Tough (to) Love

Dorothy Woodend speaks her mind about BC film

When someone asks me if I’ve seen any good BC films lately, I usually change the subject. It’s not that I hate every BC film I’ve ever seen, but when I hate them, I hate them in a very particular fashion. I hate films that everyone pretends to like but that they really think are slightly retarded. I hate bad editing, or worse, no editing at all. I hate stories that meander all over the place and then simply end. I hate cute lesbians, and anything coy. I hate Sir Ian McKellen as a Canadian farmer. I hate comedies that make you wish you were dead. I hate anything with Jennifer Tilly in it. I hate bad sound. I hate Squamish. I hate corny. I hate yokels. I hate the Downtown Eastside. And I really hate Jackson Davies—not the man, but any film he has ever been in. I’m sorry, but it’s true.

But, you know, I just may have to change my hating ways because BC films have suffered a sea change, and have seen change. Not much, mind you, but enough to give me hope. Two words: Pete Tong. Although the director is from Montreal, and the actors from the UK, and it’s about a DJ in Ibiza, It’s All Gone Pete Tong was produced in part by True West Films on Salt Spring Island. It didn’t tell a Canadian story, but that’s all right because it got everything so right—rip-snorting performances, music to die for, and a hilarious and heart-rending story. The film has scooped up awards by the bushel, and it deserved every honour it received. True West is well underway with another BC film, which has a script by Vancouver’s prodigal son Dougie Coupland (Everything’s Gone Green—part of the Gone series I guess). So the question is: Can they do it again? Unlike Pete Tong, Everything’s Gone Green is about a local boy dealing with problems such as turning 30, making money and finding happiness. Vancouver plays itself, as opposed to Seattle or some other US city. Coupland himself, whose previous fiction works (Generation X) have vanished into large American studios, appears quite content with the outcome. If anyone can make a love song to Vancouver it’s Coupland, as evidenced by his memento of all things Canuck, Souvenir of Canada—the documentary inspired by his installation/book series. Speaking of documentaries, love is definitely due on the non-fiction front, where British Columbians have distinguished themselves admirably. Velcrow Ripper, Mark Achbar, Ann Marie Fleming, Nettie Wild, and a host of others have carved out a place on the world screen. Theirs are lovely films that will make your little red-and-white-mapled heart swell with pride. But, Christ, narrative features... I’d like that cyanide pill now, please.

As a subset of the larger Canadian film industry, BC is privy to many of the same problems that plague films made in Ontario or Alberta (Quebec is, of course, an entirely different thing, and we shall leave it blissfully alone). But it is also prone to some unique challenges. First off, it is largely a province full of many people from other places, so the notion of what constitutes a true BC production is tricky at best, especially in an age of co-productions (a film written, directed, produced and starring all residents from this fair province is a rare beast). Also, this is a very pretty place, and pretty comes with its own set of concerns. The one thing I am continually struck by when watching BC film is the country in the background, whether it’s the green-gray hills of Merritt or the so-green-they-look-black forests of Desolation Sound. The entire province is insanely lovely, which can be distracting; you wish the actors would get out of the way and simply let you gaze unobstructed at the landscape. Add to this a history of hosting third-rate productions in, I hate to say it, “Hollywood North,” and you have one strange brew. It can either take the top of your head off, or make you sick to your stomach.

As dangerous as it is to make generalized statements about a large body of work such as BC filmmaking, I am now going to make a few, in the interests of the audience.

When David Cronenberg made his first feature film, Robert Fulford wrote an article for Saturday Night entitled “You Should Know How Bad This Film Is. After All, You Paid For It.” Mr. Fulford may have had to eat his words, now that Cronenberg is Canada’s addition to the ranks of international auteur/provocateurs, joining Michael Haneke, the Dardennes Brothers, and others who plumb the darker side of things. The Cronenberg example demonstrates that state-funded art needn’t be bad, but after a while a quality of sameness tends to come creeping in.

In BC’s case, it’s an enervating flabbiness that can suck the joy out and make film-going feel like homework. The drear factor is pretty high; take Flower & Garnet (which, in its favour, was at least quiet and introspective). But Lord, the bleakness, the puffy ski jackets from the ’80s, small children eating dirt—it was enough to drive even the most cheerful of souls to something drastic. Bergman’s Swedish misery has nothing on the interior of British Columbia. This holds true for a multiplicity of films that all traverse similar turf, whether it’s the Slocan Valley in A Simple Curve, the West Coast of Desolation Sound, or Squamish in Deluxe Combo Platter. But Vancouver is also pretty damn depressing, especially the drug-ridden streets of the Downtown Eastside in On the Corner. The reliance on incest (Ill Fated), necrophilia (Kissed), murder and other dark doings in the dead of Canadian winter can make for some terribly dramatic moments on the page, but when you see such events depicted on screen, one after another after another, you start to feel pretty bummed. Okay, you can bang a big rock up and down on my head until I stop squealing.

When we aren’t being grey and sad, we’re being sucky sweet instead. Or, even worse, cute... Cue the entrance of Jennifer Tilly in Deluxe Combo Platter, a film that prompted Globe and Mail critic Rick Groen to state: “Bad Hollywood movies sporting big price tags are one thing—never much fun to watch, they can at least be a pleasure to ridicule. But a bad Canadian movie done on a shoestring budget is another matter entirely. Trashing the poor thing comes with the critical territory, yet it’s all a bit like kicking a mangy puppy. You end up feeling as unworthy as the picture.” The Globe also hated Saint Monica, about an angel-obsessed 10-year-old: “Frankly, if it were any more touching, you’d want to charge it with assault.” Another example, Saint Ralph (albeit not really a BC film but a good example of the sweet suck factor), incited the snorting wrath of New York Times film critic Stephen Holden: “This crude, inspirational tear-jerker is as sweet as a bowl of instant oatmeal smothered in molasses. It should please those who honestly believe that Santa Claus and God are synonymous; others may retch.” Ow! The film, for those blessedly unaware, told the story of a young boy who decides to run the Boston Marathon in order to save his dying mother from cancer. At the pivotal moment in the big race, Santa appears running alongside the brave little tyke. At this point, if you’re Canadian, you hide under the seat. Despite the presence of Santa Claus and Jennifer Tilly (again), the blame cannot be laid entirely on either’s ample lap, there are larger problems at work. BC film needs some tough love because sometimes it’s tough to love.

A film needs to start with a good story, meaning that it makes sense, and ideally also has a beginning, a middle, and most importantly, a goddamn ending. Simply stopping because the filmmakers ran out of money, or worse, ideas, is not good enough. Bruce Sweeney’s Last Wedding—90-odd minutes of the old truism “women are crazy, and men are stupid”—ended not with a bang but a whimper with all three male characters sitting shell-shocked in a hot tub. It left me thinking: That’s the end!? I suppose when you’re on the inside, delirious with the need to bring your baby into existence, it’s easy to make excuses for Junior’s lumps and boils, but the larger world won’t be nearly so kind. Making art is largely feeling your way in the dark, a state of agonized uncertainty even for the very best and brightest. So, I have some sympathy. But sometimes I can’t help but think: What the hell were the filmmakers thinking? Any film needs a real editor, not someone who offers to do it cheap, or someone with whom the filmmaker has some or any kind of personal relationship; a good editor has a firm hand and is a disciplinarian by nature-—someone who will brook no excuses and no fudging in hope that no one will notice that the narrative meanders or makes absolutely no sense. Believe me, the audience will notice and they will grow angry and mean. Editors will invariably cut out the filmmaker’s favorite parts, but that’s what they do. Many films are made in the editing room, often by sensible older women such as Haida Paul, gracious ladies who will make the decisions directors are incapable of making. See Alex Shuper’s documentary Edge Codes.com about the importance of editing. Films are not shot, they are built, carefully, piece by piece.

Don’t ape Hollywood, please. Canadian versions of American fare are somehow even worse than homegrown stuff. Case in point, The Wild Guys, which looked more like a sitcom than a feature film. Characters should be more than mere types (the insensitive jock, the dippy New Age seeker, the idiotic redneck). Really, people, we can do better than this. Better to aim too high than too low. This is a transcendent art form; here is where high modernism came to play. Remember, film is the turf of big thinkers—Renais, Godard, Bergman, not Tony Danza.

Saying “fuck” every second word works for Ricky and Julian but doesn’t for work for everyone. This applies even to films that should know better. The Unbearable Lightness of Parking, as I like to call it (really The Delicate Art of… ), suffered from a surplus of bad language it didn’t really need. So too Ill Fated, in which the constant bombardment of profanity became numbing after a time, detracting from any emotional impact the story might have held. Which wasn’t much to begin with. A reliance on the letter F and its close friends C and K gets tiresome extremely quickly, and is a dead giveaway of a young filmmaker making something “street”... Yah, that’s right. Keeping it real, muhfuh…

Consider telling a story that is in no way, shape or form, autobiographical. The curse of the first novel is often the curse of the first feature as well. A film should not paint a thin veneer on someone’s life, family and friends and portray them as a lovably quirky bunch of misfits. What the filmmaker may end up with is a bad film and the enduring enmity of his or her family and friends for depicting them as a bunch of quirky misfits. Whether director Aubrey Nealon’s A Simple Curve borrows liberally from his own life is difficult to say, since the filmmaker maintains that despite the fact that both he and the film’s central character were raised by hippie parents in the Slocan Valley, all similarities end there. Sure they do, sonny. Unless you’re (early) Mina Shum or Sandy Wilson, don’t go there, girlfriend.

Rural people are not necessarily all rednecks and idiots, although you might be hard-pressed to find an example of literate, well-spoken one in recent BC film. This is a cliché that should finally be put to rest, it’s so used up and tired, not to mention slightly humiliating for most of the province. Ill Fated is particularly guilty in this respect. Who are these people and why, if they’re just graduating from high school, do they all look 38 years old? And where the hell did they get their clothes? People from the hinterland may be backwards, but at least they don’t have to dress in purple stretch pants and ridiculous cowboy hats.

A moratorium on mockumentaries. Even Christopher Guest has walked away from the form. Michael Dowse (Fubar, Pete Tong) did it well, but the ‘mocku’ can also hide a multitude of sins, like goofy camera work, visible boom mikes, and simply artless filmmaking. Its time is done; put it to bed.

Films can be as weird as they need to be. It worked for David Cronenberg, Guy Maddin, and John Paizs, and if it worked for them, it might work for someone else. Or maybe not. (See Phil the Alien—or rather, don’t see Phil the Alien.) The Score, a musical tale of genetic research from Vancouver theatre troupe The Electric Company tries hard, but John Greyson’s Zero Patience made better use of the all-singing, all-dancing medical/musical revue, plus it had singing sphincters and nothing tops that.

Stick to your guns: If you’ve got a tale to tell, tell it. Bruce Sweeney is a good example, despite his flaws. He makes what he wants to make—Live Bait, Dirty, Last Wedding—films set implicitly in Vancouver and featuring relationships gone bad. Despite the programmatic quality of his gender relations, there is something to be said for Vancouver being Vancouver, although a certain clubbiness creeps in. How many people outside of the city would get jokes about architect Richard Henriquez?

You can never go wrong with gore. Well, hardly ever, as Director Paul Fox (Everything’s Gone Green) will be happy to tell you. His film The Dark Hours picked up the audience award at the Dead By Dawn Horror Film Festival, and if that isn’t an endorsement, I don’t know what is. Horror has always been good to Canadians (think Cronenberg, Black Christmas, Ginger Snaps), and it has also been beneficent to local heroes, Anagram Films. Anagram is wrapping up work on Fido, a large-ish film ($10 million budget) about a little boy and his best friend, a domesticated zombie played by Billy Connolly. Ann Marie Fleming’s newest film The French Guy is also dripping in gore and quirk—the combination of the two, “gork,” could become a BC speciality. Celluloid Horror, Ashley Fester’s documentary about Cinemuerte, is another fine little beastie. The film captures three years in the life of Vancouver’s horror film festival, an event that has managed to survive without government money, battling the Canadian censor board, plus audiences who stagger out of films and throw up on the sidewalk.

But the most notable area where BC film has succeeded, and done so on a global scale, is in the realm of the documentary. (Not that the real world is any easier to corral than the fictive one, but at least it’s all right there in front you, just waiting for its closeup.) This may be thanks to the traditions of non-fiction storytelling instilled by 65 some odd (some off) years of the National Film Board. There are the big ones you’ve heard of (The Corporation, The Take, ScaredSacred) and then there are the films made by one person and the few people that they could trick, bribe, or coerce into helping them (How to be a Model). The one quality that typifies these films is that they are not insular but outward-looking, eager to address the larger world, even when that world is a pretty harsh place. Just ask Velcrow Ripper. The success of his film ScaredSacred has been a testimony to the power of the individual, but it is only the beginning; there are two more films planned in this trilogy. Ripper is venturing back out into the fray, risking his skinny body to change the world, even though the process of venturing into that great big ball of squiggling humanity and all its various problems, and returning to same, secure Vancouver has some problems of its own. “The last time I came back to Canada, I lasted two days,” says Ripper. “And then I couldn’t take it anymore and I jumped in my car and drove to the nuclear test site in Nevada to be part of a Shoshone healing ceremony.”

Allison Beda, the maker of How to be a Model, turned her lens on the trials and tribulations of beautiful people after years of being a model herself. With no money, and a crew largely composed of people donating their time and energy, she trucked from Vancouver to Paris to New York, following her close friend Peggi. Beda’s subject matter is both intensely personal and yet international in scope and interest. It is this particular blend that has worked well for BC doc makers who come to the non-fiction world with the clear and critical eye that is somehow typically Canadian. Our ever-uncertain national (or provincial) identity gives our documentarians the ability to be both inside and outside of their subjects, a quality that is absolutely necessary in the genre. It is also one of the defining qualities of all of Douglas Coupland’s oeuvre, when you think about it. A place where a degree of self-consciousness is useful. Unfortunately it is exactly that same self-consciousness that is so deadly to narrative fiction.

Just as you are allowed the priviledge of dissing your home town by dint of intimate knowledge, so too can you hate films that remind you too much of the place you came from. But hate doesn’t solve anything; love is the answer. I want to love, I really do. Which is why in the opening moments of Michael Dowse’s tale of a deaf DJ I felt my heart open like a flower. Oh my God, it’s good, it’s all good, Pete Tong.