chocolate powder was artfully spread around a phantom fork.

   Capricious humour can land right on your breakfast plate! 

Another entrée consisted of melt-in your-mouth pastry – one with cheese, the other with apple. They were made by village baker, Pascal Picarda at La Valse des pains bakery. 

These prefaced Maryse's marvellous home-made smoothie. Topped with fruit and granola, it looked so pretty in the bowl. This smoothie was exceptional.

Breakfast is always a surprise. Maryse made a really tasty dish of pancetta with mushrooms, red peppers and onions. An egg on a baguette accompanied it, or it was the other way round! 

Maryse has a knack for pleasing your taste buds with her own culinary creativity.

Truth is, Les Caprices de Victoria is somewhat addictive.  I'm returning for Sutton’s Fall Festival, and guess where I'm staying?  I can hardly wait to see the parade of pumpkins placed on the wrap-around porch, smiling as guests go for the biggest treat of all… Les Caprices de Victoria.

The website is: www. capricesdevictoria.qc.ca

The address is 63 Principale North Street, Sutton, Quebec

 Call (450) 538-1551

1945: (Directed by Ferenc Torok)***

(Here is the press release put out by Menemsha Films on this Hungarian film)

On a summer day in 1945, an Orthodox man and his grown son return to a village in Hungary while the villagers prepare for the wedding of the town clerk's son. The townspeople – suspicious, remorseful, fearful, and cunning – expect the worst and behave accordingly. The town clerk fears the men may be heirs of the village's deported Jews and expects them to demand their illegally acquired property back.

Director Ferenc Török paints a complex picture of a society trying to come to terms with the recent horrors they’ve experienced, perpetrated, or just tolerated for personal gain.

“I’ve been interested in this topic for 10 years now, ever since I read Gábor T. Szántó’s short story,” says director Török. “I was really interested in the time just after the war and just before the introduction of nationalization and Communism, when for a moment

there was an inkling of the possibility of democratic transition. Things could even have taken a turn for the better. Fascism was over but Communism had not yet begun; we tried to capture the atmosphere of those few years in this film.

“This is a period in Hungarian history that is not overly represented either in literature or in film,” continues Török, “instead, people focus on the Second World War itself or on the dictatorship of the 1950s, with these few intermediate years earlier. I wanted to present a social tableau that would portray life in Hungary just after the war.”

1945 was the opening night film of the Toronto Jewish Film Festival back in May, and more recently the film won yet another award, Best Foreign Film, at Michael Moore’s Traverse City Film Festival.

A superb ensemble cast, lustrous black and white cinematography, and historically detailed art direction contribute to an eloquent drama that reiterates Thomas Wolfe’s famed sentiment: ‘you can’t go home again."

I found the film slow moving, sporadically edited with the much-to-long scenes showing  the Jewish father and son walking about the wagon carrying the treasured  remnants to be buried. Still, this little yet startling film reveals an epic moment of tragedy, along with shameful human behaviour that continues to prove fools rule the world...wrongly. 

TRENCH 11 (directed by Leo Scherman) ****

A really cool horror film entrenched in  WW1 tunnel. A small team of allies, including one Canadian – a tunnel expert who knows how to tunnel his way out of anything resembling dark narrow passageways) is sent deep down into a maze-like tunnel full of confusing doors and rooms with remnants of habitation and dead bodies. He is supposed to blow it up. But upon entering, they discover this bio-bacterial body warfare raging  inside in the form of long white thin worms that live in people and produce zombie-like leftovers if he person infected. Germans are down there infected, and the top sadistic gun on the German side sends his people down there to blow up everything. So this is a case scenario of Germans meet allies. The commander for the allies in the tunnel is a complete jerk who orders their certain deaths. Mutiny and his death is  just the beginning of this interesting plot, sure to hurdle everyone into their own deadly destinies, save for one – the tunnel leader.

Montreal’s 2018 World Film Festival Opens with a Superb Film

THE ETRUSCAN SMILE (Directed by Mihai Brezis & Oded Binnun) *****

A great cast and story will bring you to tears. Rory MacNeil (magnificently played by Brian Cox) is from a remote island Hebrides. He’s a feisty, argumentive stubborn man who has a lifelong feud with an old sick geezer, named Frazer. Rory is one tough Scot who decides to visit his son and wife in San Francisco. Things are rotten between the two, but Rory falls in love with his baby grandson, Jamie and a woman he meets at the museum. He has leaned on an Etruscan funerary piece of a man and woman smiling at one another done in Terra cotta. It’s huge. This woman (Rosanna Arquette) tells him off; she works at the museum.  Rory has stage 4 prostate cancer and that is the main reason to travel abroad – to get a diagnosis, and of course other reasons as well. Rory will do anything for baby Jamie and what he does goes against the parenting of son Ian and Emily. Hilarious witty scenes and those full of authentic pathos pull at us. This is a great film with an ending befitting a family that really loves one another despite the major conflicts.
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Preceeded by "Pepper" a South Korean short  directed by Jayil Pako non-nonsensical that the message of unwanted baby girls was lost in  repetative artsy stuff with no impact.

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KU DAMM 59 (Directed by Sven Bohse) 

A mish mash of characters caught in their own dismal lives in Berlin in 1959. Hard to follow and frenetic. It is adopted from a TV series. The director’s focus was not there at all. Get this director an editor!
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Preceeded by "Cooee", a short film of Aussie  girl trash that was incomprehensible and totally distasteful. It was directed by Toby Morris, but who cares?
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THE LORD EAGLE (Directed by Eduard Novikov) *****

 Set in the 1930s in the barren wintery northern land above Mongolia, a very old  Aboriginal couple struggles to survive living by hunting, chopping wood, making fires and more. A big eagle one day, lands on a tree by their modest dwelling. The man of the couple thinks this is an evil omen; in fact he has felt a lifetime of guilt by scaring an eagle making a nest and dropping one of the branches. This happened when he was young. They offer it food every day, and he eats it. Soon the eagle shows he wants to come inside the house. The couple is mortified; yet one day they walk out to find that the eagle has brought them food. The ending shows the bitter Russian authorities encroaching on their way of life, including their love the eagle. The ending is sad. The film is brilliantly mesmerizing.

This film shows vividly shows in a single setting the old way of life and how mankind can ruin it as power changes the lives of two special people and their relationship to the land and animals.

 It took top prize in Moscow, winning the Golden St George.

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The film was preceeded by Pigeonberry, a Hungarian short directed by Pici Papai. A young boy tries desperatly to save his mother who aha cancer by doing a tribal ritual. A touching film

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BROKEN MIRRORS (Directed by Imri Matalon & Aviad Givon) *****

Ariella has a regimented almost cruel father who was a commander in the Israeli army. He and Ariella clash on everything and he punishes her. One day, she convinces her mother to let her drive the car back from an outing she is taking with her and her younger sister. A terrible accident leaves her mother in a coma. Ariella decides to punish herself and runs away to a place her father told her never to go to. There she tires to get raped, even to freeze herself in a nursery container. She finds out why her father is so mean and what his secret is and how it connects to his obsession with being on time and punishment. An excellent film with real suspense coming from raw reality. It is not a political film; rather, it is a story about a family fraught with serious problems that only unravel with self-truths and confessions.
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SPACE ON THE CORNER (Directed by Benjamin Eyaga)***

So a huge pharmacy in Montreal has been turned into a space to be renovated and used by people. People with their own priorities come and go hoping to rent it, but the two owners want it to be used to join the community together. Relationships come to light and individuals with their own agendas wanting to rent show their intentions. This is a talking heads type movie shot in one space. It is funny and real.

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EXPEDITION CONGO (Directed by Amy Greeson) *****

A 77-minute documentary following pharmacist Amy Greeson and her 3-man team with guides into Congo’s jungle.

 Everything goes wrong, including getting arrested – rescued by the president of Congo – being stung alive by bees and ants, getting lost and trekking four days without water. They are healing seekers in search of tree and plant medicine. Only, when they abandon the jungle, and travel on the river does their journey prove fruitful. Stopping in on various tribes, they learn about specific

barks via blind shaman. What a daring courageous woman she is, and so humble! A must-see movie.

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 IN THIS LAND NOBODY KNEW HOW TO CRY

(Directed by Giorgos Panousopoulos) ****

On a boat to Armenaki (Ikaria island in Greece was stunning location for the film). A French member of parliament and an Athenian economist are on assignment – to develop the island for investment potential. They wish to teach the people ways of modern life as well. But little to do they know just incredibly the table of fortune turn. In fact, both find their individual freedom and love. They realize, the people taught them rather than the other way around. The daughter’s director, Margarita starred in the lead. The comic tour de force in the film certainly came from the captain – wonderfully played with great comedic timing by Yannis Hajiyannis. This wise funny  captain lives on the island and knows so much about life. We meet a cast of characters who embody the collective free thinking spirit and way of life on this remarkable island of simplicity, heart and healing. They barter; no money; the bank has been closed for years. Idyllic for adults and a true experience of real learning for the children, Armenaki (a fictitious place in reality) makes us all want to live there.

In fact I did go to Ikaria. Known as Greece’s no-stress island, the cars are not permitted to honk; there are few cars in fact. The thermal baths there keep you healthy as does the food. People in Ikaria never seem to age; a 70-year-old is a fit as a 40-year-old elsewhere.

Giorgos Panousopoulos is Greece’s great film maker and he is being celebrated during a week of his films this month in Athens. His daughter was enchanting in the film – as was the cohesive colourful cast who obviously loved being in the film and working with this great director.

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This film was preceeded by the short, "We'll Always Have Toynbee". A woman and man meet in a bar, get drunk and eventually get it on in his back seat of his truck. he hopes to see her again. And he does. She is first nations and is leading a protest in the forest. Police arrive and throw tear gas and beat them. one of those police men is the very man she hooked up with at the bar. Throughout the film, they both quote lines  at fitting moments from the late great historian and philosopher, Arnold. J. Toynbee.

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PARDON (Directed by Jan Jakob Koldki) ***

Despite the marvellous acting and its riveting tragically true story of the Polish Ministry repeatedly digging up a soldier in 1947 who was considered an enemy of the state, the film is confusing yet the  dark tone and atmosphere captured in this heavy film is palpable. Husband and wife set out on a perilous journey to travel with their dead son (in a coffin) to bury him in a sacred place. Only trouble is, they are met with near death by Polish soldiers, two thugs and nature’s cruelty. 

They have escaped on a train with the horse, the coffin and food and are met with an escaped Pole who ends up saving their lives on many an occasion. Like a horse, he pulls their wagon for them when the horse dies.

It is such an unbelievable testament to a mother’s love of a son and her eventual madness and recovery. The journey full of loss she takes to buy her son is beyond treacherous. The story is told by the grandson as a flashback, but it’s pretty confusing.
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JIM SHOE (Directed by Peter Sutton)*****

The head of a Chicago law firm is going to sail around the world, and he leaves charity assignments for his four associates to undertake, At the end of six months, whoever does the best will become a partner is the film. One has to open a soup kitchen; another must take care of an Alzheimer’s patient; another must get a couple off meth and restore their kid back to them. Finally Jim Shoe has to take a juvenile delinquent under his guidance. We watch as each changes into being a better person as they juggle their charity with their job. This is a movie with a Christian message. The music is fitting to the theme.

THE ACCOUNTANT OF AUSCHWITZ (Directed by Matthew Shoychet)*****

 An excellent detailed retelling of the terrible times and the opposing views about sentencing this horrid man.

I loved the film, but the story is brutally alarming.

My summary  really only touches various themes in the film.  The documents in the film create suspense and proof of prodigious research.

Oskar Gröning, who was the accountant at Auschwitz witnessed many thousand of killings as he busily collected all the possessions of Jews arriving from the horrendous trains to be sent to their doom. Complicit in 300,000 murders there, he is finally put on trial. Survivors attest to his presence, and one woman says she forgive him, even though her family was decimated at the camp. The film brilliantly has interviews and charts with proof all the Jews murdered at different camps and the guards who watched it all happen. Testimonies and excellent archival photos recreate the camps and the murderous Nazis.


Nuremberg Trial that also introduces the prosecutor, now living in Palm Springs, Florida wants all Nazi guards to be responsible too for their participation as obedient murderers. Most of the judges in Germany were former Nazis and so it is a long arduous road to seal convictions. And when they are convicted, most spend only a few years in prison – such as Gröening who was sentenced to 4 years in prison, but after his many appeals, died without serving a day behind bars. The world will continue to commit horrors despite the collective chant of victims and anti-fascist fighters, yelling “Never Again.”