Downer zeitgeist
strongest in years. There is extreme anxiety in nearly every frame.
It has nothing to do with a certain hit TV series about housewives, though there’s a common link with high-stress times. Canadians once felt isolated and insulated from the terrors of the world, but no longer. Especially those living in Toronto, where a summer of gun violence has made our “Toronto the Good” slogan seem like false advertising. The desperation can be felt most directly in films like Six Figures, the feature debut by Calgary’s David Christensen, which marks the steady rise of panic in a man’s life. Warner Lutz ( JR Bourne) and his wife Claire (Caroline Cave) are thirtysomething Calgarians with two kids, an old car and a crowded apartment. Warner’s new job as a fundraiser isn’t going well. Money was never that important to them, but Claire really wants to buy a house, and so they do — even though they can’t afford it, and Warner’s probation period has just been extended. They both want more out of life, but they’re thrown a horrifying curve. Claire is viciously attacked and left in a coma. The unhappy Warner becomes a prime suspect, since he once struck Claire. As he professes his innocence and struggles to maintain his sanity, his mother- in- law offers her own damning character assessment: “Nobody knows anybody.”
Past crimes being brought home to roost also figure in the fest’s main Canuck offering, David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence, one of tomorrow’s Gala presentations. Viggo Mortensen plays a man who, like Warner, has put distance between his past and his present. But the past suddenly returns when violent men come to his small town with an old grievance that needs urgent attention. The past also makes an unhappy return in Atom Egoyan’s Where the Truth Lies, in which Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth play 1950s showmen whose comedy duo act is split by the suspicious death of a woman in their hotel room. Come the 1970s, the evaded answers of 15 years earlier become immediate concerns. Deepa Mehta’s Water, last night’s Gala festival opener, is set in 1930s India at the momentous juncture between the stifling restrictions of tradition and the liberation offered by Gandhi’s social revolution. But for 8-year-old child bride Chuyia ( brilliantly rendered by one- named discovery Sarala), existence offers no further horizon than the prison gates of her widow’s ashram. Her young life has been declared finished before it had a chance to start; she struggles mightily to prove otherwise. David Ray’s Fetching Cody uses the device of a hobo’s whimsical time machine to rewrite history, in the hope of creating a happier ending. Junkies and lovers Art (Jay Baruchel ) and Cody ( Sarah Lind) care only about their next handout or hit — until one day when Art find Cody in a coma, nearing death. He repeatedly travels backwards in time, frantically attempting to make the changes needed to prevent catastrophe. There is slightly less urgency, but no less a feeling of desperation, in Aubrey Nealon’s A Simple Curve. Set in B. C.’ s magnificent Kootenay region, it examines two visions of the hippie lifestyle, one idyllic and the other hard-nosed. American draft dodger Jim ( Michael Hogan) has a talent for making fine furniture, but has not a whit of business sense. His equally talented son Caleb (Kris Lemche) knows a reality check — plus some cheques from customers — is in order if the hippie dream is to survive. Reconciling the whimsical with the practical will require heart-wrenching decisions and choices. They don’t go away even when you run away, as aerobics instructor Michèle (Sylvie Moreau) discovers in Louise Archambault’s surprisingly intense debut, Familia, which opens the Canada First! program. Michèle is a chronic gambler and hard- luck mom who figures to escape her debts and her problems by hitting the road with her teenaged daughter. She has plans of mooching off a sister in California, but there will be stops along the way for handouts from other friends and relations. Michèle is about to learn that she’s not alone in her misery, or her frantic desire for a new life.
Desperation is expressed in sexual terms in John Hazlett’s These Girls, Clement Virgo’s Lie With Me and Dylan Akio Smith’s The Cabin Movie, three films guaranteed to have festivalgoers gawking and talking. Women are the aggressors in all three movies. In These Girls, randy and reckless teens Keira (Caroline Dhavernas), Glory ( Amanda Walsh) and Lisa (Holly Lewis) decide to perk up their boring New Brunswick summer by holding married hunk Keith ( David Boreanaz) to sexual ransom. They take turns bedding him, threatening to tell his wife and their parents if he doesn’t continue his stud service. It seems like a male fantasy come true, but Keith’s life is coming undone faster than his zipper. “A man’s got his limits,” he tells his seducers. “You’ve got to understand that.” In Lie With Me, twentysomething Torontonian Leila ( Lauren Lee Smith) wants sex and gets plenty of it, but a truly fulfilling relationship exceeds her grasp: “ I need to feel myself like I’ve never felt myself before.” ( Her self- assessment includes what is sure to be the worst double entendre at the fest: “I think there’s something stuck inside of me.”) The polar opposite of Leila’s problem resides in The Cabin Movie’s repressed Katherine (Erin Wells), who has agreed to attend a swinger’s weekend at a remote country cabin with her uptight husband Mark ( Brad Dryborough). The point of the exercise is to get laid in myriad ways, with two other couples adding the spice, but Mark’s libido is locked in neutral. As the situation turns from frustration to farce,
Katherine plaintively
wails, “Will someone
f--k me, please?”
Desperation of a
more cerebral kind is
explored in
Jean- Marc Vallée’s
C. R. A. Z. Y., Sean Garritty’s Lucid and Denis Côté’s Les États nordiques ( Drifting
States), three movies where all is not quite what it seems. Montreal suburban kid Zac ( Marc- André Grondin) is from a family of five boys, ruled by a macho dad, and he’s expected to grow up strong and hetero. But he’s not like that at all, being more inclined to swing like David Bowie and the other androgynous rockers of the 1960s and 1970s who captivate him. He prays to God (“Please don’t let me be soft”) but it doesn’t seem to help — and the movie really rocks, incidentally.
Lucid is anything but, at least until the end of this nightmare puzzle. Psychotherapist Joel Rothman ( Jonas Chernick) is bedevilled by a recent marital separation, chronic insomnia and patients who seem to be plotting not only their demise, but also his. He counts sheep but remains wakeful and fretful.
Les États nordiques (Drifting States) depicts a Montreal man named Christian ( Christian LeBlanc), who literally goes to the end of civilization to wrestle personal demons. He’s had a job caring for his terminally ill mother, but sudden circumstances send him on a 1,500- km trip north to a James Bay community of hydro workers, who warily accept him. Watching him decide what to do next, and knowing just a bit of what he’s already done, is as stressful on the viewer as it is on the character. The desperados of this year’s crop of Canadian films are so in tune with the downbeat zeitgeist, they could have their own theme song. It would be penned by Tygh Runyan’s depressed folkie in Ann Marie’s Fleming’s exceedingly black comedy, The French Guy. The folkie complains about how tough life is (“I just can’t seem to get a break”) and how his one recent job in advertising was a disaster, due to his bad attitude. But what if instead his audience had loved him a bit too much?
That’s the dilemma facing Matt Murphy’s mysterious title character in Michael Mabbott’s The Life and Hard Times of Guy Terrifico, a pretty terrific mockumentary that supposes Canadians can be legendary and desperate.
It’s a look into the unexplained disappearance — and apparent resurfacing, 30 years later — of a rocker, who in the 1970s raised hell as a combination Gram Parsons and Sid Vicious. He was a promising tunesmith, remembered well, but not always fondly, by contemporaries Kris Kristofferson, Merle Haggard, Levon Helm and more. Just when it seemed that Guy was about to get his life in order and hit the big-time, he took a powder. His biggest problem? His music had taken second fiddle to a lewd stage routine that was all the fans cared about.
“ But Guy Terrifico — who may only be a figment of our fevered imagination — could lay claim to the title of Canada’s Most Desperate Man in a very crowded field of contenders at this year’s Toronto Film Festival.