Love Is Work
Directed and written by Johnny Kalangis
Starring Fabrizio Filippo, Kathryn Zenna and Scott McCord
Classification: 14A
Rating: **½
The voyeurs among us know that watching a movie is a socially acceptable way of indulging tendencies that may otherwise get them in trouble. The act of surreptitiously peering into the lives of others doesn't seem so vampiric when those lives are fictional.
Nevertheless, Love Is Work seems unusually intrusive and intimate.
Watching this Canadian indie drama may make the viewer feel like a particularly nosy waiter, the kind that lingers too long at the edge of the table so that he doesn't miss any of the conversation's juiciest parts.
The restaurant setting has something to do with that feeling (the film was shot at the Rhino, in Toronto's Parkdale neighbourhood). So does the project's improvisatory nature.
Toronto actor and filmmaker Johnny Kalangis constructed his second feature out of five continuous one-hour scenes that were based on Kalangis's storylines but the dialogue was improvised by the actors.
At first, Kalangis planned to use the scenes - done without rehearsals or retakes - as the basis for a script but found that he liked them well enough as they were.
Though the scenes were shot at different times, the rapid editing and occasional use of split-screen create the impression that this eavesdropping waiter is flitting back and forth between tables, frantically trying to keep tabs on several conversations at once.
Inevitably, some encounters are more intriguing than others, but all have their moments of insight. Each scene captures a couple at a different stage in their relationship.
Victor (Fabrizio Filippo) and Celia (Shauna MacDonald) are slick young professionals still sussing each other out. Harley (Kyree Vibrant) and Shaun (Scott McCord) are musical partners whose ambitions are stymied by Shaun's hypochondria and affection for Jagermeister. Terry (Kalangis) and Sarah (Joa Gamelin) are an older couple whose relationship has been strained by a recent tragedy. Zoe (Natalie Radford) and Kathy (Meredith Vuchnich) are ex-lovers getting together to plan Zoe's baby shower. Though these exchanges have their tensions, none is as vitriolic as the confrontation between Charlie (Ryan McVittie), a bitter, jealous writer, and his long-suffering partner, Samantha (Kathryn Zenna).
Portraying modern romance as a carefully negotiated series of compromises (at best) or violent skirmishes in a war that will have no survivors (at worst), Love Is Work makes good on its title by dramatizing the arduousness that comes with ardour. The film itself can feel like hard work.
Kalangis rarely settles on one couple for long and the hectic to-and-fro-ing can often undermine the impact of the individual storylines. And while his actors - especially Zenna and Gamelin, both of whom skillfully convey their characters' frustrations - strive to make every second count, their exchanges can become repetitious and overly self-conscious, as they do in any extended improv exercise.
But Love Is Work has no shortage of verve and the movie's most revealing moments achieve some of the raw power you find in John Cassavetes's like-minded expeditions into the darker recesses of the human heart.
That Love Is Work is now being released in several cities is also welcome news. Having originally surfaced at Canadian film festivals two years ago, it's getting a theatrical release thanks to a new Telefilm Canada program that provides distribution funds for movies that would otherwise disappear into oblivion. As a result, the juiciest tidbits of these conversations will be more widely heard by inveterate eavesdroppers.
Special to The Globe and Mail