Director David Bezmozgis’s quest for authenticity

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The writer-director David Bezmozgis is talking about his new feature film, Natasha, when he pauses to offer a taxonomy of onscreen sleepwear. "You can tell what sort of film it is, and how real it is, by what people are wearing in bed," he observes with a sly smile. "Hollywood convention – the woman always has, you know, the sheet at her chest, and the guy for some reason, the sheet is at his waist. He's wearing boxers, too. And you know that it's just false."

Bezmozgis is discussing Hollywood's oddly prim aesthetic as a way of illuminating his own approach to Natasha. The film, which opens in Toronto and Vancouver on Friday and rolls out to other cities over the spring, is an adaptation of the title story from his 2004 literary debut. In that tale, Mark Berman – like Bezmozgis, a Russian-speaking, assimilated transplant growing up in the north end of Toronto – recalls the summer he was 16, when he met and fell in love with his 14-year-old step-cousin, newly arrived from Moscow.

On film, as in print, Bezmozgis tells the quietly tragic story with an authenticity that doesn't flinch from the physical reality of the characters' relationship, which is to say there is nudity as well as afternoon sex between teenagers in a suburban rec room: not gratuitous, but also not high-minded or decorous. "I think it's important to understand her power over him, and to understand what he feels like he's gaining and ultimately what he loses, as someone who is connected to her emotionally, but also sexually," he says of the title character. "And if you don't see it, if you cringe away from it, I think the film doesn't work. It loses its power."

In a way, the film is even more true to life than the short story on which it is based, since the characters speak Russian when they are talking to each other.

"The idea with the film was to be authentic," Bezmozgis says, relaxed but attentive in a spartan meeting room at Toronto's Gladstone Hotel. "All the actors are authentic Russian speakers; we shot on location. And it's to do something that is new. A film like this has not been made in Canada, really in North America, about this community, in this way. So the authenticity has to extend to everything."

The $1.5-million film was partly funded by the federal agency Telefilm, despite a loose policy restricting support to films in English, French and indigenous languages. "If we're going to tell Canadian stories," he argues, "then we also have to acknowledge that the country has changed."

That approach, he notes, may even develop new audiences. After all, English-speaking Canadians rarely go to the cinema to see homegrown films, anyway. "The pool [of moviegoers] is not that large to begin with. And if you shrink it by 10 per cent, something small becomes slightly smaller." But if you make a film in Russian, "You have this Russian-speaking community that gets to see itself represented," he says. "I think you've expanded your pool."

Bezmozgis, who will turn 43 next month, speaks with the same intelligence and lack of sentiment that is familiar to readers of his fiction. Asked if his three young daughters speak Russian, he sighs faintly and says, "It's not a sore point, it's just circumstance."

"It feels like a loss only in terms of – history has done something to my people, and it's a shame. It's beyond my control. There are larger historical forces that are responsible for the fact that I don't live in Latvia any more," he continues. "Russia was a long episode in the history of my people which, for all sorts of historical reasons beyond our control, is passed. So to look backward and artificially impose it? I don't see the point."

First published in 2002, with short stories in the Canadian magazines Prairie Fire, paperplates and The Walrus, Bezmozgis shot to wider acclaim the following year when Harper's, Zoetrope and The New Yorker joined the party. (Those six stories, along with Natasha, published by Harper's in 2004, comprised Natasha and Other Stories.) His next two works of fiction, The Free World (2011) and The Betrayers (2014), were each nominated for the Giller Prize.

But 12 years after Natasha first emerged into the world, it retains an essential enigma for Bezmozgis. Readers couldn't be certain whether Natasha, who has a devastating effect on her mother's new marriage, is a victim or aggressor. Filmgoers will likely have a similar debate. "I still can't say who's in the right and who's in the wrong. Between her and her mother, who are the engines driving what happens?" Bezmozgis says. "I think that's interesting, and that remains interesting."

Although Natasha is described as a coming-of-age tale, it is more nuanced than that. Mark is an essentially passive figure, a respectable and respectful only child of Russian émigrés whose low-level rebellions occur on the margins.

"So often when you talk about a coming-of-age film, especially an immigrant coming-of-age film, it's usually this binary thing: The family is this, and you want to escape it," Bezmozgis says. In Natasha, however, there are larger conflicts at play, including the disjunctions between the different waves of immigrants: those who came to Canada in the early 1980s, like Bezmozgis's family, and those who came after the collapse of the Soviet Union. "Those two don't entirely mesh," he says.

With that in mind, our conversation turns to some of the newest immigrants to Canada, and the stories that are unfolding right now in their communities. "I'm really curious how the assimilated, established Syrian community is going to interact with the people who have come now," he says. "I haven't heard that story."