A Canadian Method
Nicholas Davies
16.10.2011 - Canadian cinema is well
represented at ADFF this year, and the films themselves offer a
good example of the cross-section of work made in the Great White
North. Without venturing too far into a Canadian culture lecture, I
think it's interesting that each of the Canadian features on offer
demonstrates a different long-standing tradition of movie-making in
Canada.
First off, the Festival launched with Philippe Falardeau's Monsieur Lazhar, a French-language film from the
overwhelmingly francophone province of Québec. The film itself is a
gentle tale of a teacher helping his students overcome a tragedy -
in some ways a far cry from the farces, cinema vérité and
kitchen-sink dramas, excellent and otherwise, that characterize
much of le cinéma québécois. But at the same time, this is
undoubtedly un film québécois. For me, this is most
evident in the way young people (in this case, children) are
represented in the film: smart, cocky, independent, confident
beyond their years. In short, they are very Québec.
The notion, fact or question (depending on one's political
stance) of Québec's sovereignty as separate from the rest of Canada
is a long-standing debate that has led to demonstrations, referenda
and - in the case of the 1970 October Crisis - terrorism, murder
and the invocation of the War Measures Act during peacetime.
Thankfully, the question of Québec's nationhood is by no means
questioned in the world of movies, where the films of Québec
clearly represent a national cinema that is distinct from the rest
of Canadian film offerings.
There has always been a strong tradition in Canada of films made
by women and focusing on women's issues. This is nowhere more
evident than in the now-defunct Studio D section of the National
Film Board of Canada (NFB), a state-funded entity entirely devoted
to making films by women directors. For better or worse, this
particular brand of quota feminism has largely been abandoned, but
women making movies and films focused on women remains a large
portion of Canadian filmmaking. To wit, Mary Harron's brilliant,
female-focused The Moth Diaries features characters who, with the
exception of the dreamy English teacher, are all girls or
women.
This setup allows Harron to explore the particularly female
coming-of-age experience via a triangle of jealousy among three
young women (Sarah Bolger, Sarah Gadon - who also appears in David
Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method - and Lily Cole) at a
creepy Gothic boarding school. Within the premise of a good
old-fashioned ghost story (or is it a vampire tale?), the director
takes a provocative look at the powerful bonds that are created
among young women, and the horror - real or imagined, but
powerfully felt - that rears its ugly head when those bonds are
broken.
David Cronenberg is a Canadian cinema institution unto himself.
For four decades, he has been addling our minds with his brand of
psychotwist - exploding heads in Scanners, abdominal VCRs
in Videodrome, turning into a fly in, well, The
Fly. Now he brings his singular view of the battle between the
selfish and the social to a period piece, skewering the uptight
methodology of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung in A Dangerous Method. The film features brilliant turns
by Viggo Mortensen (now a Cronenberg regular after his roles in
A History of Violence and Eastern Promises) as
Freud, and Michael Fassbender - the toast of Venice and Toronto for
his performances this year in Method and Steve McQueen's
Shame. Keira Knightley gives a huge and wonderfully
twisted performance as the hysteric-turned-psychoanalyst Sabina
Spielrein, while Vincent Cassel shows up as an off-the-hook
hedonist.
So besides the fact that Cronenberg was born in Toronto, what's
Canadian about it? The clue here lies in the list of countries of
production, in which Canada in fact comes last of five. Without the
powerhouse of the Hollywood studios - indeed, without the
powerhouse of American indies - Canadian cinema often operates on a
more European co-production model. To say this leads to cinema that
is outside the cookie-cutter, marketing-driven filmmaking of the
American mainstream is a platitude with which I disagree, but there
isn't space for that argument here. What I can say, though, is that
the impulse to make that tired claim is in line with the undefined,
we-are-not-American, Canadian cry of identity.
A Dangerous Method screens Monday, October 17 at
9:30pm and Wednesday, October 19 at 3:30pm. Both screenings are at
Abu Dhabi Theater.
The Moth Diaries screens Sunday, October 16 at 9:30pm
at Abu Dhabi Theater.