In the Hereafter and now

> BY KEN EISNER

Atom Egoyan has just returned from Armenia, his ancestral home and site of his ambitious Ararat. He and his wife, Arsinée Khanjian, got caught up in muddled elections there, and that was after a trip to China to work on a potential project. Now he’s looking forward to visiting Victoria, where he grew up, and then Vancouver, to help celebrate National Canadian Film Day (NCFD 150) next Wednesday (April 19) at the Vancity Theatre with a special 20th-anniversary screening of The Sweet Hereafter.

“It’s fitting that we show this,” declares Egoyan, on the line from his Toronto home, “as it’s really the only film I ever made that was shot and set in B.C.” Plenty of other Canuck titles are showing throughout Vancouver and rural B.C., thanks to Reel Canada, a nonprofit outfit he helps advise. The day before, there’s a special screening of his most recent movie, Remember, at Victoria’s Empress Hotel. That was the site of Egoyan’s first job, in fact, as captured in his 1989 breakthrough, Speaking Parts.

“I think I still have some badges from when I worked there, and I have to find them before going home,” he adds. The veteran writer-director, actually born in Egypt, in 1960, sounds nostalgic when talking about his first real home—especially when it comes to Uvic’s Cinecenta, where he “spent countless hours devouring all those great movies from Europe and Asia that inspired so many filmmakers who followed”.

Egoyan moved to Toronto in the early ’80s, to study international relations at Trinity College. Cinema took over, however, and he achieved some of his globalist ambitions by winning festival competitions, including three major Cannes prizes and two Oscar nominations for Hereafter.

He has since been knighted by the French government, received state honours in Armenia, and been given the Order of Canada—upgraded to the highest level, Companion, in 2015 for his dedication to Canadian culture. Examples of his generosity include sharing his own prize money with Vancouver directors John Pozer (The Grocer’s Wife) and Mina Shum (Double Happiness) in 1991 and ’94, respectively.

“The landscape has certainly changed since then,” Egoyan observes. “In the ’90s, there was suddenly much more emphasis on the fluidity of gender and sexuality. Then, when Deepa Mehta won all those awards for Water, just over 10 years ago, it was obvious that Canadian film would show a lot more cultural diversity.”

Other big changes have been in technology and distribution.

“With the advent of digital cameras and editing,” he explains, “it has become way easier to make films. And I’ve never seen so many high-quality first features. The problem comes in finding places to show them. There have also never been so many festivals, and programmers compete over premieres, which means that movies don’t travel quite as much as they used to. And theatrically, they are vying for space with things that are much easier to market. So a great debut like Hello Destroyer, for example, just isn’t seen by all the people who would enjoy it.”

Of course, marketing problems are familiar to Egoyan, who had a hard time pushing his Hereafter even after the triple win at Cannes.

“Let’s face it: who wants to see a movie about a bus crash that kills a bunch of schoolchildren? Then, when you want to explain that it’s not really about that, and that some of it is quite funny, or even stranger, you lose some more people.”

Still, the movie will always hold a sweet spot in his filmography.

“There’s no doubt it was a peak experience. It was the last film that I location-scouted and cast myself; even the fact that Donald Sutherland dropped out at the last moment and we got Ian Holm instead was important. We finished in January of 1997, and I don’t know how we got it together to show at Cannes, which was having its own 50th anniversary. Have I ever felt that magic again? I don’t know, really. I never went to film school, but I know my first efforts were full of feeling. I’m always trying to keep that alive and, hopefully, to add some sense of accomplishment.”

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novelist Lissa Evans’s Their Finest Hour and a Half, a cheeky reference to a famous Winston Churchill speech made just before the Battle of Britain. In late 1940, France is already lost, the U.S. has not yet entered the war, and the demand for morale-boosting entertainment—an uplifting 90 minutes, let’s say—is at an all-time high.

Demand is also surging for the professional services of women, which is how Catrin Cole (a delightful Gemma Arterton), a Welsh transplant to blitz-blighted London, managed to turn copywriting experience into a job with the Ministry of Information. “We can’t pay you as much as the chaps, of course,” explains her cheerful new boss (Richard E. Grant). What she thinks is a secretarial gig turns out to be working on a script for a new propaganda film.

Upon realizing that the story she’s been given to work with, about twin sisters stealing their dad’s boat to help rescue soldiers from Dunkirk, was largely fabricated by local newspapers, she weaves some flannel of her own. She needs the dosh to support her moody husband (Jack Huston)—a painter wounded in the Spanish Civil War—and enjoys the screenwriting camaraderie with a sleepy older fellow (Paul Ritter) and the crankier Buckley. Younger viewers will recognize the latter, beneath his glasses, ’stache, and Brylcreem, as Hunger Games dreamboat Sam Claflin.

Their work is intended to boost morale and help invite Yanks aboard, as explained by their Alexander Korda–ish producer (Henry Goodman) and a stuffy cabinet minister (Jeremy Irons, in a great cameo). The movie we’re watching, then, is a boon to lovers of British cinema, with the bonus of comic opportunities handed to Bill Nighy, as an aging ham actor whose flagging career could be revived by this home-front codswallop.

As assembled by An Education director Lone Scherfig and veteran TV writer Gaby Chiappe, all the parts here work together beautifully. It’s a shame, then, when the incipient romance between Buckley and Catrin moves to the foreground, breaking the collective momentum of the story and flow of her self-discovery. Their Finest recovers, however, and these two hours are quite rewarding.

> KEN EISNER

(Vancouver stalwart Gabriel Rose), who doesn’t approve of her smoking, drinking, and going to jazz clubs—let alone wasting her time with paintbrushes that are already hard to hold.

Told she can’t even look after herself, the 34-year-old Maud instead goes after a job taking care of someone else. Rest assured, dear moviegoer, that real-life fish peddler Everett Lewis looked nothing like Ethan Hawke, and yet the former child actor does his best to play a rough, sometimes brutal dim bulb of a man— one who ranks his dogs and chickens above “a crippled-up woman”. It’s sort of a love story. Irish director Aisling Walsh, working from Rookie Blue writer Sherry White’s prosaic script, pretty much rests the whole shebang on Maudie’s struggle against pain and prejudice to gradually become famous for her colourful art. There are few whys here—just a lot of doin’.

> KEN EISNER

(nonstubbly Bond veteran Bérénice Marlohe). Everyone pouts like mad.

Presumably, these A-listers keep returning to Malick hoping he’ll return to the brilliant form of 1978’s Days of Heaven. Well, he did combine classical storytelling with experimental cinema in 2011’s The Tree of Life, but now seems content to plunk pretty people against ever-shifting backdrops, the better to mug, twirl, and mock-fight their cares away. He reduces talent to its most childish elements and removes all material challenges. The sushi looks fantastic.

> KEN EISNER

Their Finest.