This nationalist romance imagines a context for the mysterious death of the proto «Group of Seven» painter Tom Thompson by linking him romantically with a Québecois woman married to an English Canadian boor. In this dramatic feature passion is key: both the passion for another human and the passion for a landscape, a homeland. In the scene in question, which incidentally is often represented in stills for the film, the lovers speak across the table to one another, each holding a magnifying glass to the mouth. I imagine that the Francophone woman speaks French; the Anglophone man, English. It is impossible to say for sure, since no words can be heard, for it should come as no surprise that while the sources, the mouths and the bodies, of this passionate exchange are emphasized, we never learn what it is that they are saying.