First-rate acting elevates haunting northern tale
Aloft (out of 4) Starring Jennifer Connelly, Cillian Murphy. Written and directed by Claudia Llosa. 112 minutes. Opens Friday at the Carlton. STC In the Great White North, there’s a magic that heals and the pain of loss and abandonment that doesn’t.
Peruvanian filmmaker Claudia Llosa has set her third feature film in Canada’s North and Far North. It’s a meditative and intriguing tale filled with mystical imagery that never reveals all of its secrets. That’s a good thing.
Llosa’s screenplay follows two intertwining storylines, one set in rural Manitoba, where Nana (Jennifer Connelly), a mother of two, struggles to raise her sons, the rebellious Ivan who’s an avid falconer and the younger, frailer Gully, who’s suffering from a life-threatening ailment.
Desperate to save Gully, Nana turns to the Architect, a faith healer who uses elements of the natural world to treat his patients. But when Ivan’s falcon disrupts the ritual, the Architect learns by happenstance that Nana also has the power to heal.
Fast forward 20 years and Ivan, an adult with a wife and young son of his own, is approached by Jannia, a documentary filmmaker hoping to track down his mother at a secret enclave near the Arctic Circle.
Ivan harbours deep pain that his mother abandoned him years earlier after the death of his younger brother but joins the long and tortuous journey after some initial reluctance.
The film, a co-production between Canada, Spain and France, is suffused in haunting, desolate landscapes and hints of mysticism. In fact, the environment itself, captured by cinematographer Nicolas Bolduc, becomes a character, from the snowy forests of northern Manitoba to the flat, forbidding and windswept wasteland of the Arctic.
The music by Michael Brook provides a keening and mournful accompaniment throughout.
The film could easily have strayed in an ambivalent quagmire if not for the grounding performances of Connelly as Nana and Cillian Murphy as the adult Ivan. Both are actors who typically choose their roles with care and approach them — as in this case — with precision and quiet intensity.
Melanie Laurent is very watchable as Jannia, the beautiful catalyst who has her own reasons for reuniting mother and son, and Zen McGrath deserves praise for his portrayal of young Ivan. (The makeup used to age Nana 20 years deserves special mention for its subtleness and realism.)
As the two storylines edge ever closer to merging, Llosa instills a quiet but urgent sense of longing and tension in the audience, increasingly desperate to understand the events that led to the long estrangement of mother and son.
The conclusion is laced with ambiguity, which may not satisfy everyone, but that is part of the film’s allure and power. As screenwriter and director, Llosa commendably refuses to offer trite and simple aphorisms in a world where both magic and truth are elusive and existence doesn’t always yield up its secrets.