Doc explores Spoon’s traumatic past
Film about local musician surreal, subtle
It was one of those cinematic ideas that was easier imagined than done.
In the musical-documentary, My Prairie Home, Calgary-born singer-songwriter Rae Spoon is shown walking through the snow at the foot of the Athabasca Glacier, singing a fragile ballad about overcoming a traumatic past and finding a sense of identity.
For a documentary, it’s an unusually constructed and set up scene, rife with symbolism. It’s also beautifully calm and peaceful.
But filming it, apparently, was anything but. It was early November. The road to the location was closed and covered in snow. Spoon and the film crew had to trudge for a mile in frigid temperatures.
“It was f--king freezing. It was a really horrible shoot ... Rae was like ‘I’m never living out a metaphor again!’” says filmmaker Chelsea McMullan, on the phone from Vancouver’s National Film Board offices, with a laugh.
“The Onion headline would have been: ‘Indie Rocker Dies trying to Live Metaphor on Glacier.’ ”
McMullan seems pleased when told that none of that strife is apparent in the scene, which unfolds with the same meditative pace that defines much of the film.
But it’s also a clear indication that My Prairie Home — which features lively musical numbers based on Spoon’s autobiographical songs while examining the transgendered singer-songwriter’s troubled, religious upbringing in Calgary — is not a documentary for purists, straying pretty far from those stodgy NFB talking-head docs of old.
It is not, however, completely without the conventional, cinema-verite type scenes. In one, the camera follows a mysterious man as he leaves the venue after Spoon’s show, disappearing into the night before he can be identified. He may or may not be Spoon’s estranged father, who doesn’t otherwise appear in the film but remains a dark spectre throughout.
“I’m really interested in playing with genre,” McMullan says. “I think audiences are becoming savvier. And with that you can change the language (of film) and make the language more complex and mix languages to create new ones.”
My Prairie Home began six years ago when McMullan first met Spoon, who initially provided some songs for a TV documentary the filmmaker was directing called Deadman. She was smitten by Spoon’s music and curious about the musician’s background. Spoon, who prefers to use the pronoun they, had not spoken much about growing up a girl in Calgary under the thumb of an abusive father and fireand-brimstone Pentecostal church that was obsessed with end times and not particularly subtle in its condemnation of homosexuality. By the time Spoon made 2008’s Superioryouareinferior, a musically adventurous album that explored dance-pop and electronic sounds, more personal issues were being explored with lyrics about identity and the search for community.
Still, that didn’t mean Spoon was at ease talking about the past or being on camera, at least initially.
“(Spoon) couldn’t kind of mine those early memories,” says McMullan. “It’s hard for anyone to remember their childhood. But then especially being asked those traumatic questions where the trauma took place, it’s even harder. We had to work out how I was going to interview Rae to get what I needed to make the film work. So we came up with the idea that they write down their memories and email them to me. Then I could read them and so I could ask the right questions. I didn’t know a lot of stuff that had happened and Rae hadn’t talked about them.”
Those emails morphed into slightly fictionalized short stories that were released in 2012 in the collection First Spring Grass Fire. Meanwhile, Spoon was also working through their own story through music — writing the songs that would eventually be the soundtrack for My Prairie Home. So it made sense that McMullan would tell much of the story through musical numbers performed by Spoon.
The result is a film that can go from surreal to subtle, veering from choreographed music numbers, to heartfelt interviews, to a beautifully shot road memoir about the transitory life of a touring musician. Whatever abuse Spoon may have faced growing up is not explicitly explained. But they talk about losing faith in religion, their first high-school girlfriend and how the family dealt, or didn’t deal, with various trauma, such as the death of a baby brother or the mental illness of a father that Spoon describes as a tyrant. But, for the most part, it’s a story of triumph and arriving at a point of self-awareness, McMullan says.
“A lot of things that are really traumatic have happened in Rae’s life and I think we address them, but we don’t stay with them, we don’t get stuck in them,” McMullan says. “And I think that’s because Rae hasn’t. They are still alive and still making music and they’ve had this really difficult life. But I think it should celebrate coming out the other side and as a talent in this country. What they’ve been able to accomplish is amazing.”