The Chronicle Herald (Provincial)
Halifax-shot feature set to debut
As the opening strains of Jill Barber’s wistful Chances reminds us at the start of the East Coast feature Hopeless Romantic, love is always a gamble, with few safe bets.
Making its public bow via on-demand services on Tuesday, the film is a remarkable collaboration offering a variety of distinct looks at relationships from the viewpoints of six different women filmmakers, with results ranging from humourous to tragic, for characters of all ages.
It’s an anthology made wonderfully cohesive by its framing device of a wedding reception — shot at Halifax’s historic Waegwoltic Club on the Northwest Arm — and its central character Anna, a widowed cardiologist forced to take a chance of her own as the stories told by the women she meets unfold.
The film’s origins lay in a conversation between its producers Latonia Hartery, a St. John’s based filmmaker and archaeologist, and Halifax’s Bill Niven and Jay Dahl. They had previously connected on projects like Keeping Canada Alive and Facebook Follies when she was living in Nova Scotia, and they all knew they wanted to find a way to keep the relationship going.
“Their main question to me was, ‘If you want to make a feature, what’s the most important thing to you?’ And I said women’s stories, obviously; that’s what matters to me,” says Hartery.
“And they said OK, if that’s something that I wanted to do, then let’s go down that path. We just decided from there to elevate as many women’s voices as we could, and that’s how we landed on the anthology concept.”
The challenge of making an anthology of stories feel like a complete whole would be a tricky one, solved by deciding on the wedding reception “spine” of the film, where Anna — sympathetically played by Republic of Doyle’s Lynda Boyd — and her new friends share their experiences in love and relationships, to comedic, touching and harrowing effect. Anna’s mission to come up with some cogent thoughts about the nature of true love for her speech inspires a series of wide-ranging discussions and subsequent flashbacks.
Over the course of a year, and roughly 1,300 emails, the team was assembled and the stories took shape. The writer-directors included Nova Scotians Megan Wennberg (Drag Kids) and Stephanie Clattenburg (Play Your Gender) and Newfoundland and Labrador filmmakers Hartery, Martine Blue (Hunting Pignut), Deanne Foley (An Audience of Chairs) and Ruth Lawrence (Little Orphans). Additional script contributions were made by Dahl, Iain Macleod and Emily Bridger.
The film’s strong ensemble cast includes stand-out performances by Francine Deschepper, Amy Groening, Susan Kent, Taylor Olson, Shelly Thompson, Kirstin Howell, Genevieve Steele and Emmanuel John Malok, to name just a few.
“At some point, I ended up writing the love story we track through the film, of Anna falling in love with her dying husband’s physiotherapist, and then running into him at this wedding, which turns out to be a surprise,” says Wennberg. “I was definitely was interested in a story where you fall in love with someone kind of by accident.
“You’re not supposed to be in love with them, and yet it’s pretty undeniable that you’re both now in this place that’s really, really complicated. In her case, because her husband was still alive. And I was interested in looking at that, because you don’t really have a choice about who you fall in love with, and it can be pretty inconvenient. But that doesn’t mean it’s not real.”
By contrast, Hartery’s story reflects feelings that are not mutual, when PHD graduate Lauren (Amy Groening) has to fend off unwanted advances from a friend and colleague who doesn’t respect her boundaries (Taylor Olson, who won a FIN Atlantic International Film Festival award for his performance).
Groening and Olson would go on to play brother and sister in the latter’s feature directorial debut Bone Cage, but here their performances are fraught with jealousy and mistrust, providing Hopeless Romantic with one of its most powerful sequences.
“They’re really great friends in real life, so we had a lot of dialogue beforehand before we did the film in general and especially those sequences,” says Hartery, who considers her story one of the film’s darker moments, but also a triumph in the collaborative way it came together as Groening’s grad student Lauren stands up for herself in a frightening and hurtful situation.
“I hadn’t really directed anything like that before, so it was a challenge for me as well. It was an interesting exercise, because in real life Taylor is quite a lovely fellow, so he did play against type. ... He put a lot of effort into understanding the feelings of that character, the sense of entitlement the character had, and the feelings of career jealousy he had toward Amy’s character and how that all culminated in that particular moment.”
The balance between the shifting tones of the stories was helped greatly by Foley’s direction of the reception scenes, plus the continuity of having award-winning Nova Scotian cinematographer Jeff Wheaton behind the camera and Newfoundland-based editor Justin Simms putting all the pieces together.
But ultimately, it’s the solidarity in honesty and heart found among Hopeless Romantic’s stories that make the whole greater than the sum of its parts.
“Everybody that directed segments or parts of this film have gone on to do really incredible things,” says Hartery of her cinematic team. “I think that really shows that when just an inch is given to women in opportunities, we’re going to take that inch and it’s going to be way beyond a foot to make a difference and make a mark.
“That’s the vision we had as producers when we began three years ago, and I guess I just feel good knowing that this was part of everybody’s journey.”