Natasha Greenblatt, foreground, and Julie Patzwald in Carl Laudan's Sheltered Life.
Sheltered Life
- Directed by Carl Laudan
- Written by Katherine Schlemmer
- Starring Natasha Greenblatt and Valerie Buhagiar
- Classification: NA
Josephine (Natasha Greenblatt) lives in big house with a pool, has a closet full of expensive jeans and goes to private school. But her life is far from easy: The 16-year-old makes an anonymous call to a help line and soon finds herself holed up in a women's shelter on the edge of town with her mother Candice (Valerie Buhagiar), who has a broken wrist and a serious case of denial.
The independent drama Sheltered Life follows the well-heeled pair's adjustment to their new surroundings, creating an intimate portrait of life inside the facility with an ensemble of characters facing a range of problems.
Josephine, the instigator of this new reality, has mixed feelings about her father and an unspoken resentment of her mother's failure to deal with, let alone talk about, the domestic violence she has experienced. Writer Katherine Schlemmer and first-time feature director Carl Laudan underline the tense mother-daughter relationship by keeping them apart, moving the action back and forth between the new friendships Josephine and Candice make as they wait things out.
Greenblatt's sensitive, energetic performance is the heart of the film, and she really makes us feel the steep learning curve Josephine has unwittingly put herself on by trading one kind of sheltered life for another very different one. Candice, meanwhile, remains in numb denial; she drinks too much one night and calls her husband to pick them up.
The film eventually moves into touchy territory that, metaphorically, suggests "violence breeds violence." It may be true sometimes, but the notion doesn't work in the context of this otherwise nicely crafted drama.
Special to The Globe and Mail