AN ILLUMINATING TALE
Affleck explores a world without women and showcases his directorial strengths
“Would you like me to tell you a story?”
What a great opening line. It’s spoken by Dad — we never do learn the name of Casey Affleck’s character — to his daughter, as they prepare to bunk down on what looks like a family camping trip. But it’s also the implied query every movie makes when the lights go down. And because we’re already there, so is the answer. Yes. Yes, please.
Affleck, who also wrote and directed this tale, quickly makes it clear that Light of My Life is no walk in the park. Like the father-daughter duo played by Ben Foster and Thomasin Mckenzie in last year’s Leave No Trace, these two are living off the grid to avoid others who might wish them harm. As in 2009’s The Road with Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-mcphee, the danger springs from some kind of catastrophe. And like 2006’s Children of Men, that calamity has its roots in reproduction.
This is not to say that Affleck is stealing from other movies. It’s
merely that if you enjoyed any of those superb dramas, you should relish this entry in the genre of post-apocalyptic dystopia. Dad and his daughter — her name is Anna, but he calls her Rag — live in a world in which half the population has died of a plague. The female half.
Flashbacks reveal that Dad and Mom (Elisabeth Moss) had a daughter about 10 years ago, just as the plague was scouring the planet. Mom succumbed. How their infant daughter survived is never explained, but Dad knows that to keep her safe she must stay hidden. The older she gets, the harder this is going to be.
The story is heartbreakingly simple, as the two struggle to find a place where they can survive without calling attention to themselves. An abandoned rural property seems too good to be true, and Dad vetoes it out of hand, but the persistent Rag finally persuades him to stay for just one night.
She’s at that age where questions are endless — every explanation sets off a new query, while a negative response triggers a cascade of “Why not?” Dad is doing his best to educate her with a hodgepodge of knowledge: spelling, scraps of science, the complicated balance of morals and ethics and, of course, stories. One scene finds him perusing dusty parenting books in an abandoned library, but those authors, at least half of them now dead, never envisioned a world like this.
The overall tone — both visual and emotional — is one of dusty greys and browns. Society hasn’t quite collapsed, but it’s clearly staggering badly. There are rumours of pockets of unaffected females, but even that notion sounds Handmaid’s Tale-scary. Dad doesn’t trust anyone but himself to look after Rag, and he’s been doing it long enough that he’s very good at it. The first thing they do on arriving somewhere new is figure out how best to escape.
British Columbia steps in as the unnamed but presumably American location, and Canadian actor Anna Pniowsky shines in the role of Rag. But this is Affleck’s story start to finish, and he makes some fascinating choices, including one to limit the violence in this post-apocalyptic world.
At one point he steals a vehicle from a young man by just telling him he’s doing it; elsewhere, a scuffle with a blunt-force weapon is so quiet it sounds like a mild slap-fight. Dad carries no weapons.
The quiet, sombre mood of the film invites all kinds of reflections from viewers. Not just what happens when 50 per cent of the population vanishes — Avengers: Endgame already dealt with that one — but what it means when that loss is seemingly so targeted, so specific.
It makes for a great story, well told.