In the pinky-turquoise glow of Lill's outdoor beauty salon, evil hairdresser Spanky O'Neil delivers a rant that is a parody of every hard-luck B movie story ever uttered.
"Chelsea, Sylvia, Lola, you're my chosen family," he says, addressing a trio of stout beautician-bodyguards who wear life jackets and rubber boots. "Big Momma hung herself while I watched from the crib playing with my diddle and we'll never know who daddy was, will we? Aunt Lill raised me here in the beauty shop until the perm solution ate her brain.
"We lost it all to the government, but we took the show on the road. You're all I've got girls, so you've gotta be tough. You gotta be strong. It's apocalypse time -- we do not discriminate, we hate all things equally."
Hey, Happy! is Apocalypse New.
In his first feature-length film, director Noam Gonick has taken the form of the conventional millennial film and set it in Winnipeg, as it is about to sink beneath the rising Red and Assiniboine Rivers.
The inhabitants of the city are ravers and pornographers and benign desperados, all on the lookout for some pre-evacuatory saving grace. The overseer of this prairie waterworld is Sabu, a DJ whose mythic quest is to sleep with 2,000 boys before the floodwaters arrive. He is the film's sexual superhero, the-once-and-future-king of a place that could be called Comealot. Spanky is the kingdom's queen. They are fierce competitors in the seduction of Happy, an innocent ufologist who converses with aliens through his ghetto blaster.
Their various trysts occur in locations that make Winnipeg look like a golden ruin -- the industrial landscape of Saint Boniface; a rave on Garbage Hill; an open-air porn emporium. The entire film is staged outside, a rare case where a lack of money for indoor locations was a blessing. Gonick and his cinematographer, Paul Suderman, filmed as often as they could in the magic hours just at sunrise and sunset.
The results, filmed in cinemascope, are gorgeous.
Guy Maddin, Gonick's mentor and Winnipeg's most illustrious filmmaker, admires what his friend produced. "If you're going to shoot a dead dog in a pool of sludge, then you might as well do it during magic hour and make it the most beautiful dead dog possible," Maddin says, then adds: "Although I don't think either Noam or I will be invited by the Chamber of Commerce to make films about Winnipeg."
Not for lack of caring. Gonick is almost zenophobically pro-Winnipeg. "The only reason I'd ever leave is if I got run out of town."
When asked what role the city has played in shaping his artistic career he says, impishly: "Winnipeg's to blame." He spent some unproductive time in film schools in Toronto and Vancouver -- "There are 13 university degrees in my immediate family; unfortunately, none of them is mine" -- before moving back to Winnipeg in the early 1990s.
"I didn't want to stay in Vancouver; my friends were all dying of AIDS, the rain was depressing and the world was a scary place. So, I came back home. I thought it was a safer place to be if I just wanted to fester in my juices and survive my 20s. I knew I was a Pisces and prone to partying and I thought that partying in Winnipeg was like being in a madhouse with padded walls. You can't really do too much damage to yourself."
In 1993, he met Laura Michalchyshyn, the co-producer of Hey, Happy! and a close friend. Today she is the programmer for Showcase Television and an influential figure in the Canadian film world; then she was the organizer of a modest film and video festival called Revisions. Gonick already was cultivating his own garden of self-delight, not to mention generating a fair degree of animosity at the Winnipeg Film Group.
"I remember going to a concert at the West End Cultural Centre and Noam walked in wearing a supertight, one-piece maroon wrestler's outfit with white piping and a blue feather Mohawk strapped onto his shaved head," says Michalchyshyn. "I thought: 'Oh, isn't that a saucy boy.' Then he walked right by paying absolutely no attention and I thought: 'Diva entering the room.' "
Before long they were working together at WTN. They realized they had a good deal in common in addition to their shared interest in film. They both came from Eastern European backgrounds, had roots in Winnipeg's North End, and had family members who were heavily involved in left-wing social causes.
Gonick's political pedigree is especially notable. His father, Cy, was an economics professor at the University of Manitoba and for 38 years edited the left-wing magazine Canadian Dimension. The family politics left an mark on Noam's imagination.
Gonick calls his father "the great leftist warrior of the late sixties and early seventies." But there was a period when their relations were strained. "Freud always said you have to kill your father but I didn't want to do that," Gonick says, "so I avoided him for eight years instead."
Gonick made a gesture of reconciliation in the film that first brought him fame and notoriety.
In 1919 he restaged the famous Winnipeg General Strike in a bathhouse. "I tried to align sexual politics and social struggle because to me they're basically the same." It may not have been accurate history but it was squeaky clean, dirty fun.
Gonick admits that sexualizing the General Strike was also an olive branch offered to his father. For his part, Cy viewed the film as "a hoot." But he was most struck by the way his son fabricated history: "It's so consistent with how he wants the world to be. In reality the good guys lost, but he turned the whole thing around and made them win. He's looking for harmony, so all of his stuff ends up harmonious. It's the Noam ending."
The Noam ending is evident in Hey, Happy! as well, which is an optimistic take on the millennium. The effect of his alterations is to mythologize both history and place.
"Nobody knows a thing about Winnipeg, other than it floods, and nobody gives a shit about Winnipeg in the real world either. So I have the opportunity to actually make the city better. A filmmaker located in New York or L.A. doesn't have that luxury because there's so much popular imagination surrounding those places. But I don't have the same audience as Carol Shields and so I'm working with a blank slate. It's total freedom."
In Hey, Happy! freedom's just another word for letting everything loose, including rape and disembowelment. But somehow the overall effect of the film drifts away from catastrophic toward the romantic.
"You're prepared for all the rapaciousness and the outrage and the assaults," Guy Maddin says, "but what I wasn't prepared for, and what catches you completely off-guard, is the sweetness. It's a case of what's in the film being in the filmmaker."
Hey, Happy! is a trace of Noam Gonick's personality -- equal parts warring and winning, a captivating mixture of style and substance. When he showed the film at the New York Underground Film Festival this year, he came to a conclusion about the connection he makes between life and art.
"I realized that one of my main motivating factors -- in everything I do -- is to kick ass as hard as I can. I guess I'm flying in the face of the ethos that says Canadians are boring. But as much as I want to kick ass, there are also ideas in my movie that I want the audience to get. I think gay work isn't as interesting or as raw as it was 10 years ago. Gay is on TV now in a really big way. Hey, Happy! is about trying to make being a 'fag' cool again, where you go back to the roots of what it is to be a fag, where it's all about excess and numerous sexual partners and trying to transcend the normal."
Gonick's commitment to sex as a personal, social and aesthetic panacea may not be to everyone's liking.
So far, the film has been shown to audiences at specialty festivals -- Sundance and in Buenos Aires, New York and Winnipeg. It has been well-reviewed in Variety and The Village Voice.
The question remains about the film's crossover appeal to a mainstream audience. "It's a crap shoot, just like everything," Gonick says. "We gave it all we've got and we'll have to see what the world does with it."
If that sounds like resignation, don't be fooled. Gonick is on the case. "When you finish a film, your work has only just begun. It's not like blowing bubbles and watching them go up in the air and pop. I take the work very seriously."
Then he comes back to the topic of Winnipeg, where Hey, Happy! will open next month. "Maybe this is the most important thing to happen since BTO. We can finally shove those guys off the pedestal."
You can bet that Noam Gonick will be dressed for the dethroning. "I'll be wearing feather Mohawks again." Hey, Happy! plays tonight at the Inside/Out Festival in Toronto. Its commercial run starts in Toronto on June 1 and in Winnipeg on June 2. Openings in other Canadian cities are being organized. Robert Enright works with the CBC in Winnipeg, as an arts reporter for Canada Now.