Public Domain Directed and written by Kris Lefcoe Starring Don McKellar, Nicole de Boer, Nadia Litz, Mike Beaver and Jason Jones Classification: NA Rating: * * ½
Once upon a time, people went to movies to escape reality. Now many of us gather in darkened theatres to avoid reality TV.
Public Domain, a bristling debut by Canadian filmmaker Kris Lefcoe, takes the reality-TV game a step further than the American networks. The characters here don't know they're on TV. Nor do they realize they're stars of an existential sport - a treading-water contest where the player who sinks slowest wins.
Or as the program's shout line advises us: "Welcome to Public Domain, the game show where sloth pays."
The unwitting stars of the fictitious reality-game show include Peter (Mike Beaver), an agoraphobic who hasn't left the house in eight years; Bonnie (Nicole DeBoer), a compulsive pop-music fan who never left Echo and the Bunnymen; and Terry (Nadia Litz), a blinking, sweating drug addict who tricks out high-school pals to score dope.
The suggestion that reality shows promote surveillance as entertainment is a shrewd take on TV's newest genre. And Don McKellar ( Last Night) offers up a funny performance as the show's host, a slumming intellectual who holds his cigarette like a prison-camp interrogator while dissecting contestants' lives. ("Note the deft manipulation of the father here, [Terry's]really at the top of her game . . .") It should also be noted that writer-director Lefcoe, a graduate of the Canadian Film Centre, shows an impressive command of the medium. Using digital, split-screen images and an ambitious soundtrack collage littered with British pop tunes and tape-loop fragments, virtually every scene of Lefcoe's first feature radiates energy and wit.
But for all its ambition and evident talent, Public Domain is a dispiriting affair. For now anyway, Lefcoe is a better director than writer. While her ideas are intriguing, and the film's camera work is almost recklessly assured, there is a reflexive cynicism on display here - an off-putting callousness that prevents us from ever falling in with the film's characters or storyline.
Other than McKellar's bright cameo, the remaining players seem trapped in a mean, deadening satire. Their characters are too rigidly defined by their neuroses. Peter is worried about what's going on outside even when he's sitting on a couch. Bonnie blathers on forever about old music. And Terry is always looking to fix.
That the film cruelly spends so much time letting three non-swimmers flop and flail at the deep end of the pool, all by their lonesome, is a mistake for two reasons. First, Lefcoe doesn't provide them with enough funny, winning scenes to maintain our interest. (Her humour functions better as commentary. Almost all the program's on-air promotions are both funny and chilling. For example: "Public Domain - television that watches you.") More damaging still - keeping the characters in hiding, on their own, outside competition, robs the enterprise of the terrifying Lord of the Flies dynamic that makes reality game shows like Survivor as dangerous and addictive as high school.
Public Domain marks the debut of a promising young filmmaker. One hopes that in the future Lefcoe will showcase her obvious talent in a more generous, character- and audience-friendly context.
Special to The Globe and Mail