Claudette Delorimier

A lonely woman spends the winter isolated and reminiscing about the past as she waits for her husband to return from a prolonged absence.

Bernadette has a yen to chuck it all and go back to nature, in this French-language Canadian film. That's just what she does after carefully leaving her wedding ring where her affluent husband, a lawyer, can see it. She has bought a farm, complete with a run-down farmhouse and a live-in cranky old man. Soon, because of the wonderful effects that her sympathy and her outsider's perspective have, her neighbors perceive great improvements in their lives. They attribute these changes to something miraculous (perhaps taking a cue from her name), and hordes of needy people descend on her farm.

A widow must cope with her late husband's associates, crooked Japanese businessmen who want her shares of a rich Northern Quebec land and a Jewish con man who wants to get a hand of her mysterious synthetic fur coat.