Monkey Warfare
Directed and written by Reginald Harkema
Starring Don McKellar, Tracy Wright and Nadia Litz
Classification: 14A
Rating: ***
A wry, black comedy about counterculture values and compromises, Reginald Harkema's Monkey Warfare pays homage to the radical 1960s techniques of Jean-Luc Godard in a contemporary and distinctly Canadian story.
Harkema, who directed 1999's A Girl Is a Girl, is best known as an editor (for Guy Maddin, Don McKellar and Gary Burns, among others) who moved from his native Vancouver to Toronto, where Monkey Warfare was shot. His film deals, in part, with the seepage of West Coast political activism into Toronto and the legacy of Sixties radical politics.
The script was inspired by the notoriety of the eighties' Vancouver punk-anarchist group known as the Squamish Five (a.k.a. Direct Action or the Vancouver Five) who engaged in a series of bombings and vandalism in the name of feminist, environmental and anti-war causes. Their activities included the 1982 bombing of Litton Systems in west-end Toronto, where they badly injured security guard Terry Chikowski, among others.
Harkema's film focuses on a couple now in their 40s, Dan (McKellar) and Linda (Tracy Wright) who have a Squamish-like radical history and similar blight on their consciences. Instead of doing time in a penitentiary, they are living the life of penitents, hiding out in Toronto's poor-but-gentrifying Parkdale area. They survive by scavenging off the detritus of the capitalist excess - Dan by "liberating" abandoned bicycles, and repairing and selling them, Linda by finding objects in the trash that she sells on the Internet (somehow without a credit card). Radicals in theory, in practice they have become profiteers from what Marxists might call the fetishization of objects. Both their sexual interest in each other and their passion for the revolution have become dormant, anesthetized in their daily clouds of pot smoke.
When their dealer is busted, Dan and Linda are forced out of their usual rut as Dan hooks up with Susan (Nadia Litz), a perky young Vancouverite with a direct line to B.C. organic weed and a passion for old-fashioned radicalism. Inspiring Dan's libido (as well as his more pedantic tendencies in leftist lecturing), she threatens both Dan and Linda's secret and the bond that has held them together.
Much of Monkey Warfare (a play on "monkey wrenching" or enviro-activist acts of sabotaging industrial equipment, and "guerrilla warfare" coined by Abbie Hoffman in Steal This Book) is relatively broad comedy. Dan gets caught in a compromising position adjusting Nadia's bike seat; Dan and Linda find themselves acting like scolding parents to their young acolyte, despite their best revolutionary beliefs. Susan wants to bring the revolution to the present by attacking SUVs with gangs of bicycle-riding revolutionaries, a tactic that manages to be ridiculous and, frankly, attractive.
Matching theme with style, Harkema's film borrows Godard's signature flourishes - jump cuts, text on screen and montage - to suggest the enduring romance of transgression. Harkema is also refreshingly diligent (especially for a Canadian movie) about insisting on the movie's sense of place: The movie occurs, inescapably, in the rough streets of Parkdale imbued with a seedy romance, helped by a knowing soundtrack that ranges from Leonard Cohen and the Fugs to contemporary bands such as Pink Mountaintops and Comets on Fire.
Along with some fairly silly comedy, romance and irony bounce off each other through Monkey Warfare. According to one interview, Harkema says Monkey Warfare is about the way "society keeps any sort of radical politics down, and by extension how the system discourages and keeps creativity down" - but that's barely half the story.
Although Harkema has affection for his characters, the movie looks on Dan and Linda's parasitic nostalgia and Susan's beret-wearing radical chic for the delusions that they are. Perhaps the script's nervy, ambiguous ending defines its most Canadian quality: as radical as possible under conservative circumstances.
Liam Lacey