From left: Young Canadian filmmakers Andrew Cividino, Matt Johnson, Chelsea McMullan, Kazik Radwanski and Pavan Moondi are part of a plain-spoken cohort making an impression both at home and globally.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
At the risk of sounding biased (toward the publication) or, worse, butt-kissy and sycophantic (toward my assigning editor), one of my favourite pieces of writing during TIFF 2016 was Barry Hertz's feature on the new generation of Canadian filmmakers, published in The Globe and Mail over the weekend.
Mr. Hertz described the new wave (or new non-wave, given their disparate interests and styles) of talent thusly: "The filmmakers make do with little money and either shun traditional funding bodies or partner with them reluctantly. They focus on the vast, diverse identities that make up Canadian culture, but do not feel bound by any staid, maple-syrup-swigging, hockey-loving, Tragically Hip-listening presuppositions."
It's a description that, I think, can be fruitfully expanded beyond the crop of Toronto filmmakers Mr. Hertz writes about, namely: Andrew Cividino, Matt Johnson, Chelsea McMullan, Kazik Radwanski and Pavan Moondi. One of the perennial opportunities TIFF offers is the chance to get reacquainted with what's fresh and exciting in our national cinema, if anything. It's also a possibility to grapple with what these films and filmmakers say about our big, disparate, sprawling nation – again, if anything.
I should probably set this up with the caveat that I don't necessarily believe in any sort of governing national psychology: the garrison mentality, the beautiful losers stuff, the anxiety suffered by squirming in the long cultural and political shadow of the United States. I mean, I believe that these things exist. But they exist only as tropes, not as actual conditions that proceed from anywhere inside of us, be it individually or culturally. The nervous nail-biting about Canadian Identity is largely restricted to policy-makers attempting to beef up homegrown TV and film production, and novelists looking for similarly beefy themes to hang their work on.
All that said, these themes and tropes are themselves useful in the same way that the fundaments of Freudian psychoanalysis or Greek mythology are useful: as structuring fables that (not to get all Joseph Campbell on you, reader) serve a sense-making function, ordering and shaping the social and physical world. So do Canadians actually quiver in the shadow of our burly neighbour to the south? I don't think so. But we're told that we do. And so we do.
Something of this anxiety – or the expectation of it – plays out in our current cinema. In his piece on the Toronto cinema's bold newcomers, Mr. Hertz described the tight-framing that's common in the films of Kaz Radwanski. "It is intensely intimate filmmaking," he writes, "that revels in feelings of anxiety and self-doubt." There is a similar sense of claustrophobic intensity in Werewolf, the first feature from Nova Scotian filmmaker Ashley McKenzie (who is an actual New Waterford girl).
Ms. McKenzie's camera follows two not-so-beautiful loser types, Nessa (Bhreagh MacNeil) and boyfriend Blaise (Andrew Gillis), as they struggle with opioid addiction. While Nessa seems determined to get her life on track, dutifully taking her methadone and getting a job at the local dairy freeze, Blaise is a bundle of twitchy, selfish instincts. Instead of casting hard-living heroes against the panoramic backdrops of Canada's East Coast, Ms. McKenzie gets uncomfortably intimate, drawing her eye to faces and segments of faces.
The implication is one of a certain cramped psychology. These aren't Canadian characters lost in the barrens of a sublime and cruel wilderness, but ones confined by more immanent things: the conditions of their daily lives and their attitudes toward it. Were it not for the Atlantic accents and government-subsidized methadone, you'd have a hard time figuring out these kids were Canadian at all.
Of course, Quebec has long seemed an exception to almost any hard and fast rule. As exhibited in Mathieu Denis and Simon Lavoie's arresting, gorgeous, profoundly sad Those Who Make Revolution Halfway Only Dig Their Own Graves (hereby abbreviated as Revolution), Quebec suffers from a particularly deep disenchantment. A very literal epic – it even has an overture, and an intermission breaking up its three-hour-plus runtime (the intermission is set to some ripping classic Norwegian black metal) – Revolution is a film about student radicals trying to parlay their theoretical politics into real action in the hangover of the "Maple Spring."
It draws easy comparisons to Jean-Luc Godard's La Chinoise (young radicals; political missive scrawled on walls, on human bodies, on anything) or Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers (young radicals, again; also lots of beautiful, young, naked bodies). But Revolution feels distinctly Québécois. A sustained investigation of the old Leninesque question of "what's to be done?" the film taps into a grander anxiety. It's not just nail-biting about national identity or apprehension about Canada's relationship to America (or Quebec's relationship to Canada). It's about a deeper anxiety; a Kierkegaardian angst about the overriding pleasure and terror of existence itself.
There's a great scene midway Revolution in which an Asian-Canadian aesthetician is waxing the bikini line of a trans sex worker. She (the aesthetician), who fled a war-torn country to enjoy the privileges of the Canadian experience, expresses a sense of confusion with the Quebec student protests, and with the province's whole culture of civic unrest. It's a powerful, thoughtful scene, speaking again to the essential woe of the movie and its central characters. If there's a governing Canadian pathology or psychology, it's this kind of angst that emerges not from imminent peril but from a kind of prosperous sorrow.
Canadians may well be angsty about who we are, what we are, or how we fit in. But perhaps the best thing that can be said about us fortunate Canadians is that even our problems seem like privileges.