Colonial Report from the Dominion of Canada (above the 49th Parallel)

This is a true story.

I was conceived in Detroit, Michigan.

My father was property of the famed National Hockey League (NHL) team the Detroit Red Wings. For a couple of years, Dad played for a variety of their ‘farm teams’ in Northern Michigan, which meant he was almost always on the road, carted along icy highways in rickety buses across several states.

Once he was brought into the fold of the team itself, Mom and Dad were nicely ensconced in the birthplace of Motown. Dad was the backup goalie to the legendary Terry Sawchuck. All his teammates referred to him as ‘The Little Uke’ and Sawchuck as ‘The Big Uke’ – two generations of Ukrainian goaltenders rubbing elbows with the very best players in what is still considered the golden age of professional hockey within the original Six Team League of the NHL.

Given that he was backing up the greatest goalie who ever lived, Dad only played one NHL game. It’s still in the record books. Detroit was playing against the New York Rangers and they did not have a backup goaltender. Their goalie, Gump Worsley, had taken ill and was unable to play. Rather than cancel the game, Detroit’s wily general manager Jack Adams offered my Dad to take Gump’s place.

After that season, like all professional hockey players at the time, Dad went back home with Mom so he could get a job. This was before a players’ union existed and even the biggest stars needed to work in the off season – selling cars, working construction or, as in my Dad’s case, performing general labour for my uncle’s plumbing company.

Mom and Dad never went back to Detroit. Dad broke his ankle and was laid up. Jack Adams offered a friendly ‘Tough break, kid’ and when Dad recovered, he needed to support his family, so he became a cop. He did play for Canada’s national hockey team in the 1960s, and in the late 1970s he became a beer salesman and quickly worked his way up the brewery’s ladder. He became a sales promotions supervisor, using his hockey connections to sponsor numerous World Cup hockey events and back several World Hockey Association (WHA) teams with sponsorship.

It is, however, those days in Detroit that I’m especially sentimental about. During the late 1950s, I was swimming about in my mother’s belly as she carried my added girth around Motor City. Being a hockey wife is a lonely existence, and as detailed in numerous films about hockey, hockey wives seek the company and comfort of other hockey wives.

OK, granted I was still in my mother’s womb, but I am convinced (as is she) that my love for movies began in Detroit. One night, when the men were on the road, she accepted an invitation from another hockey wife to go to the movies. Mom didn’t pick the movie, nor did she pick the venue, nor did she agree that walking home after the movie was the best idea – this was, after all, downtown Detroit. And though it probably wasn’t quite as dangerous after dark as it is now – a blasted-out war zone – it was still DOWNTOWN DETROIT.

Do the math on that, folks.

So, there I was, floating ever so gently in Mom’s womb as she and the other hockey wife attended a re-release of Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers – a movie that’s plenty chilling even today, but during the hysteria of Cold War America it scared the living bejesus out of her.

After the movie, the other hockey wife insisted they walk home. My Mom still gets gooseflesh of the creepiest kind when she thinks about seeing that movie then walking along the dirty, dark, downtown Detroit streets – grizzled barkers outside ‘gentlemen’s clubs’, rollies dangling from their lower lips while huckstering the womanly delights within, trench-coat-adorned bachelors ogling any female worth ogling, sidewalk-hugging tramps reeking of urine, their lips and chins encrusted with dry vomit, roving bands of malcontent youth malevolently taunting anyone passing by, cheaply plumed hookers zealously guarding their turf as they eyeballed the environs for potential clientele, and several dark, empty blocks save for an occasional flash of a Zippo flash or mysterious cough from pitch-black Jacques-Tourneur-styled shadows – with me nestled in her belly, umbilically soaking up the sights, sounds and smells of the city I desperately craved to be born unto.

I reiterate – DO THE MATH!!!

Mom noticed my obsession with movies when I was only three years old. Long after everyone was asleep, I’d sneak into the living room, turn on the television set and watch late-night movies. She’d catch me sitting in front of the TV, not unlike the little blond girl in Poltergeist. Some nights she even found me staring at the old ‘Indian Head’ test pattern long after the late shows were over.

I was conceived in Detroit.

So too was my lifelong love affair with the movies.

* * *

It takes a lot of courage to watch a man out there night after night. I know the players get most of the glory, but I think the women who wait at home for them at night deserve most of the credit. They must have to love the game as much as the man does.

– Toronto Maple Leafs owner to the young singer in love with the team’s star player in the classic 70s Canadian hockey movie Face Off.

 

I first saw the movie Face Off with my Dad when it played in Winnipeg first-run in a huge, packed-to-the-rafters old downtown picture palace. Even as a kid the aforementioned speech was not lost on me – I’d heard many stories from my Mom about life as a ‘hockey wife’. Oddly, I heard more stories from her about those days than from my Dad. I enjoyed hockey, but if anything, I think it was more the world of hockey that appealed to me.

I loved, for example, the old Winnipeg Arena – referred even back then as ‘The Barn’. It held 10,000 people and on big game nights, the smoke was so thick from cigars and cigarettes, it looked like the fields of battle I recall watching on the battered 16mm film prints of the National Film Board of Canada’s (NFB) Canada at War series – prints that I happily still own and occasionally un-spool upon my Bell and Howell Autoload projector.

On game nights, Dad would take me in through the media entrance guarded by Jimmy, a kindly, grizzled old hockey player with a wooden leg, then lead me to the northwest corner where the craggy sportswriters were assembled – smoking butts and trading quips. We’d stop for a pre-game horse-piss in the legendary Winnipeg Arena washrooms, which, rather than urinals, had open troughs to expunge one’s geysers of urine.

Most games, I sat way up high. Dad would deposit me in a seat near a staircase that led to the ‘Barn’s’ heavenly heights and I’d watch him eventually mount a rickety catwalk as he proceeded to a press box high above the ice and even higher than the worn portrait of Queen Elizabeth and the score cube emblazoned with the logo of Export ‘A’ cigarettes.

Once ensconced in the press box, he’d ply all the sportswriters with free Carling-O’Keefe beer, just to make sure they’d mention his brewery’s hospitality and support in their articles and broadcasts. (I remember one sports writer referring to Dad in an article as ‘Big Julie from that great Oriental beer company Car Ling’.)

Halfway through the final period of every game, it was my solemn duty to go back to the car and start it. Dad liked getting into a warm car – especially in 50-below weather. I’d sit there, burning gas, turn on the radio, listen to the end of the game, then proudly hear Dad on the post-game analysis – picking the three stars and, more often than not, getting a few plugs in for his beer.

On a few rare occasions, I’d get the opportunity to sit in the players’ bench – usually of opposing teams. Dad loved nothing more than to say ‘hello’ to old pals now living in cities all over the continent and, invariably, they’d invite his ‘little shaver’ to enjoy the game from the coolest vantage point in town. This once afforded me the distinct pleasure of witnessing one of the bloodiest bench-clearing brawls in hockey history between the Quebec Nordiques and the Winnipeg Jets at ice level.

Perhaps even more thrilling were the eye-level views of soapy genitalia in the dressing room after the game – a delight also shared by my future friend, filmmaker Guy Maddin. Though we eventually met as young adults and roomed together, and I eventually produced his first three features, Guy and I inexplicably did not meet in childhood, in spite of the fact that our hockey dads were mutual friends and, most notably, that we shared often identical childhood memories of the ‘Barn’.

As kids in the 60s, when our dads were touring together through Europe during national championships, we eventually reminisced about the eerie trans-Atlantic cable calls we’d respectively get from Chas (Guy’s Dad) and ‘Big Julie’ (my Dad).

Do the math.

Detroit + exposure to Don Siegel in the womb + Winnipeg + Hockey + soapy genitals = Movies.

Hockey is, of course, as Canadian as maple syrup, peameal bacon, geese, moose, beavers, pouding chômeur, poutine, national inferiority complexes and Norman Jewison. As such, one can only wonder why the most Canadian movie NEVER made by a Canadian in the Dominion of Canada was Slap Shot, George Roy Hill’s hilarious hockey satire with Paul Newman.

That said, many years before everyone’s favourite salad dressing magnate and the Hanson Brothers cracked heads like so many eggs, yielding runny crimson yolk matter upon the fresh, white ice, Canada did indeed generate a terrific piss-and-vinegar hockey picture: Face Off.

Written by George Robertson (based on material by Neil Young’s dad, sports writer Scott Young), directed by stalwart TV helmer George McCowan (who would happily go on to direct the utterly insane 70s horror thriller Frogs) and starring a very handsome Art Hindle (who went on to scare the shit out of movie audiences as Brooke Adams’s pod-victim hubby in Phil Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers remake) and the delectable Trudy Young (former child star and every young Canadian boy’s wet dream from the long-running kids show Razzle Dazzle), Face Off blazed onto Canadian screens in 1971.

This was truly a movie by Canadians for Canadians. They embraced it wholeheartedly – not just because it was a genuinely good picture, but for the amazing on-ice action. Face Off is historically significant for a number of reasons, but most importantly, it contains the only existing 35mm film footage of actual NHL hockey action.

In spite of this, the original elements to generate new prints went missing, and it’s suspected the negative had been thrown out by mistake after producer John F. Bassett’s untimely death from brain cancer in 1985. With one decent existing print left in the whole world, the Toronto International Film Festival’s Film Reference Library (TIFF) and the visionary Canadian home entertainment company Video Service Corporation (VSC) undertook the painstaking, expensive and worthwhile toil of restoring the film – frame by frame – to high definition.

The movie straddles the best of both worlds: it is part of that amazing early period of Canuck features that not only reflected English Canadian culture, but did so with the distinctive 70s darkness so prevalent in the work of Canada’s neighbours south of the 49th parallel.

On the surface, Face Off is a simple, oft-told tale of star-crossed lovers, doomed from the start. The movie is all the more melancholy as we experience WHY they should be together, but also get a God’s-eye perspective of WHY they won’t be together. As the narrative un-spools, we hope things will work out for the best, but anyone who knows and loves the best 70s movies will guess that the relationship will be thwarted.

The emphasis on darkness was not only the 70s way, but the Canadian way. Canuck pictures from this period shared the tone so apparent in the work of Scorsese, Schrader, Toback, Lumet and others. Where the two countries differed was in ‘production value’. Naturally lower budgets plus the National Film Board’s influence resulted in Canadian films that blended traditional, classical storytelling with an almost neo-realist approach – less razzle-dazzle, more dour-dazzle.

As a kid, Face Off was a revelation. For someone living in a country inundated with American popular culture, yet feeling you were, as a Canadian, not American, it was a movie that captured the essence of living in the Dominion, but unlike most Canadian culture broadcast on television – happy fiddlers and trilling Irish tenors from the Maritimes, game shows where the grand prizes were pen and pencil sets, kids’ shows with visibly drunk ventriloquists or adventure shows always set in the wilderness – Face Off was cool. Why wouldn’t it be? It had a hunky hero; a former kids TV starlet, great hockey action with cameos from the greatest NHL stars and globs of blood spilling on the ice.

Of course, the movie captured so much of what I had already experienced in the world of hockey – the locker room camaraderie, the wood-paneled smoky taverns, the cheap suits adorning the men, clutches of sports reporters and the parties.

Most resonantly, Face Off captured the place of women in this world of gladiators on the ice and the players’ masters in the back rooms – something that was not lost on me even as a kid. At one point in the film, the coach, played by the late, great Canadian character actor John Vernon (the evil prison warden in Chained Heat, Clint Eastwood’s nemesis in The Outlaw Josey Wales, the slimy San Francisco mayor in Dirty Harry, Dean Wormer in Animal House and the malevolent Mr Kapital in Dušan Makavejev’s Sweet Movie) has a chilling conversation with star player Billy where he imparts the following advice: ‘Kid, everything in life has to be in its proper place. Even the wife, eh.’ Billy regards this with a mixture of scepticism and acceptance. Poker-faced, he responds with: ‘Something to think about.’ The Coach delivers the final knockout verbal blow: ‘Just don’t think about it. DECIDE!!!’

For Billy, it IS a tough decision. He’s not only being seduced by the game, his teammates, his bosses, but by fame itself. At one point, Billy and his folk-singing girlfriend Sherri clash when he gloats over his ‘bad boy’ press in the sports pages. When she accuses him of being ‘just like the rest of them’ (the patriarchal world that has attempted to put HER in her place), Billy responds, ‘No, I’m not’. Billy brashly, directly and romantically takes the bull by the horns, looks Sherri in the eyes and says, ‘I’m younger, stronger and tougher and that’s why you dig me. You know that’s right. We both know it, eh’.

And here, for me, the Canuck clincher comes when Billy adds: ‘So dry your eyes and put on something warm. I think we both could use some fresh air’.

Ah, young love in Canada.

A stroll through sub-zero winter snow and all will be well.

* * *

If you could read my mind love, what a tale my thoughts could tell.
Just like an old time movie, about a ghost from a wishing well.
In a castle dark, or a fortress strong, with chains upon my feet.
You know that ghost is me. And I will never be set free,
as long as I’m a ghost that you can see.
If I could read your mind love, what a tale your thoughts could tell.
Just like a paperback novel, the kind the drugstore sells.
When you reach the part where the heartaches come,
the hero would be me,
and heroes often fail.
And you won’t read that book again
because the ending’s just to hard to take.

– ‘If You Could Read My Mind’, theme song as sung by Gordon Lightfoot in the 1973 Canadian hockey picture Paperback Hero.

 

Like Face Off, Peter Pearson’s Paperback Hero indelibly captures hockey and its relationship to Canadian culture, but most importantly, how American culture had such a strong influence upon those who lived even in isolation. Starring Keir Dullea (Dave Bowman from 2001: A Space Odyssey) as Rick Dylan, a hard-drinking, brawling, womanising small-town hockey player on the flat prairies surrounding Delisle, Saskatchewan, it’s also typical of 70s Canadian cinema. Blending elements of the documentary tradition it combines an almost neo-realist approach to the drama with considerable darkness and cynicism.

Curiously and coincidentally, both Face Off and Paperback Hero were both produced by John F. Bassett. I not only first saw both movies with my Dad, but Bassett had married into the family that ran the mighty brewing empire my Dad worked for. Bassett’s daughter, the eventual famed tennis pro Carling Bassett, was even named after the company Dad orchestrated hockey promotional tie-ins for.

Small world.

Then again, it’s a small world that Paperback Hero is all about.

In addition to Bassett, the key creative team included director Peter Pearson who came from a television news background while cinematographer Donald Wilder, who shot Face Off and eventually one of Canada’s highest grossing hits, Meatballs, spent a good portion of his career as a documentary shooter. Pearson and Wilder not only excelled in the area of the hockey practices and matches – again, full of rough and tumble action as well as the bloody fisticuffs on ice – but also captured the details of small-town Canadian prairie life more distinctively than pretty much any Canadian film.

A ramshackle community centre and arena, the local bar smelling of decades worth of beer suds soaked into the floors, greasy diners, wide streets under a jet blue sky, flat yellow fields of wheat and mustard seed as Gordon Lightfoot mournfully crooned on the soundtrack – all this and more were indelibly rendered by Pearson and Wilder.

Rick Dylan is also the quintessential Canadian hero of the period. His whole world exists in Delisle – he’s a big fish that subsidizes his low-paying hockey career as a laborer. His off hours are spent drinking and carousing with his best friend, the restless, unhappily married Pov (John Beck – who played James Caan’s second banana ‘Moonpie’ in Norman Jewison’s Rollerball). Dylan has a caring fuck-buddy in the local barmaid Loretta (Elizabeth Ashley, a TV veteran and 70s male-angst cinema’s go-to gal for pictures like Frank Perry’s Rancho Deluxe and Thomas McGuane’s 92 in the Shade), but his real designs are on the college-educated Joanna (Dayle Haydon, model, Playboy bunny and star of Quebecois/Euro-trash soft-core delights such as Spermula and The Girls of Madame Claude), daughter of the hockey team’s owner Big Ed (Canadian TV stalwart Franz Russell).

Rick, like all good Canadian heroes, has not grown up. He considers himself a superb marksman and dons the garb of a cowboy, encouraging people to call him ‘Marshall’ Dylan (after James Arness as Marshall Matt Dillon from TV’s long-running Gunsmoke series). Rick’s primary nemesis (aside from himself) is the town’s local law enforcement official, Burdock (George R. Robertson), who’s itching for an excuse – any excuse – to put an end to Rick’s shenanigans.

For me, Rick has always been a fascinating character. Again, I first saw the movie as a kid first-run on a big screen. Living in a prairie city like Winnipeg, surrounded by yahoos with the same kind of small-town mentality, and indeed, living in a city bordered by similar topography and a multitude of tiny hamlets just like Delisle, there’s this weird sense – especially if you’re even vaguely outside of the norm – of feeling like you don’t belong where you are, but that you can’t belong anywhere else.

Hockey is really the only thing that roots Rick (plus the minor celebrity status that fuels his ego). He’s the ultimate outsider. He doesn’t really care about anyone else. He uses the women in his life as receptacles for his man-seed, and his journey is essentially that of a man who begins with a delusion that intensifies to the point that he’s a threat – not only to those around him, but frankly, to himself.

Thankfully, some of us living on the prairies found the movies.

The rest were like Rick Dylan. They were the ghosts who could never be free so long as those who might inexplicably care about them could see them – the wannabe heroes who, by virtue of their delusions, always lost.

* * *

Ooh and it’s alright and it’s coming on
We gotta get right back to where we started from
Love is good, love can be strong
We gotta get right back to where we started from

-Maxine Nightingale singing ‘Right Back Where We Started From’ on the soundtrack to Slap Shot

 

1977 saw the momentous release of what is still the greatest hockey picture of all time. In her rave review of Slap Shot, Pauline Kael in the New Yorker noted that ‘George Roy Hill, who directed two of the ten biggest money-makers of all time, will probably have a third’ with the raucous satire of minor league hockey violence. Anyone who saw the picture – whether they cared about hockey or not – might have wholeheartedly agreed with this prediction.

From a truly great script by Nancy Dowd, who spent a year on the road with her minor league hockey-playing brother Ned Dowd, director Hill generated a grand underdog tale of the cellar-dwelling Charlestown Chiefs and their rise to glory when foul-mouthed, irascible player-coach Reggie Dunlop (Paul Newman) transforms them overnight into pop-culture sensations, inspiring them to crack open as many heads as score goals.

Hill, a critically underrated filmmaker who churned out a whole mess of hit movies (including The World of Henry Orient, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting), directed this picture with the kind of fervor and aplomb that yielded one magnificent comic set piece after another. He seemed to be on some kind of crazed overdrive – making the movie as if it might be his last.

Dowd’s screenplay is utter perfection. Not only does she capture a world that seemed familiar to me from all those seminal years of experiencing many aspects of it from the inside, but I have spoken with players from all levels of the business (including my Dad), who all give high marks to the film for capturing so many details that rang incredibly true. (And yes, they all acknowledged it was ‘Hollywood-ized’, but to a considerably lesser degree than they expected.)

Dowd created a great collection of characters – right from the leads down to the tiniest roles – and the dialogue she had barking out of their mouths is right up there with the best comic dialogue in movie history. She deftly balanced the machismo of the world with the lives of all the women in it and created several indelible portraits of ‘hockey wives’ – most notably Jennifer Warren as Reggie’s ex-wife, whom he keeps, almost stalker-like, trying to get back, and Lindsay Crouse as the neglected alcoholic wife of a player who cares more for his slobbery dog than for her.

In spite of Kael’s prognostication, Slap Shot was a flop – everywhere except in the Dominion of Canada. Above the 49th parallel, Hill’s violent comic masterpiece was a blockbuster – not only upon its initial release, but also for many years afterwards.

In the late 70s and early 80s, it could take forever for major studio releases to make it to broadcast television and since this was prior to the home video boom, theatrical re-releases were extremely common. Pictures could do very well in re-release (most notably Gone with the Wind and classic Disney titles), but in Canada, Slap Shot had three MAJOR re-releases in a period of about five years following the first theatrical release.

Universal Pictures backed these reissues with substantial TV and print ad-buys, which yielded grosses to more than justify the expenditures. By this point, I was working as a programmer and film buyer for independent cinemas across three major provincial territories and the grosses for my theatres were astounding.

The bottom line is this: Canadians love their hockey and Slap Shot delivered the goods. That it took a major American studio picture about the subject to achieve blockbuster status (if only in Canada) has been a thorn in the side of Canadian cinema. Don’t get me wrong, though. Face Off and Paperback Hero both did excellent business in Canada, though in the rest of the world they died without a trace. In fact, both pictures were weirdly and respectively re-titled for American release as Winter Comes Early and The Last of the Big Guns.

In the post-Slap Shot period, The Hounds of Notre Dame, a sadly unheralded Canadian hockey picture directed by Zale Dalen, was a lovely 1980 ode to the famed Saskatchewan kids’ hockey coach Father Athol ‘Pere’ Murray. Played by the legendary Canadian character actor Thomas Peacocke, the movie focused on the Boys Town-styled school for wayward youth Murray built in the middle of Nowhere, Saskatchewan.

The good Father was a hard drinking, two-fisted son of a bitch who whipped his bad boys into shape by inspiring them academically through the glories of hockey. Murray used hockey like a big-stick metaphor for success in all things, and in fact, he churned out many of Canada’s captains of industry and politics with this no-nonsense approach. In fact, the school went on to receive most of its funding to keep its doors open from former students who went on to unparalleled financial success.

One of the most memorable sequences in the picture is Murray ignoring a blinding snowstorm, which on the Canadian prairies is usually not the best idea. He bundles the boys in their hockey gear, shoves them all into a ramshackle old bus, gets them to the big game and back to the school – all in one piece and in weather where exposed skin will freeze in less than 30 seconds.

It’s a lovely picture. Although it was released theatrically across Canada, it came and went with little fanfare and is forgotten by all except those lucky enough to have seen it.

After The Hounds of Notre Dame, the big question in the Dominion was: ‘Where, pray tell, is the Great Canadian Hockey Movie?

Canadian TV movies in the 90s briefly flirted with hockey. Atom Egoyan’s still pungent Gross Misconduct, told the true story of Canadian hockey player Brian ‘Spinner’ Spencer (brilliantly played by Daniel Kash), driven by his mean, two-fisted dad (Peter MacNeill) to use his fists to get him to the top.

Egoyan superbly renders this violent biopic, which is punctuated with a steady stream of ironic inter-titles to announce every perverse episode in Spinner’s out-of-control ascension in the NHL and his eventual downfall. Egoyan uses his cold, observational approach to capture every vicious blow on the ice, Spinner’s addiction to crack cocaine, his consorting with prostitutes and a variety of lowlifes and the murder rap he beat by the skin of his teeth.

One of the more harrowing sequences involves Spinner’s drunken dad taking a TV station hostage when one of his son’s earliest games was blacked out in his home province by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. While Spinner plays his heart out, RCMP officers open fire on the armed elder Spencer, blowing him tidily away. Equally harrowing is a similar moment at the end of Spinner’s tragic life.

Jerry Ciccoritti’s superb Net Worth, dealt with the struggle for a players’ union in the NHL and, according to my Dad, was not only a fine rendering of the period, but featured a brilliant performance by Al Waxman, who, he said, captured Detroit manager Jack Adams to perfection. Dad would know. In spite of being cited by the legendary goalie Ken Dryden as a personal hero in his book The Game, Dad (as mentioned above) was subsequently booted by Adams after he broke his ankle. For me, it was especially cool to see Wings players I’d actually met over the years through Dad rendered as characters in a movie.

Both of these 90s TV flicks were decidedly revisionist takes on the sport, and as such, they most deservedly earned consideration in the pantheon of our fair Dominion’s finer cinematic hockey efforts.

Other than Egoyan, Ciccoritti, Pearson, Dalen and McCowan’s pictures, and yes, George Roy Hill’s immortal Slap Shot – which of course, is not Canadian, but feels like it could have been, or at the very least is one of the few non-Canadian movies that somehow captures the ethos of Canadian hockey – the Dominion’s cinematic output has been pretty spotty.

Canada did manage to yield a few utterly dreadful blips on the cinematic hockey radar; Charles Biname’s lame by-the-numbers 2005 biopic of Maurice Richard, The Rocket, a loathsome comedy about South-East Asian players in Canada called Breakaway, and last and certainly the least, the utterly inept Score: The Hockey Musical.

But again, where, oh where, was the truly Great Canadian Hockey Movie?

Would I, in my lifetime as a member of this great Dominion ever see a hockey picture sprung from our collective colonial loins that I could truly call . . . my own?

Would the bitch goddess ‘Success’ never again bless us with a homegrown hockey picture to be proud of?

As the great Peggy Lee once crooned, ‘Is that all there is?’

* * *

Kid, you’ve got this thing. The shit. The stuff. The fuckin’ grit. You got it, like me. But like me, that’s ALL you fuckin’ got. And like me, you’re no good to anyone doin’ anything else. Don’t go tryin’ to be a hockey player. You’ll get your fuckin’ heart ripped out.

-Liev Schreiber as Ross Rhena, the toughest enforcer in hockey, imparting advice to the sweet young brawler Doug Glatt (Seann William Scott) whom he’ll eventually be squaring off with in Michael Dowse’s Goon.

 

The wait is over!

The Second Coming is here!

Call it The Rapture, if you will.

Based upon Doug Smith and Adam Frattasio’s novel Goon: The True Story of an Unlikely Journey into Minor League Hockey and with a screenplay co-written by everyone’s favourite Canuck comic geniuses Jay Baruchel and Evan Goldberg (Superbad), director Michael Dowse offers the Great Canadian Hockey Movie:

Goon.

Etching the tender tale of the kindly, but brick-shit-house-for-brains bouncer Doug Glatt (Seann William Scott), who is recruited to a cellar-dweller hockey team in Halifax to protect the once-promising forward Xavier Laflamme (Marc-André Grondin), Dowse captures the sweaty, blood-spurting, bone-crunching and tooth-spitting circus of minor league hockey with utter perfection.

The camaraderie, the endless bus trips, the squalid motels, the brain-dead fans, the piss-and-vinegar coaches, the craggy play-by-play sportscasters, the bars reeking of beer and vomit and, of course, Pogo Sticks (those delicious deep-fried wieners on a stick surrounded by corn meal batter) – it’s all here and then some.

Goon delivers laughs, fisticuffs, and mayhem, and yes, even a dash of romance in a tidy package of good, old-fashioned underdog styling.

Comparisons to Slap Shot, however, are inevitable.

George Roy Hill’s untouchable classic features a variety of near-Buñuelian set pieces:

Can anyone ever forget the interview with the Quebecois goalie when he describes what it’s like to be in the penalty box? ‘You sit dere,’ he says in his thick joual accent. ‘You feel shame’.

Or Paul Newman taunting an opposing team member about his wife going ‘dyke’ with the mantra, ‘She’s a lesbian, a lesbian, a lesbian’.

Or the foul-minded Moe Wanchuk (the late character actor who played Nick Nolte’s utterly reprehensible father in The Prince of Tides), releasing a steady stream of gems, like when Killer Carlson (Jerry Houser, the sexual braggart teen from Summer of 42) must spend a night in jail and he’s advised of his right to one phone call and Moe kindly suggests: ‘Why don’t you call a massage parlour?’

Or college boy Ned Braden (Michael Ontkean), who refuses to fight during a bench clearing brawl, and instead, skates out onto the ice to perform a strip-tease.

Or the coach (Strother Martin), who tenderly reminisces about an inveterate masturbator who’d commit vicious acts of violence on the ice to whack off in the penalty box.

Or, finally, can any hockey movie – even a Great CANADIAN Hockey Movie like Goon – ever top Slap Shot‘s Hanson Brothers (the immortal triplets adorned with glasses sporting coke bottle lenses and played by genuine World Hockey Association goons).

From ‘putting on the foil’ (making their knuckles super-lethal by affixing plenty of Alcan to them) to manhandling the drink machine (‘Took my fuckin’ quarter!’), to skating in formation like deadly Marx Brothers, to smacking the helmets of the opposing team in their bench, to a Hanson berating a disrespectful referee admonishing them during the national anthem (‘I’m listening to the fuckin’ SONG!’) or the immortal slap shot that sends a puck sailing into the side of the organist’s head, and last, but not least, Paul Newman’s observation upon first seeing the Hanson Brothers in their hotel room (‘These guys are retards! They brought their fuckin’ TOYS with them!’): hockey has never seemed so real and surreal all at once.

Well, Dowse and his team are smart. They know you don’t fuck with the Citizen Kane of hockey movies and instead try to move in a more, shall we say, esoteric direction.

While Goon might not have individual set pieces on a par with Slap Shot, it more than makes up for this with an emotional core that Dowse’s previous comedies were also endowed with. Both his Fubar movies presented the adventures of two mega-heavy-metal Alberta hosers who, on a comedy scale, far exceeded the considerable laugh count generated by SCTV’s Bob and Doug McKenzie and Dowse’s own extraordinary It’s All Gone Pete Tong, a melancholy, though very funny mockumentary about a deaf DJ that has the mythic qualities of genuine tragedy. Dowse might well be one of the greatest filmmakers in the Dominion who successfully blends artistry of the highest order with commercial appeal.

One of the things Goon does very well is bring Dowse’s humanist qualities to material that on the surface might seem anything but human. Baruchel and Goldberg’s screenplay seems almost tailored to Dowse in so far as it’s impossible to imagine anyone else bringing the film so successfully to the big screen.

A perfect example, and one that places Goon in its own sphere outside of George Roy Hill’s classic, is the difference in how both films treat the key villain. Slap Shot provided the legend of Ogie Ogilthorpe (played by Ned Dowd), the worst goon in hockey history. Goon goes a step further and utilises a fabulous Ogilthorpe-styled character that is all flesh and blood.

Ross Rhena (Liev Schreiber) is the goon to end all goons. (Uh, yeah. Liev ‘FUCKING’ Schreiber! This is one great actor and he delivers one of his best performances here.) Rhena is, in effect, a goon’s goon. And what Dowse and team do here is perfect. They create a character with a bit of sentimental, old-guard flavour.

In one tremendously moving scene, Doug and Ross meet face to face in a squalid diner and engage in a conversation worthy of every great sports picture that ever featured the grand old man and the eager young up-and-comer.

In this scene, Dowse one-ups Slap Shot by imbuing this indelible scene with truly elegiac qualities and adds far more resonance to the final punch-out in the film. In contrast, Nancy Dowd’s screenplay uses Ogilthorpe as someone we hear about often enough, but when he finally appears, the film doesn’t really exploit his legendary status in an active way, nor is he really tied into a central conflict. Baruchel and Goldberg’s screenplay really delivers the goods here.

The other cool element of their script is placing Glatt within the context of his family as well as providing a more contemporary view of homosexuality. Glatt comes from a strangely dysfunctional Jewish family where Dad (Eugene Levy) explains that one of their sons is brainless and that the other is gay by tossing out the excuse that the boys are ‘adopted’. This is funny, but it also hurts. It’s a deep cut that resembles some of the domestic issues dealt with in Dowd’s screenplay.

However, where Slap Shot realistically, given the time period and world, is replete with any number of homophobic references (the funny line where one of the players wonders if the fact that a guy’s wife has gone dyke automatically makes him ‘a fag’ springs to mind), Goon presents two gay characters who are not only comfortable with their sexuality, but in the case of Glatt’s brother-in-law (hilariously played by Baruchel himself), brashly proud and irreverently delightful. With him the movie delivers a gay character who gets an opportunity to balance the still homophobic attitudes within both traditional families and the world of hockey.

Right across the board the casting and performances in Goon are first rate, but the revelation here is Seann William Scott as Glatt. His sweet, goofy, still-boyish appeal is so infectious, you actually enjoy seeing this happy-go-lucky lug doing what God intended him to do – bust heads. Based upon his great performance here, I suspect Mr Scott can finally add Glatt to his American Pie laurels as the immortal Stifler. From now on le canon de l’homme qui est Stifler can simply be le canon de Seann William Scott.

Another astounding achievement is that you will never – in your life – see so much man-on-man carnage on the ice as you will in Goon, and it’s not just a matter of quantity – the quality of the carnage is pure, exquisite bravura pulverising.

It is a beautiful thing!

If Slap Shot is the Citizen Kane of hockey movies, Goon is The Magnificent Ambersons of hockey movies – only here, imagine a work that rekindles the butchered glory of Orson Welles’s masterpiece (with a few Touch of Evil dollops) on the blood-spattered hockey rinks of Canada!

It is a beautiful thing!

And fuck it – let’s stretch the Orson Welles metaphor further. A great director needs a great editor. Welles had Robert Wise (an editor with the soul of a director). Dowse is blessed with Reginald Harkema (an editor with the soul of a director, ‘natch!). Harkema’s earlier films as a director include the brilliantly anarchic ode to Toronto Kensington Market activists Monkey Warfare and the utterly insane biopic of Manson’s deadly paramour Miss Van Houten, Leslie, My Name Is Evil.

As an editor, he has delivered the goods for such Canadian filmmaking icons as Guy Maddin, Bruce McDonald, Don McKellar and Malcolm Ingram and if there are better editors in Canada than Reginald Harkema, I frankly have no idea who they are. The cutting in this film is utter perfection. Harkema slices and dices both comedy and action with equal aplomb.

Now granted, a director had to get the proper coverage for an editor to work such magic, but I was utterly floored by the cutting of the sequences on the ice. The sense of pace and geography is impeccable. Though Dowse has chosen a cuttier mise en scène than George Roy Hill, this doesn’t result in the sort of horrible mish-mash of cutty confusion in virtually every other contemporary action sequence. Harkema makes every cut a DRAMATIC beat and this is finally what contributes to Goon being endowed with both drive and emotional resonance.

It is, indeed, a beautiful thing!

The Dominion of Canada finally has its very own Great Canadian Hockey Movie.

Slap Shot generated huge box office in Canada, and Goon is following in these footsteps proudly. Its opening weekend made it the highest grossing movie in the entire Dominion.

* * *

Thinking about all these great Canadian hockey pictures, I can’t really put my Dad out of my head. Other than Goon, we saw all of these films together, or at least had opportunities to discuss them at length. Sadly, in 1999, (and ironically on the night I was acting in a boxing picture), I got a call on my cell phone from Mom. Dad had suffered a major stroke and was not expected to live. I boarded the first available flight to Winnipeg and spent the next week at his side in the hospital.

I was tremendously moved by the constant flow of visitors to his room – old hockey players, coaches and sports reporters. What really choked me up, though, was the parade of sweet-faced young men from a local minor league hockey team called the Manitoba Moose.

Years earlier, Winnipeg lost its major hockey franchise the Winnipeg Jets, but this didn’t seem to faze my Dad at all – in fact, the new minor league team was the highlight of his retirement. He volunteered his services on a number of fronts. Firstly, he was the guy who met all the new players at the bus depot, took them to their quarters and settled them into their new team and home. Secondly, he went to every practice, helped the guys out in the locker room and imparted sage advice. Thirdly, and amazingly, he’d don his goalie equipment – the same equipment he’d kept and maintained from the days he played in the NHL for the Detroit Red Wings – and this 66-year-old man would get on the ice and in the net and let 18-year-old kids fire slap shots at him. One of the guys who came to visit in the hospital told me that ‘Big Julie’ almost never let a goal in the net.

In fact, the day before his stroke, he was on the ice, strong as an ox and taking shots from all these young lads in the old Winnipeg Arena. (Then again, in the early days of hockey, when goalie masks were being developed, Dad would moonlight as the guy who stood in the net, taking slap shots to his face to test mask prototypes. He was a tough customer!) Though the doctors were strongly suggesting he be taken off life support, Mom refused. A day later, he was conscious.

He’s still alive. During the years after his stroke, he was in no shape to get on the ice anymore, but the Manitoba Moose team treated him like one of its own. He got season tickets to the games, a pass to the VIP room and even a special parking pass that allowed my cousins (who all took turns driving him to the games) the opportunity to park right by the VIP entrance. He should have been using a walker, but often refused to do so, and being parked near the entrance allowed him to proudly walk into the arena – slowly, but without having to suffer the sub-zero temperatures for too long.

Even more moving than anything to me is when the team annually gave out an award in his name to some sweet young hockey player who’d demonstrated the highest level of community service.

These days, the Manitoba Moose are gone. The NHL and the Winnipeg Jets have returned. He listens to their games on the radio – the same station he used to do post-game analysis in the early years of the Jets. Like so many old hockey players, he’s gone back to a certain obscurity – the tickets and passes have gone the way of both the original Winnipeg Jets and the Moose.

That said, hockey is still his life and I hope, on my next trip back home, I can watch Goon with him on DVD. Somehow I think this would add a necessary full-circle closure to our mutual experience of enjoying all the Great Canadian Hockey Movies together.

But until then . . .

. . . from the Dominion of Canada on the northernmost tip of the Bruce Peninsula, I bid you a hearty ‘Bon Cinema!’

Greg Klymkiw

Colonial Report from the Dominion of Canada (above the 49th Parallel):

Leaving Home: The Maestro of Rimini Meets the Master of Baltimore
Fellini Series a Perfect Climax to the First Year of the Toronto Film Festival’s TIFF Bell Lightbox

To you, my dearest, deviant readers of the Electric Sheep persuasion, please accept 1001 jugs of Canadian maple syrup’ worth of pardons for my falling behind on the regular reportage you’ve come to expect on the state of cinema here in the Colonies. From my fallout shelter at the tip of the Bruce Peninsula in the Dominion of Canada, I can say quite readily that I had myself one major league annus horribilis that beat even an affliction of anus fissurae. A dreadful mishap resulting in a hard drive crash that wiped out several years’ worth of writing (including my book on the art and craft of the screenplay) forced this grown man to retreat into the bush for the solace that can only be provided by blasting a Baikal semi-automatic Russian assault rifle at pesky critters (gotta love the Coyote bounty here in the Colonies) and a few, not-so-pesky critters (like Black Bears) that make for mighty fine eating. Hunting season was good, but poaching season was even better.

Ultimately, it was the opening of TIFF Bell Lightbox at the Toronto International Film Festival (horrendously abbreviated as ‘TIFF’) in the otherwise loathsome city that takes a five-hour drive from my home in North Country, which provided me the necessary post tenebras lux. Being a denizen of rural splendour meant even more rockin’ good news – a full family membership to a year-round film festival cost this redneck-hoser-cineaste only 75 smackers, and even with the price of gas, thanks to those pesky terrorists that our Dominion’s American neighbours are taking good care of, it surely was no skin off my anus (as it were) to blast down south to the metropolis with a few jars of open liquor, a chub of sausage that I won at the Royal Canadian Legion Meat Draw and a firm resolve to dine at the TIFF Lightbox trough of great movies.

Here we are then, almost a full year since the ribbon was cut on this joint located in the heart of Hogtown at that big, old city block now known as Reitman Square. ‘Twas so named after the Canadian movie director Ivan Reitman – who ya’ gonna’ call when you’re needing a big old American studio hit? Simple questions got themselves simple answers: a Canadian, of course.

And what better way can there be to celebrate life in the Colonies, but with a humungous series of movies devoted to an Italian? Not just any Italian, mind you, but the super deluxe pizza adorned with double cheese and Canadian back bacon of Italian movie directors: Federico Fellini. Who says you need a Russian assault rifle when you’ve got yourself a few weeks of the Maestro o’ Movies to put things right again in the world?

So uncork that jug of Donini Red and let’s talk Fellini!!!

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The summer of 2011 will surely go down as some kind of a milestone in our fair Dominion with the magnificent TIFF Lightbox exhibition entitled ‘Fellini: Spectacular Obsessions’ – a veritable buffet of movies, photography and all manner of paraphernalia devoted to the boy from Rimini who took the world by storm.

In the Lightbox Gallery (until September 18), a series of very cool explorations of the maestro’s celluloid dreams are on display, organized by the inimitable towering inferno of cinephilia that is the Lightbox directeur artistique Noah Cowan, from an exhibit first curated by Sam Stourdzé and produced by NBC Photography (and including additional support from Cineteca di Bologna and the legendary production designers Dante Ferretti and Francesca Lo Schiavo). We can gaze to our heart’s content at exhibitions focusing on the La Dolce Vita Trevi Fountain sequence, Fellini’s fascination with grotesques and, among other delights, a terrific photographic tribute to Italian tabloid shutterbugs, who were eventually dubbed paparazzi, based of course on the famed character created by Fellini himself.

This is what you do BETWEEN the movies.

Ultimately, given the state-of-the-art cinemas in Lightbox as well as the sort of attention to details of presentation that’s become an almost lost art, it is finally and undoubtedly the MOVIES that matter most.

And what movies they are!

Several Fellini-themed series have already, or will be, unspooling. The most delicious strands are ‘Days of Glory: Masterworks of Italian Neo-Realism’ and the ‘Fellini Dream Double Bills’.

The magnificent Lightbox projectors aim their beams upon post-war Italian cinema in the first series mentioned above. From such luminaries and contemporaries of Fellini as Vittorio De Sica, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Luchino Visconti and Roberto Rossellini we get an excellent array of films that forever changed how pictures were made. The latter series includes a clutch of luscious double bills comprised of one Fellini picture paired with the work of another filmmaker who was influenced by the maestro and either compares or contrasts with his work – all chosen by a mouth-wateringly eclectic mix of motion picture mavens.

For me, it is these double bills that truly tantalize both the taste buds and the gonads. What is Italian cinema, after all, without food and sex?

Among several pairings, Canada’s art-house darling of the Armenian persuasion Atom Egoyan served up a double trouble double bill of 8 1/2 with Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Beware of a Holy Whore.

Isabella (The Saddest Music in the World) Rossellini, daughter of Roberto Rosselini (and Ingrid Bergman) set out a pasta platter of La Strada with Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights.

TIFF topper Piers Handling dove into the deep end of a post-modern peepshow that is Fellini Casanova and Hal Ashby’s Shampoo.

Noah Cowan thrusts us ever so deeply and prodigiously between the firm celluloid buttocks of homoerotic splendour on August 26 with Fellini Satyricon and Derek Jarman’s Sebastiane.

Earth, Fire and Water helmer Deepa Mehta ladles out the delicately spiced curry of Nights of Cabiria and Satyajit Ray’s Devi on August 18.

And lest we forget, on August 28 TIFF dishes out a combo platter of 8 1/2 and cuisinologists Oliver and Bonacini’s sumptuous gourmet Italian meal.

All in all, it’s programming of the highest order.

On August 8, everyone’s favourite From Reverence to Rape gal Molly Haskell tosses a few buckets of cinematic delectability into the trough that is MAN and comes up with a double bill that seems such an obvious pairing – Fellini’s I vitelloni and Barry Levinson’s Diner.

This combination of titles, in its perfect simplicity, speaks to so many levels (all two) of the male psyche. In doing so, both pictures reflect women on a surface level that is finally much deeper than one might expect. By placing men under a microscope – both discovering and displaying a seemingly shallow series of thin layers beneath their rough skin – the films reveal through their respective lenses that it is in fact the women who display a depth far more indelible than the male characters acknowledge and that both movies themselves deliver in terms of literal on-screen time.

In his extremely positive review of Diner, Roger Ebert seemed mildly disappointed with the aspect of character dimension when he wrote, ‘For all that I recognized and sympathized with these young men and their martyred wives, girlfriends, and sex symbols, I never quite believed that they were three-dimensional’. He then immediately appeared to convince even himself as he wrote that this might well be the point: ‘It is, of course, a disturbing possibility that, to the degree these young men denied full personhood to women, they didn’t have three-dimensional personalities.’

One might actually be able to say the same thing about I vitelloni, but then, one would be slightly off base I think. Both Fellini and Levinson spend as much time as possible (and necessary) with the much larger number of male characters as opposed to the women, but still deliver what I think are extremely deep portraits of all concerned.

I think it is all in the details with these two films.

Two films separated by almost 30 years that feel like they were separated at birth; two films that are now respectively 58 and 29 years old and have not dated one bit (in terms of filmmaking technique); two films vibrant, exciting and filled with the sort of detail and nuance one seldom sees in contemporary cinema; two films that speak directly to everyone on so many levels and are so universal that they have stood the test of time and indeed deserve to be called classics of cinema.

One is set in Rimini.

One is set in Baltimore.

It’s BECAUSE the characters are so rich that the stories can play out as brilliantly as they do – two different time periods of their actual production, two similar time periods in terms of where their respective stories unfold – and hit one on a very deep and personal level.

Both movies play like they could have been set – for ME – in Winnipeg.

Others, no doubt, feel like the films could have been set in their own hometown.

In 1939, Sherwood Anderson wrote ‘that man’s real life is lived out there in the imaginative world’ and he furthermore worried that writers were potentially betraying the world of imagination in the lives of all men – that good writing, GREAT writing needed to come from writers finding and then understanding the imagination of reality.

On that level, I believe both Fellini and Levinson have achieved this. They have tapped into reality and used imagination as a springboard towards that thing we all look for in both life and art: truth – and a universal truth, at that.

Two movies. Two directors. Two stories.

In the universal language that is cinema.

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‘There is only one great cause for remorse – to have failed to look after one’s own interests.’
– Italo Svevo, Confessions of Zeno

‘The young man’s mind was carried away by his growing passions for dreams… he closed his eyes and… stayed that way for a long time and when he aroused himself and again looked out… the town of Winesburg had disappeared and his life there had become but a background on which to paint the dreams of his manhood.’
– Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio

The first time I saw Barry Levinson’s Diner was Friday, October 15, 1982 – first-run in Winnipeg at a north-end suburban twin theatre called the Garden City Cinema, located in the shopping mall a few blocks away from my childhood home. I sat and watched this great picture, consumed (nay, reeling) with emotions, memories and feelings of a distant past, a not-so-distant past and a present that were all reflected in this portrait of male layabouts in a Baltimore of 1959 (my year of birth).

Here was a movie written and directed by someone 17 years my senior, (who himself was only 17 years old when his film was set) with a tale told in a city and time far from my own, and yet everything I witnessed on this first viewing reminded me of those three aforementioned periods of my life.

Where the shopping mall now stood, there used to be vast, open, flat prairies that reached as far north as the shores of Lake Winnipeg (where I and a future filmmaking partner both had summer cottages). The field itself was several hundred acres of an abandoned farm replete with tall grasses, well-worn monkey trails and a long-empty ramshackle house that we’d cycle out to as pre-teens on our banana-seat three-speeds and hang around in as if it were our own private clubhouse.

It wasn’t our own clubhouse, however.

By daring to transgress upon the party house of some early-20-something-want-to-be bikers, we were, at least to our minds, risking our safety within inches of taking our own lives. As terrified as we were of these party-hearty petty criminals on wheels, we also admired and respected them from afar.

These long-haired burly boys – mostly of Eastern European and/or Aboriginal extraction (or a mix of the two) – spent hours hanging in a corner booth at the local diner, the Thunderbird Restaurant (or, as everyone called it, ‘The T-Bird’).

And as we sat there, (not unlike the two generations patronizing Levinson’s diner – the early 20-something layabouts and the 40-something businessmen-cum-gangsters) we talked, and the young men talked.

And talked.

And talked.

The T-Bird was home to the Centennial Burger, a three-patty, four-bun monstrosity smothered in chilli sauce from bottom, through middle and finally, on top. The burger itself, respectfully named after the birth of Canadian Confederation, was served up in a cottage cheese container. You were given a knife, fork and spoon to shovel this meaty delight down your gullet.

However, if you ordered the ‘platter’, you got yourself a pile of French fries, which, like all good Canadian boys, you ordered with that special cherry on the ice-cream sundae. Concealed beneath your thick-cut fries was a cosy comforter of oil-slick-thick, brown-coloured savoury gravy. One of the pals I saw Diner with for my first screening had earlier spent the summer in his hometown of Buffalo, New York, and got his first helping of the picture there. He’d been living in Canada for a few years and had come, like any good landed immigrant in our fair Dominion, to appreciate the culinary glories of French fries adorned with globs of rich gravy.

This inspired him to mention to me that the screening of the film with an American audience elicited continued displays of displeasure from the Buffalonian movie-goers. The very notion of fries with gravy was so foreign and distasteful to them that a chorus of ‘eeewwwsss’ accompanied every appearance of this taste treat.

Eventually, in my own life, the distant past turned into the not-so-distant past, and I and my pals from the old neighbourhood found ourselves sitting in our own regular booth at the T-Bird – now adorned in Lumberjack plaid – and the bikers, now full-fledged members of the Los Bravos motorcycle gang, were draped in the colours of their outfit.

And as the bikers sat there, they talked.

And as we sat there, we talked.

And talked.

And talked.

When the not-so-distant past transformed to the present (at least in the context of 1982), I had left the Lumberjacks (which we called ourselves – modelled on the Monty Python sketch no less) well behind and now spent endless days in the company of a new group of young men.

There was the English professor from Buffalo, the English professor from Idaho, the boy wonder philosophy professor from the Maritimes, a gaggle of assorted young men (including myself) without ‘real’ jobs, and we sat at the Bar Italia on a tiny Corydon Street strip of Winnipeg’s Little Italy.

Though not one of us was even remotely Italian, we shared one thing with the groups of Italian men surrounding us. We sat around, often at the same table, and we talked.

And talked.

And talked.

And talked.

We called ourselves The Drones.

And indeed, drones we were.

Specifically, we belonged to the human order of social hymenoptera that would be classified as the Lasius niger of the male branch of the Formicidae – our bonds as strong as they were competitive – mating with as many females as were available, but often suffering rejection after a single coupling. Most importantly, and in spite of this, much like the characters in Levinson’s picture, ‘we’d always have the diner’.

One evening at the Bar Italia (our own Fells Point Diner), the formicine banter had been even more fast and furious than usual. It had reached such a crescendo that when the jabbering ceased, we could only do what came naturally at such junctures and sat in silence.

Spent from our discourse, the sound of needles dropping was shattered when our pal, the Boy Wonder Philosophy Professor, offered up the following:

‘You know, I really love you guys. Really. I do. I really, you know, love you.’

We regarded this with the solemnity of deep appreciation and understanding.

The Boy Wonder, waiting for just the right silent cue, continued:

‘Sometimes I wish we could just walk down the street holding hands. You know? Just, you know, holding hands.’

We all understood, and again our silence acknowledged this fact.

‘Even now,’ the Boy Wonder continued, ‘it would be so wonderful if we could just hold hands and give each other kisses when we wanted to.’

We looked at him.

‘It’s nothing sexual,’ he assured us. ‘It’s just an expression of our love for each other.’

We nodded in hearty approval until one of us, my Roommate, a former bank teller and future filmmaker, decided to chime in.

‘I love you too,’ he said, ‘but if we did hold hands and if we did kiss each other, we’d have to eventually go so much further.’

The Boy Wonder arched an eyebrow.

My Roommate clarified his position: ‘We’d eventually have to put our dirty cocks in each other’s mouths.’

As Kurt Vonnegut Jr. would say, ‘And so it goes’.

And so it goes. And so it went, that we found ourselves, every single one of us Drones, sitting together in the Garden City Cinema on October 15, 1982, and watching our life on celluloid.

I had come – we all had come – full circle.

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A heaping helping of Fellini’s I vitelloni at the urging of our American English professor friends soon followed this momentous screening of Diner. Home video was still in its infancy at this point so a copy (of this, or anything like it) was impossible to rent. No matter. The Drones delightedly assembled in the living room of Professor Idaho where he unleashed a version of the picture that originated with a rented 16mm public domain print (which had a marginal subtitled translation that was almost impossible to see when the white letters appeared over anything remotely white), then shot off the screen at the university on 3/4″ tape, and dubbed back onto VHS for our viewing pleasure.

The Drones saw many movies in this fashion. Seeing physically degraded versions of great films might – for some – seem a tad sacrilegious, but when great work broke through the barriers of such presentation, you knew you were watching greatness incarnate.

Make no mistake, either.

I vitelloni is not only a great picture, but it’s the grandfather of all layabout male loser pictures.

The haunting images beneath the opening titles finds the maestro’s camera perched from a God-like view upon the winding small town streets of Rimini as a group of men, arm in arm, appear from around a corner while we hear them singing a rousing song, which is quickly drowned out by Nino Rota’s score.

And what a score! It’s sentimental, emotional, jaunty, sad and malevolent – when it needs to be one of those things or a combination of them.

Once the titles finish, we’re perched in a seaside outdoor club where the town has gathered for the crowning of Miss Mermaid of 1953. A celebrity panel has been selected to choose the winner while a scarf-adorned tenor sings on stage.

Here Fellini introduces us to our main characters – in one of the cleanest ways imaginable. So simple and so effective is this introduction that it became an almost de rigueur approach to presenting characters in a film. The camera dollies and/or cuts to each of the vitelloni (translated from Italian to mean either young calves held to be fattened for slaughter and/or idle young men of the provinces) and the narrator introduces each one by name, delivers a brief evocative description and, of course, we get an image that seems to indelibly capture exactly who each one of them is. (Think back on Henry Hill’s introduction to all the gangsters in Scorsese’s Goodfellas – it’s almost a carbon copy of Fellini’s approach.)

And from this point on, we follow the gentle episodic tale of these men in their late 20s and early 30s who refuse to grow up.

There is Alberto (Alberto Sordi), the jovial, unemployed party animal who lives with his mother and sister Olga (Claude Farrel), the latter of whom is supporting the family, but also – much to the dismay of her mother and brother – carrying on with a married man. Leopoldo (Leopoldo Trieste) is the ‘intellectual’ of the bunch, a poet – also unemployed. Soulful Moraldo (Franco Interlenghi) is the youngest of the vitelloni and though unemployed, yearns to have a life beyond the small town. Riccardo (Riccardo Fellini, and yes, the maestro’s real-life brother) has a gorgeous tenor and lives for moments like the Miss Mermaid contest or weddings (when he can sing ‘Ave Maria’ to the delight of all). He is – wait for it, folks – unemployed. And finally, no group can be without a leader, and this duty rests upon the shoulders of the unemployed Fausto (Franco Fabrizi), the stylish, handsome and incurably horny ladies’ man. He’s impregnated Sandra (Eleonora Ruffo), Miss Mermaid of 1953, forced into a shotgun wedding and made to take a job in a religious goods store.

Barry Levinson’s Diner has an equally evocative introduction to its cast of layabout characters. Instead of a formal score, much of the movie is packed with 50s rock and roll and R&B hits – usually used as source. Like I vitelloni, the picture begins during a big social event, but instead of a trilling tenor on the soundtrack we hear the faint strains of ‘Shout’ as Modell (Paul Reiser) makes his way through the hallways and finally into the dance area of a community centre where a kick-ass cover band is doing a rousing interpretation of the great Isley Brothers hit while young couples dance up a storm.

We don’t get an immediate sense of who Modell is – other than the fact that he’s well dressed and seems rather affable. In 1982, most of us didn’t know Paul Reiser, but if one did (or indeed, does know), then we would have had some idea that he was going to be screamingly funny with his trademark deadpan nebbish delivery.

Reiser’s first lines are drowned under the music and all we can faintly hear is that he’s looking for a character called Boogie who, once revealed, is none other than a very young, handsome and stylishly coiffured Mickey Rourke. ‘Nuff said if you know who Mickey Rourke is, but at the time he was a relative unknown.

Boogie, once summoned by Modell, enters a room in the basement of the facility to find Fenwick, a preppily attired little rich boy drunkenly smashing windows. When Rourke asks Fenwick why he’s behaving so erratically, Fen responds with a goofy grin and a singsong lilt in his voice, ‘It’s a smile’.

Fenwick is also played by a relative unknown (at the time), Kevin Bacon, perfectly cast as the perpetual fuck-up with a heart of gold.

We’re briefly introduced to the other members of the Baltimore layabouts upstairs at the dance, but the manner in which Levinson chooses to do this gives us even more insight into the characters.

It’s seemingly in opposition to how Fellini does it in I vitelloni, but is in actuality very similar, the only real difference being that the sequence is rooted in a completely different culture.

I vitelloni offers up a group of layabouts in an old Italian town in the provinces where people mostly walk to get to and fro. Diner, on the other hand, is American as all get out. This is a Baltimore suburb where everybody has a humungous Detroit City gas pig to get from place to place and once we’re out of the dancehall, we get a fantastic cut to a wide shot of a veritable convoy of stylish vehicles making their way along a rural side road as we hear Jerry Lee Lewis belting out ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On’ through each car’s respective tinny radio speakers.

Levinson places his camera inside each of the cars and we get snippets of his crackling dialogue, which paints perfect bite-sized portraits of each character in a few lines.

Modell is in the passenger seat as Boogie drives. At this point, we’ve already been given a fair bit of information about Boogie from the dancehall scenes. Boogie’s a bit older than the rest, a real charmer, semi-street-wise and as such, looked upon as a sage. So here we get Boogie driving while Modell gives us a hint of the hilarity to come when Reiser delivers the hilarious mini-monologue in which he describes why ‘nuance’ is not as good a word as ‘gesture’. Rourke’s deadpan reaction to this is as priceless and funny as Reiser’s delivery.

When Levinson settles inside Shrevie’s (Daniel Stern) car, his wife Beth (Ellen Barkin) at his side, we know immediately that this is not the happiest of marriages. The couple is cordial on the surface, but there’s a huge distance between them. Beth discusses the upcoming marriage plans between Eddie (Steve Guttenberg, whom we have met very briefly at the dancehall) and his fiancée.

Beth expresses shock that Eddie is insisting that the bridesmaids wear blue and white in homage to the Baltimore Colts football team. Shrevie couldn’t care less. He jokes it’s a good thing Eddie didn’t insist upon black and gold, the colours of the Colts’ arch-rivals the Pittsburgh Steelers. Beth clearly fails to see the humour.

With this exchange Levinson deftly provides a huge piece of the puzzle to our film’s primary layabout Eddie – and let me stress, we have barely seen Eddie. To this point, he might as well be a background player. When we finally meet Eddie, we’re brilliantly primed to understand his impending nuptial trepidation and completely swallow the fact that he’s designed an extremely tough football quiz his fiancée must pass for the wedding to actually go through.

This, of course, becomes one of the central issues dividing the men and women of both Diner and I vitelloni – communication (or lack thereof) between the sexes. In both films, the men – in spite of occasional differences – have one another. They have common ground, which is, ultimately, conversation – communication.

It is just not so with the women, who in both films are relegated to the sidelines. In I vitelloni, when Fausto and Sandra return from their honeymoon in Rome, she keeps trying to get in a word edgewise about their experiences there. She is ignored by the other men, and it is Fausto who blusters in and carries the conversation about their exploits. In Diner, when Shrevie and Beth exit the movie house where they’ve just seen A Summer Place, Beth looks at the one-sheet displayed out front and tries to make conversation – pointing out that the writer of this Troy Donahue epic was the same person who wrote The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit. Shrevie looks longingly at his buddies. Beth keeps talking. Shrevie keeps not listening.

The ultimate explosion in this communication divide comes during the now-famous scene where Shrevie furiously chastises Beth for incorrectly filing his vinyl collection. He yells at her while hurling invectives. He berates and calls her stupid for putting James Brown under the ‘J’ section and even more viciously/stupidly displays total incredulity that she’s filed James Brown in the rock and roll category instead of R & B.

When Sandra in I vitelloni finds out that Fausto has been fired from his job for making an inappropriate pass at his boss’s wife, her face is, at first, frozen in a state of disbelief, and it is only when Fausto dons his pathetic please-let-me-explain hang-dog that actress Eleonora Ruffo transforms before our eyes and displays a hurt so deep, so utterly heartbreaking, that Fellini’s decision to have her bolt from the room at the precise moment she does comes as a relief to both the audience and, to a certain extent, to Fausto.

In Diner, when Beth asks Shrevie why he yells at her all the time, his response remains centred on HIS needs. Barkin, like Ruffo, transforms her face into such a pitiful expression of pain we almost want to punch him. Shrevie’s especially idiotic response is that his filing system represents his true passion – music. He further berates her for never asking him ‘what’s on the flipside’ of his collection of hit 45rpm vinyl.

Beth responds even more pointedly, asking Shrevie if he ever yells at his friends the way he yells at her. (OK, guys reading this – ‘fess up! How many of you have heard this question from a woman you love? Be honest now!)

His flustered comeback could almost be touching when he whines that music helps him remember important events in his life and that the first time he met Beth, Clarence Henry’s ‘Ain’t Got No Home’ was playing.

With both movies, Levinson and Fellini always make sure to temper the drama to relieve the pain somewhat and importantly, to reveal humanity in their characters and situations. They do this through humour, of course.

Shrevie, upon blasting out of the house after his argument with Beth, is found at the top of a great cut behind the wheel of his car singing along to ‘Ain’t Got No Home’ as Clarence Henry’s screeching falsetto (along with Daniel Stern’s hilarious mimicry of it) fills the soundtrack.

Fellini delivers one lollapalooza of laughs after another in the scenes following two genuinely harrowing dramatic sequences. Coming home after yet another infidelity, the stench of sex with another woman all over his fingers, Fausto puts on a happy face when he sees Sandra in bed with their new-born baby. When he reaches out to caress little Moraldino, Sandra defiantly refuses to let him do so. The next morning, she takes the baby and leaves Fausto.

Fellini outdoes himself here. Fausto, for the first time, is genuinely disgusted with himself – even more so as he begins a frantic, futile search for Sandra. With each scene in this sequence, Fellini charts an unforgettable, believable and thoroughly earned (in a dramatic context) transformation in Fausto’s character. Shot by shot, cut by cut, we not only see increasing fear, but a realization of how much he truly loves Sandra. And no offence intended, but actress Eleonora Ruffo is such a mind-numbingly gorgeous babe and the character she etches is so loveable that it’s yet another reminder of how in the movies, as in life, men are especially susceptible to not seeing what’s in front of them until they’re threatened with losing it.

For once, we experience genuine heartbreak associated with Fausto’s character. Granted, it also reflects upon and reminds us of Sandra’s heartbreak, but in so doing, it serves to make his fear and regret all the more harrowing.

Ah, but maestro Fellini won’t drag us through the muck forever. He follows this up with the now famous and much loved scene where Alberto gives the roadside workers an ‘up yours’ gesture and a big raspberry fart bleat as his vehicle passes them. He furthermore yells out what losers they are for actually working – triumphant in his ‘victory’ until the vehicle breaks down a few feet away from the burly hard-hats.

As if this wasn’t enough of a knee-slapper, Fellini follows this up with an even more hilarious scene where Fausto gets what’s coming to him. Suffice to say he receives something that’s both humiliatingly funny and completely, utterly deserved.

Both movies are infused with obvious autobiographical elements as well as the qualities of neo-realism. That said, both filmmakers move well beyond these fundamentals of great cinematic storytelling.

Fellini, for example, actually left Rimini at the age of 19 and was not so much a vitellone as a great admirer of the vitelloni in his hometown. In terms of the neo-realist qualities of both pictures, it is true they shot on actual locations – often with ‘real’ people as opposed to ‘just’ actors. Fellini, however, hardly shot in Rimini since Alberto Sordi determined the entire production schedule and locations were often chosen based upon what part of Italy Sordi was playing in on a live theatre tour. Most tellingly, Levinson shot in his hometown of Baltimore, but his beloved Fells Point Diner had to be recreated by a company that actually specialized in designing, building and providing period diners to entrepreneurs wishing to set up such businesses for themselves.

There is also no question that Fellini and Levinson were blessed with phenomenal ensemble actors who behave like they’ve been genuine friends for years. Levinson has a foot up in one aspect of the filmmaking process – at least to English-speaking viewers. Levinson’s dialogue teems with life and vibrancy. The diner conversations are so funny, so true, that most audiences (of both sexes – though I’d argue, especially men) are completely swept away with the words on the page and how brilliantly the actors capture them. As I don’t speak Italian, I can’t completely vouch for Fellini’s words on the page. While I vitelloni has a new and seemingly better subtitled translation, nuance in dialogue is harder to ascertain. Thankfully, his astounding actors always keep one’s eyes glued to the screen and the rhythms of the dialogue always feel spot on.

In a strange way, I do think Fellini (and his co-writers) delivers a script that manages to provide female characters that are more rounded than Levinson’s are. The beleaguered Sandra finally comes alive in ways that Beth can’t, given certain structural differences rooted in themes that are unique, I think, to the Italian, as opposed to the American, experience.

Given the matriarchal power of women in an Italian Catholic context, which subtly overtakes patriarchy in ways that the men are utterly incapable of dealing with, Sandra does indeed have a whole lot of ‘fight’ in her and it’s that fight that gives Fausto the biggest boner of his life.

Within the melting pot context of post-war America, women as objects, as trophies, as property, always seemed to supersede any fight they try to display (at least within a dramatic context in films from or about this period). On the eve of his wedding, Eddie is terrified he’s ‘gonna be missing out on a lotta things’, and this feeling is buoyed when one of his pals asserts, ‘that’s what marriage is all about’. The mother/whore syndrome seems even stronger within an American context than the Italian one.

After an especially joyous scene at a strip club, Eddie goes for coffee with one of the strippers. His heart-to-heart with her is perhaps one of the most poignant scenes in Diner. The stripper expresses how she longed for marriage, but that it just never seemed to work out. In spite of (or maybe because of) this, she’s the bearer of the most sage advice of all. She asks Eddie if he loves his wife-to-be. He replies that he’s ‘told’ her repeatedly how much he loves her. The stripper’s response caps everything perfectly. ‘Yeah,’ she says, ‘but did you ever show her how much you love her?’

Even still, Levinson continues with a clear choice he’s made from the beginning. We never see Eddie’s fiancée, and even in the haunting and extremely moving scene near the end of the movie where she tosses the bouquet of flowers, we do not see her face. Compared to the fellowship of men who never want to grow up, women, it seems, are almost always faceless.

It’s a brave and powerful move on Levinson’s part to make this dramatic choice.

Finally, where I vitelloni and Diner truly deliver the goods is in their final moments of happiness, joy and melancholy – none of which are falsely tacked on, but genuinely earned. Reconciliation and love play a huge role in both movies and both make one soar at the end in ways that only movies can.

Fellini does, perhaps, have a slight edge over Levinson here. The restless, sensitive Moraldo in I vitelloni is, almost from the start of the picture, a character who both loves his aimless life and buddies, but yearns for, and wonders if there could be, something more.

When Moraldo finally boards the train to leave everything behind, he looks out at his home as it passes by. What Fellini shows us from Moraldo’s perspective is a series of images, which in the context of I vitelloni both breaks our hearts and lifts us to the heavens all at once.

Moraldo, like the young man at the end of Sherwood Anderson’s great piece of 20th-century American literature, Winesburg, Ohio – like Fellini, like Levinson and yes, like the Drones and all such young men the world over – looks from the passing train as his hometown disappears.

What remains is all that possibly can remain.

‘His life there had become but a background on which to paint the dreams of his manhood.’

From the Dominion of Canada,
On the northernmost tip of the Bruce Peninsula,
I bid you a hearty:

‘Bon cinema!’

Greg Klymkiw

?

Colonial Report from the Dominion of Canada (above the 49th Parallel):

Autumn in the Dominion of Canada Yields Bounty from India:
A Conversation with Aamir Bashir, the director of Autumn – Part One: The Political Context of Kashmir, Personal Beginnings of Aamir Bashir, Movies and Mohawk Cigarettes

Taking a break from boozing, hunting, trapping, fishing and fighting with my manly buds in the bush up here on the northernmost tip of the Bruce Peninsula in the outer regions of the glorious Dominion of Canada, I sallied forth in early September to the normally cold, creepy and empty concrete wasteland of Hogtown to partake in the 2010 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival (bearing that truly unfortunate acronym TIFF) whereupon I saw 36 movies, hustled some new properties, caroused with old friends I only see on the festival circuit, filed numerous reviews, missed a party I wanted to attend because I had stupid electrical problems with my car, and in spite of this, still managed to attend more parties than I cared to (and not one on par with those held at the Tobermory Royal Canadian Legion Hall – all north country festivities driven by the inimitable thump-thump-thumpety-thumping of the illustrious DJ Scubalicious).

Inevitably though, one can only hack so much clean country living while staring at endless Blu-rays in the cottage (now newly equipped with a glorious off-grid solar electric system fulfilling my wife’s need for green living and my need for libertarianism), a red-blooded fella’ such as myself ultimately desires total immersion in cinema.

In spite of my ire over TIFF’s boneheaded decision not to show Monte Hellman’s new picture Road to Nowhere, which premiered in Venice (where it garnered a Lifetime Achievement Award for the fiercely independent auteur), but apparently wasn’t good enough to screen in the city of Smugly Fucklings, there were plenty of fine movies to see in the festival’s new stomping grounds in the financial district of the aforementioned cold, creepy and empty concrete wasteland of Hogtown.

In addition to the festival’s pilfering of south Toronto’s majestic-mega-multiplexes to unspool their wares, we were blessed with the arrival of the new festival headquarters known as Lightbox (please note I refuse to mention the corporate sponsor that demands its name preface the otherwise deliciously named venue). An architectural nightmare from the outside (fitting in ever so blandly with the rather ugly financial district), it sports a spectacular environment within, chockfull of several magnificent state-of-the-art auditoriums that will be devoted to cinema of the highest order all year round (in addition to TIFF itself).

* * *

One of the best movies I saw at TIFF was Autumn (Harud), an exquisite independent film from India by Aamir Bashir. The picture’s world premiere was in Toronto and will continue its festival run during The London Film Festival in the UK, Rotterdam and, no doubt, other fine venues of world cinema. This is a picture that totally caught me off guard – it is measured, delicate and replete with the sort of observational details that could have descended into ass-numbing pretension – especially in less assured hands (and frankly, even in those that should know better).

Set in the Kashmir province on the northernmost tip of India (I think I’ve got an obsession with northernmost tips), Autumn tells the tale of those who live amid violence, terrorism and poverty, with only a bleak future ahead of them. After an unsuccessful try at militancy following the disappearance of his brother, the film’s central character Rafiq (Shahnawaz Bhat) exists in a perpetual walking cat-nap, alternately loafing with his friends and working a dead-end job (morning newspaper delivery). Life for Rafiq moves slowly and is punctuated only by bursts of violence around him. Through the course of the film, scattered gunshots are heard, bombs go off and at one point, he and his buddies discover a man on the verge of dying with a gaping bullet wound to the belly (which eventually leads Rafiq to a slightly better job).

Though haunted by his brother’s disappearance, Rafiq wishes to move on. There is the overwhelming feeling of the inevitable – that his brother has been kidnapped by the security forces and/or killed, and certainly, Rafiq seems to accept this, though his parents refuse to believe their eldest son is dead. This cloud of non-acceptance hangs heavily over their home. At one point, Rafiq’s father Jusuf (Reza Naji) suffers a nervous breakdown – adding more strife and tragedy to a situation foreign to most of us in the West, but a matter of course in so many other parts of the world.

Films such as this have been extremely prevalent during the past 20 years – especially so in the new millennium, but seldom have these works transcended their subject matter the way Autumn does. (Good subject matter tends to blind the eyes of people who should know better. They will often extol a film’s virtues based solely on what the picture is about, ignoring the style and craft, which can frequently be run-of-the-mill at best.)

With Autumn, director Aamir Bashir unflinchingly presents a world where death, destruction and corruption are endless – an eternal plodding state of aimlessness and despair. Life is cheap and can end very quickly. Our filmmaker captures this eloquently through a camera-eye that seldom moves and reflects the day-to-day mundane activities of Rafiq as if the very act of living feels like an eternity – like death itself.

Shots will often hold longer than audiences might be used to, but the detail and observation within these shots is so exquisite that we experience a highly evocative portrait of a life lived merely for the sake of survival. This is NEVER boring – it is the stuff of great drama – etched with the kind of command one usually experiences in the work of such masters as Yasujiro Ozu, Satyajit Ray or Carl Dreyer, but almost never in the work of young, contemporary filmmakers.

Needless to say, when I reviewed the film for Daily Film Dose, I received plenty of responses from those who immediately wished to see the film, but the note I received that truly excited me was from Courtney Goldman, one of my filmmakers in the Editing Lab at ‘Uncle’ Norman Jewison’s Canadian Film Centre (where I continue to preside as the Senior Creative Consultant in the Film Department after stepping away from a 12-year-long stint as the Producer-in-Residence in order to continue making my own films, after an admittedly lengthy hiatus). Courtney had already seen Autumn, loved it and very much appreciated the review – always an extra special treat for me when it comes from one of my charges, but where I immediately got that extra special gooseflesh was when she mentioned her personal acquaintance with the filmmakers.

I knew immediately that Aamir Bashir was someone I wanted to meet and write more about. Given the film’s title, it was only appropriate we finally met on a crisp fall day with typically overcast Toronto skies (which are overcast with smog when clouds are not present).

Armed with Hogtown’s best coffee from the Cherry Bomb Café in the Parkdale district, I bundled Aamir and his partner Shanker Raman into my pathetic gas-efficient Toyota Yaris (oh how I miss my gas-piggish 1976 lime green Pontiac Laurentian) and drove to the leafy enclave of High Park.

We settled under a picnic canopy and started to talk.

Greg Klymkiw: One of the things I find about cinema over all the other art forms is that because technology, industry and commerce are so inextricably linked to the art, and because it’s essentially an art of the 20th century and now the 21st, the advancements, technologically and otherwise, have been so rapid there are certain vocabularies of cinematic storytelling that filmmakers have barely scratched the surface of and…

Aamir Bashir: …and moved on.

Yes, and that’s always driven me a little crazy because in actuality, it’s not the ‘moving on’ that’s the real problem, but the…

…the ‘leaving behind’.

Yes, the forgetting of certain techniques. It’s so unfortunate.

Exactly!

Your film, of course, has a very unique style by contemporary standards and yet it has a vocabulary that used to be fairly common that blends with current approaches and in so doing is something very new and unto itself. Now I’d like to start with your background. You were born in Kashmir?

I was born in Kashmir and I spent my early schooling life there and in summer 1990 left to study history at St Stephen’s College. That sort of coincided with the beginning of the insurgency in the late 1980s.

[After an ongoing series of border disputes and several rigged elections, an insurgency began to fight Indian rule. India accused Pakistan of instigating and training mujahideen, an Arabic word meaning strugglers or those strugglers who will do jihad which, in turn, refers to struggling with internal faith, struggling to uphold Muslim ideals and within the controversial context of interpretation, participating in Holy War. The results of the insurgency have been thousands of ‘disappearances’, deaths and ‘terrorist’ attacks.]

You obviously have a perspective on your world before and after the insurgency and I’m curious about what it was like growing up in the pre-insurgency years – as a kid in Kashmir. What were some of the highlights of your life there at that time?

It was pretty idyllic. Kashmir is a beautiful place, especially the access to nature – you just have to drive an hour in any direction to find it. My school was heavy into nature activities, so there were always summer camps and skiing in winter, swimming and regattas and lots of outdoor activities throughout the year. My uncle, who I dedicated the film to, was a journalist who owned his own daily newspaper called Aina (‘the Mirror’), which he edited and published. So from a very young age, I was exposed to the politics of the place. My uncle was only 45 years of age when he died, almost homeless. He was evicted from his house by the government on the pretext that his uncle who had migrated to Pakistan gave the house he was living in to him. They have a law that when someone evacuates their home, the state custodian takes it over.

[For a variety of reasons, Bashir’s late uncle, Shamim Ahmed Shamim, didn’t exactly endear himself to the state.]

He started his political career with the most powerful party in Kashmir at that time, which is still the ruling party today, the National Conference. My uncle was a protégé of Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah, who was also called Sher-e-Kashmir or the Lion of Kashmir. He was the Prime Minister of Kashmir, which was an autonomous region. After starting his career with the National Conference party, my uncle gradually rebelled and became an anti-establishment figure. His writing, his editorials – he was a lone voice against them.

[Shamin Ahmed Shamin, in a 1969 Aina personality profile, wrote the following about Sher-e-Kashmir: ‘Was Sheikh Abdullah a successful politician? There can be more than one opinion about it. Was Sheikh Abdullah a good man? This is a moot question. One thing beyond dispute is his patriotism. He loved Kashmir to distraction. He could sacrifice the world’s kingdoms for the sake of Kashmir. His entire life has been an expression of this love. It is for the sake of this unfathomable love for Kashmir that Kashmiris turn a blind eye to his faults and see only his virtues.’]

In that sense even at a young age I was politically aware and I do remember local governments falling due to the machinations of the Union government – coalitions wanting this or that and not getting it. Cinema played an important part in the insurgency. Lion of the Desert is considered as a catalyst for the insurgency. This was the only film in English that ran – four shows a day for months. Normally, English-language films would only play twice a day and the rest of the screen time was taken up with Bollywood titles. Lion of the Desert, though, proved so popular it took Kashmir by storm, and soon you started hearing audience members shouting out political slogans during the shows while it was playing.

[Lion of the Desert is the epic war film from the 80s starring Anthony Quinn and Oliver Reed that depicted the exploits of Arab Muslim leader Omar Mukhtar and his fierce battles waged during World War I when Libya was conquered by the Italians who, for their part, ruthlessly and brutally subjugated the peoples of Libya. Substantially financed by Libyan ruler/dictator Muammar Gaddafi, the picture was directed by Moustapha Akkad, best known as the producer who bankrolled John Carpenter’s Halloween and presided over all the sequels in the franchise. I recalled enjoying Lion of the Desert when I first saw it in the 80s. Watching it again recently, I have to admit the picture kicks major ass. Akkad directs with passion, the battle sequences in particular are phenomenal and more than make up for some of the clunky dialogue sequences. The picture even presents an Islamic point of view that is extremely convincing and heartfelt. The sad irony is that Akkad was killed in a Jordan hotel targeted by a suicide bomber.]

And what place did religion play in your childhood?

As far as religion is concerned, I grew up in a fairly liberal atmosphere at home. Also, the neighbourhood I grew up in was not only mixed but fairly cosmopolitan by small-town Kashmiri standards – comprising journalists and civil servants from other parts of India. The only time I remember my mother insisting that I offer my prayers was when my uncle [Shamin Ahmed Shamin], her brother, was dying of cancer. Those prayers – all prayers at home were in the Muslim tradition – went unanswered. Besides, going to a Christian missionary school, the oldest educational institution in Kashmir, and getting a daily dose of stories from the New Testament, made sure that I had a fairly religious upbringing, which of course was instantly negated by a Western, rationalist education. All in all, it was fairly confusing and more than enough to keep me away from religion.

Your uncle’s literary militancy aside, much of the pre-insurgency life seems, as you already said, so idyllic.

Kashmiris were for a long time not considered a volatile bunch of people. I remember whenever small troubles took place, one policeman with a bamboo stick used to control a crowd. From there to what it is now, it is quite a transformation. Even when the insurgency began, Kashmiris used to say that the Kashmiri militant is not really a revolutionary because all you needed to do was deliver one slap during interrogation and the Kashmiri militant would vomit everything – ‘I didn’t do anything!’ This is the joke within the Kashmiris. We were never hardcore.

One thing I’ve always been interested in is the notion of colonisation. Canada, of course, was a colony of Britain. In fact, because of the Commonwealth, we’re really still beholden to the Crown – so much so that I wanted, from the beginning, to call my film column for Electric Sheep, which is UK-based, ‘The Colonial Report from the Dominion of Canada’. I have benign childhood memories of the idea of living in a ‘Dominion’ and certainly as a child with Eastern European immigrant grandparents, I heard stories of Anglo-inflicted racism. Even my dad, who was born in Canada, would refer to Anglo-Canadians with a bit of a sneer as ‘The’ English. Not just English, but the English, so even he felt this dominance of Britain. And of course, all of this is incredibly benign given the utter horrors perpetrated upon Canada’s aboriginal peoples by British colonisation. What are your thoughts on colonisation?

Well, the idea of India only happened during the British time. It was never one single unit or one single nation – it was a bunch of trading zones brought together by the British, so in that sense, we owe the idea of India to the British. That’s why Gandhi, when he was fighting for independence, was trying to delay it for a while because, according to him, the people, this so-called nation, was not ready to be an independent nation. As for our experience, I went to Christian school founded by Cambridge priests, all our judicial and bureaucratic institutions are British, our railways were set up by the British, so it’s all there – it’s all there.

But what has happened now – at present – is that India itself is behaving like a colonial power with its own people. That is happening not just in Kashmir, but also in seven individual states in the northeast and across the Red Corridor, or the tribal belt of India, which goes from Central South India all the way up to Eastern India. Along this belt, tribal peoples live in mostly forest land and have been labelled ‘Maoists’. Of course, leftist guerrilla groups support them, and it’s probably an even bigger problem than Kashmir is right now, but it’s just that the media highlights or wants to club Kashmir with this ‘bad’ Islamic problem across the world.

Here, in this Red Corridor, it’s even more colonial than ideological because big industry along with the state wants to go in there and rape, pillage and plunder whatever they can – these beautiful forests that mining companies and others want to destroy are one thing, but the people living there will be displaced. The government brazenly wants them to change their lifestyles, they want to move them into concrete buildings and give them television sets. Local police officers and people who are in charge of security say, ‘All we need to do is give them TV sets’. They just become consumers themselves because they’re not dependent on the forest anymore.

So India is actually a colonial power itself and it scares me. It’s a scary place and of course, the west is backslapping India as an ’emerging power’, ‘an economic power’ and all that. The whole middle class has bought this idea that these tribal peoples, these ‘Maoists’, or Kashmir, are an obstruction to our progress – that if these people in Kashmir will just get jobs there will be no problem.

[At this point in our conversation, I was reminded of Bashir’s depiction in Autumn of all the disenfranchised young men in Kashmir – with no future, no motivation, dead-end jobs if jobs at all – a world where jihad seems like the only way to break free of colonial repression and domination and my mind shifts back to… cinema.]

When did you fall in love with movies? Was it gradual? Was there one epiphany or several?

In the early 1970s, in our neighbourhood there was one TV set – it was state-run television – and whether the movies were colour or black and white, the TV set itself was black and white, so that is how we would watch them. Everyone would descend upon this one household that had the TV on Sundays and watch this movie in the living room. Everybody’s there – a sea of slippers outside, everybody’s sitting down and there’s literally no room to walk, or step or stand. I must have been four or five years old at that time…

And what type of films were they?

Most of the films were Hindi. They were mushy and romantic and all the kids would cry, thinking about the ‘poor mother’, the ‘poor kid’ or whatever was happening on the screen. And that was one experience. That was my introduction to cinema. But when I was 14 or 15, that’s when the VCR came.

Ah-ha!

The VCR exposed me to a whole new world of movies. That’s when my parents, during one winter, went for a holiday, and I had to stay back home to prepare for an important exam coming up. They gave me a little bit of money for groceries and I remember spending almost all of that money on movies and not on Hindi films, but Hollywood and English-language movies from The Godfather to Ryan’s Daughter to Taxi Driver to British sex comedies – everything! I must have seen over 200 movies that one winter.

So the VCR was the explosion for you?

Definitely.

I’m just trying to place this in context since I’ve got at least 12 to 15 years on you and whenever I meet filmmakers from slightly earlier generations, it’s that whole Tarantino thing of watching movies on VHS. My own epiphanies with all of the same pictures happened on a big screen.

Oh yes, I did have the experience of seeing many movies on the big screen as well because my uncle had press passes and I got to see movies in a special press box separated from the rest of the audience. The movies in the theatres though were almost always Bollywood, so it was truly the VCR that I consider as being the most significant period for me – when my view of storytelling, how to tell a story, changed. Of course, there were a few English-language movies I would see on a big screen. I remember watching The Blue Lagoon. When I came out of the theatre, my physical education teacher from school was there and he was like, ‘What are you doing here?’ And yes, I guess I would occasionally sneak out in the evenings to see English movies on my own, but one movie I remember going to see on a big screen was Kramer vs Kramer, with my parents.

Of course, and the stuff you watched on VHS was probably a lot cooler than the English-language stuff you saw on a big screen.

Oh, definitely.

My dad used to take me to see a lot of cool movies on a big screen – many of which would have been considered inappropriate for children to see, and I can tell you my life certainly changed when he took me to see The Wild Bunch when I was about 9 years old. On a big screen no less!

That’s great!

I need to see Lion of the Desert again.

Actually, forget about Lion of the Desert. If any picture inspires and galvanises people in India, it’s Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi.

A big-screen picture for sure.

Yes, but one that plays every year on television and is screened reverently by everyone…

So, after that point at which you discovered a new way of telling stories and you went to St Stephen’s to study history, was there any plan at that time to get involved in movies?

Oh no, no plan to do that at all. In fact, there was no plan at all.

That sounds familiar – my entire early 20s were basically no plan – other than slacking and doing cool shit I enjoyed doing. Say, do you mind if I have a cigarette?

Please do. Would you mind if I tried one of yours?

Oh yes, my pleasure. I’m smoking these fabulous All-Natural Natives that I get from one of the Mohawk reservations in Buffalo. I even occasionally get them in Toronto from a Vietnamese mob source. I can also get Canadian brands manufactured by our Aboriginal brothers on Indian land up north. I prefer the American ones, though. They have fewer additives.

[By this point, we light up the full-flavour cigarettes and begin puffing away.]

The thing with the Mohawks is that they came to this point where they said, ‘Fuck it! Our people like to smoke, but the White Man is poisoning us, so let’s make our own cigarettes.’

[We both share hearty laughs over this and begin coughing.]

Of course, these will kill us too.

I don’t like the cigarettes from America, the Marlboros and all those. They don’t taste right to me.

What do you think of these?

Oh, very nice.

An old acquaintance of mine, Camelia Frieberg, the producer of Atom Egoyan’s really great early work, used to smoke Bidis. She got me hooked on them for a long time. Are those still popular?

Oh no…

Just with old hippies now?

Yeah, old leftist intellectuals.

[End of Part One]

Next month, we will continue the discussion with Aamir Bashir and focus on his acting career in Bollywood, his collaboration with co-producer, co-editor, co-writer and director of photography Shanker Raman – who will also join the conversation – and last, but not least, the development and making of Autumn and the unique pacing of the film.

Note: The above piece included some plot summary used in my original review published at Daily Film Dose during the Toronto International Film Festival.

To coincide with the film’s European Premiere at the London International Film Festival, I am now republishing my Daily Film Dose review in its entirety:

Autumn (2010) dir. Aamir Bashir
Starring: Shahnawaz Bhat, Reza Naji

The proper pacing of a movie can be a seemingly amorphous goal for many filmmakers. The whole problem, I think, is in the notion of whether something is too slow or not fast enough and what precisely defines and contributes to an audience detecting, then reacting to a picture when it lugubriously shuffles along. That said, and where the confusion can come in, is when even a break-neck speed in terms of cuts, movement and/or line delivery contributes immeasurably to creating a dragging effect. Audiences (and I’d argue most reviewers) aren’t always aware that it’s a supersonic speed that, more often than not, induces boredom and/or sore sphincters.

I have often tarred and feathered the cinematic output of Iran (and recently added Kyrgyzstan to my ass-numbing-by-country list), but of course, it has less to do with my desire to be obnoxious than with the fact that there ARE rules to the grammar of cinema – the biggest being that a filmmaker must ALWAYS be serving the story and its forward movement, and furthermore, serving the dramatic beats in a style and manner that hammer them home the best.

Autumn is a stunning new film from India that, for the most part, is snail-paced, but in spite of this, I cannot recall a single moment when my mind wandered or when my eye strayed to my iPhone to check email. My eyes were super-glued to the screen. I couldn’t take my precious asymmetrical globes off the picture if I tried. Part of this is director Aamir Bashir’s desire to tell his story in a manner in which it’s all important for us to experience the minute by minute, hour by hour, day in and day out, emptiness in the lives of Kashmir’s young men.

Living amid violence, terrorism and poverty, and with only a bleak future ahead of him, our central character Rafiq (Shahnawaz Bhat), after an unsuccessful try at militancy following the disappearance of his brother, exists in a perpetual walking cat-nap, alternately loafing with his friends and working a dead-end job (morning newspaper delivery). Life for Rafiq moves slowly and is punctuated only by bursts of violence around him. Through the course of the film, scattered gunshots are heard, bombs go off and at one point, he and his buddies find a man on the verge of dying with a gaping bullet wound to the belly (which eventually leads Rafiq to a slightly better job).

Though haunted by his brother’s disappearance, Rafiq wishes to move on. There is the overwhelming feeling of the inevitable – that his brother has been kidnapped by the security forces and/or killed, and certainly, Rafiq seems to accept this, but his parents refuse to believe their eldest son is dead. This cloud of non-acceptance hangs over their home like a heavy, dark cloud. At one point, Rafiq’s father Jusuf (Reza Naji) suffers a nervous breakdown – adding more strife and tragedy to a situation foreign to most of us in the West, but a matter of course in so many other parts of the world.

This is the story of a world where death, destruction and corruption are endless and by extension, while life is cheap and can end very quickly, while it goes on, it seems to be an endless, plodding state of aimlessness and despair.

Director Bashir captures this eloquently through a camera-eye that seldom moves and captures the day-to-day mundane activities of Rafiq – it’s as if the very act of living feels like an eternity – like death itself. Shots will often hold longer than audiences might be used to, but the detail and observation within these shots is so exquisite that we experience a highly evocative portrait of a life lived merely for the sake of survival. This is NEVER boring – it is the stuff of great drama – etched with the kind of command one usually experiences in the work of such masters as Yasujiro Ozu, Satyajit Ray or Carl Dreyer, but almost never in the work of young, contemporary filmmakers. Bashir is, by trade, an actor, but I sincerely hope he continues to find subject matter that inspires him as much as that on display in Autumn so he can give up his ‘day job’ and dazzle us again and again with his astounding command of cinematic storytelling.

This is a story that DEMANDS a measured pace. The picture is almost neorealist in extremis and there is little by way of overt lyricism – save for the few lyrical moments in the lives of the characters; most notably when Rafiq’s chum sings a haunting song as the young men laze about under the autumn sky and the lads encourage him to enter a television variety show for amateurs with talent and, most importantly, when Rafiq becomes drawn to taking photographs using his late brother’s camera. The pace is what PRECISELY allows for small moments like these to take on almost mythic proportions within the narrative itself.

Too many art and/or independent films almost annoyingly wear their slow pace like some badge of honour. This is why such pictures give this slower approach a bad name – their ‘artistry’ feels machine-tooled.

Not so with Autumn. This is one of the most stately and profoundly moving films I’ve seen in recent years – it is replete with compassion and humanity, using its exquisite, delicate pace to examine and remind us how precious every second of life on this earth is.

From the Dominion of Canada,
On the northernmost tip of the Bruce Peninsula,
I bid you a hearty:

‘Bon cinema!’

Greg Klymkiw

Colonial Report from the Dominion of Canada (above the 49th Parallel):

Frank Cole: A Life Remembered

For me, September is a month of melancholy and elation. It is that time of year when all Canadians in the film business turn their attention over to the Toronto International Film Festival. Veterans of the event spend 10 days alternating between darkened cinemas, with quick forays outside for much-needed cigarettes and scrounging as much free food and drink at endless parties. We stand in lobbies, trading thoughts on what we’ve just seen, but the most hardened wags are seldom listening to each other, instead looking for that brief lull in the conversation to jump in and spew out their own words of wisdom, which, of course, are equally consumed in one ear and out the other by everyone else in the pack, desperately waiting for that hallowed juncture to jump in and do the same. We’ll all have the same complaints – year in and year out: the festival is just a cheap junket for the studios, the festival is too big, the festival used to be friendlier, the general public are a bloody nuisance with their unwieldy backpacks slamming into us as we jump lines with an air of self-importance. And yet, we’re all still there: it’s easy to avoid the junket atmosphere if one is writing for publications that care little for puff pieces on Hollywood stars, the festival – as big as it is – still offers an opportunity to see just as many movies, if not more, friendliness is in the eye of the beholder and the general public are just ultimately a necessary evil we can all avoid by just seeing movies in the secret press and industry screenings, the festival within the festival. Things really don’t change. And personally, I cannot imagine being anywhere else at this time of year. I’ve been attending the Toronto Festival for 23 years now and while there are three other great festivals in Canada this time of year (the glorious, down-home laid-back Vancouver, the European-flavoured celebration of all cinema not American at Serge Losique’s World Festival in Montreal, and the utter cutting-edge madness of Montreal’s Nouveau Cinema, still led by the stylishly irascible Claude Chamberlan), it is Toronto that finally holds my happiest and saddest memories. The best moment was being at the Toronto Festival when a truly new wave of English-Canadian cinema was burgeoning, and my thoughts at this time always gravitate to Frank Cole and first experiencing his pure cinema, his pure obsessive originality and perhaps most importantly, his genius. Genius is hard to come by and certainly hard to describe, but you know it when you see it. And in 1988, I experienced genius in all its splendour at the Toronto Film Festival – in Frank Cole’s first feature film A Life. It’s those things you don’t forget that keep the bar high, and Frank set the bar to stratospheric heights.

* * *

Frank Cole, an Ottawa-based Canadian filmmaker, crossed the Sahara Desert on foot from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea. This feat of endurance earned him a permanent home in the Guinness Book of World Records. Cole’s final journey to the vast, inhospitable land led to a permanent resting place at the Michigan Cryonics Institute in Detroit. As per his last will and testament, Frank Cole’s remains were cryogenically preserved.

Cole believed death was a disease that needed to be cured and though he is no longer with us in a traditional sense (as in, alive), I sincerely hope and pray that wherever he is, he still believes it.

He was happy to admit to people that his sojourns across the infinite grains of sand terrified him to no end, and what eventually killed him was what he feared the most. His last challenge was to cross the Sahara again, from the Atlantic to the Red Sea and back again – a return journey by camel. He never made it. Not long after first setting out from Ber, he was severely beaten, robbed of all his possessions, tied to a desert shrub and left for dead by bandits.

Frank Cole left this world, leaving us to wonder what miracles of cinema he had yet to create, what tricks he had up his sleeve to cheat death. His legacy will be forever enshrined in the work he did create. He left us with two shorts (A Documentary and The Mountenays) and two features (A Life and Life without Death).

On the basis of these works, Frank Cole might well be one of Canada’s (and for that matter, all of cinema’s) most important filmmakers.

Upon the world premiere of A Life in 1988 at the Toronto International Film Festival, known more brashly in those halcyon days as ‘The Festival of Festivals’, I sensed from the opening few minutes that it was never going to let go. Nothing, and I mean nothing, could have prepared me for such an astounding, eye-popping and gut-churning experience. Its grip upon me held throughout the course of the festival, then for weeks, then months, then years afterwards. Now, as I write this re-assessment almost 25 years later, all I can think about is the opening paragraph of what is no doubt the most influential film review of Pauline Kael’s career. On October 28, 1972, the first few sentences of this legendary review declared the following:

‘Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris was presented for the first time on the closing night of the New York Film Festival, October 14, 1972: that date should become a landmark in movie history comparable to May 29, 1913 — the night Le Sacre du Printemps was first performed – in music history. There was no riot, and no one threw anything at the screen, but I think it’s fair to say that the audience was in a state of shock, because Last Tango in Paris has the same kind of hypnotic excitement as the Sacre, the same primitive force, and the same thrusting, jabbing eroticism.’

In retrospect, I only wish I had been able to muster something similar when first reviewing Cole’s picture in 1988. Then again, I was hardly Pauline Kael – not even a burgeoning one.

At the time, I was just shy of my 30th year on this planet and though I had been toiling in the trenches of film reviewing, journalism, exhibition and distribution, I was a relative newcomer to actually making movies, and as such was quite overwhelmed with the promise Canada’s relatively young industry held and how I might, in some small way, contemplate being a part of it.

This, more than anything, influenced my approach to reviewing Cole’s extraordinary picture since cool shit was starting to really happen in Canadian cinema. Reviewing A Life as a prairie-based correspondent for the now defunct, but by Canadian standards, legendary trade magazine Cinema Canada, I wanted to shout to the rooftops that Cole’s picture was leading the charge, but when I read the piece now, I think I fell rather short of that lofty goal. In fact, it was a rather unattainable one since I was right in the middle of what could only be contextualised in retrospect. It was, however, a good old college try.

By this point, French Canada had several new waves (and continues to do so) and on the English side, David Cronenberg, Donald Shebib, Don Owen, Phillip Borsos and Zale Dalen had made some striking inroads at earlier junctures, but nothing like our Québécois confrères. The fact of the matter is that French Canada was extremely proud and protectionist about its truly distinct society. English Canada was also distinct, but in much subtler ways – especially given the physical proximity to America and the common bond of the English language. In fairness, however, the differences weren’t that subtle. Those of us in the Dominion spoke the Queen’s English as opposed to the bastardised, drawling, mush-mouthed, inbred American English and even our more working-class vernacular had more in common with the clipped, pointed and musical English spoken by our aboriginal brothers (or, for that matter, the joual-tinged English of the Québécois of Montreal’s East End).

But 1988 felt different. Something decidedly new and exciting was happening in the few book-ending years leading up to and following the year Frank’s feature premiered. Even veteran David Cronenberg was on the cusp of a new phase with Dead Ringers.

In the early 90s, German filmmaker Alexander Bohr was so taken with what was beginning to happen in late-80s English Canadian cinema that he produced and directed a ZDF documentary about the phenomenon. It was titled, appropriately enough, Strangers in their Own Land. This, more than anything, typified much of the art and culture in the Dominion of Canada – especially among tail-end baby boomers and Gen-X-ers.

A rag-tag group of late-20-early-30-something whippersnappers, they had little use for the status quo (Canadian-in-name-only dramatic series and movies of the week aimed at international, but primarily American audiences) and absolutely no desire to be part of dour National Film Board of Canada documentaries about children with learning disabilities who had finally found teachers they could really relate to. Most definitely, they were not going to take the path demanded on the side of traditional Canadian government financiers who were looking for product that would develop an industrial base, which led to too many expensive, overblown, dull-as-dishwater glorified television movies masquerading as features.

Strangers in their own land, indeed!

At this time, English Canada yielded (or was yielding) work by the new, young iconoclasts; Patricia Rozema’s I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing, John Paizs’s Crime Wave, A Winter Tan by the five-director collective of Jackie Burroughs, Louise Clark, John Frizzell, John Walker and Aerlyn Weissman, Atom Egoyan’s Next of Kin and Family Viewing, Guy Maddin’s Tales from the Gimli Hospital, Bill McGillivray’s Life Classes, Peter Mettler’s Scissere and The Top of His Head, Anne Wheeler’s Loyalties, Bruno Lazaro Pacheco’s The Traveller, Brian Stockton and Gerald Saul’s Wheat Soup, Greg Hanec’s Downtime, Bruce McDonald’s Roadkill, and numerous cutting-edge short films like John Martins-Manteiga’s The Mario Lanza Story, Alan Zweig’s Stealing Images, Francis Damberger’s Road to Yorkton, Nik Sheehan’s No Sad Songs, Lorne Bailey’s The Milkman Cometh and Richard Kerr’s Last Days of Contrition.

And then there was Frank Cole.

Frank was definitely a stranger in his own land. The son of a Canadian diplomat, Frank spent many of his formative years in locales far more exotic than Ottawa. Brooding, handsome, intelligent and creative – he began with the still image and eventually, under the mentorship of Peter Wintonick (Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media), he turned to cinema.

The Dominion of Canada seems the perfect place for a stranger in one’s own land to thrive as an artist. The sheer physical vastness of the country has any number of regions that are as infinite, desolate and awe-inspiring as the desert that beckoned Frank Cole. With the majority of the Dominion’s population congregated within 100 kilometres of the border between Canada and the United States, the rest of the country is almost exclusively wilderness. The frozen tundra of the North West Territories, the barrenness of the Rock, the unending and oldest mountain range in the world within the Shield, the flat, Ocean-like properties of terra firma on the Prairies and the seemingly infinite glaciers and towering heights of the Rocky Mountains all might suggest that Frank didn’t necessarily need to leave Canada to find danger and desolation, but so goes the cliché: the grass is always greener on the other side.

That said, Canada has always inspired a ‘grass is always greener’ frame of mind in many of its best and brightest. Published in 1977, the late Charles Taylor’s brilliant book Six Journeys: A Canadian Pattern, presents a series of biographical essays on extraordinary Canadians who ‘followed a lonely path in search of a more sustaining vision’ than Canada could ever offer them, in spite of the fact that Canada’s ‘Calvinist rigidity’ might well have been the defining influence upon their work as artists and/or as political figures. Taylor’s book surely might well have considered Frank Cole as a seventh subject had it been revised at a later juncture.

Taylor’s introduction to his book declares the following: ‘More than most people, Canadians are prejudiced in favour of the ordinary – we honour all those pioneering virtues which impose restraint and engender mediocrity. Revolutions produce heroes: it is one reason why the Americans have had such an abundance of exemplary figures. But we lack a revolution, and our rebellions are notable mainly for their ineptitude.’ I cannot argue at all with Taylor’s assertion that the Dominion of Canada seems obsessed with the ordinary – this is often a reigning feature of so much of Canadian cinema, television and literature – but where I might part company with Taylor (ever so slightly and in a quietly Canadian manner) is in the notion of Canadian revolutions being infused with ‘ineptitude’. While this is true of many of them, a number of our country’s revolutions have been ‘quiet revolutions’ – not unlike the sweeping changes that occurred in French Canada between 1960 and 1968 that laid the groundwork for self-determination, cultural nationhood and separation. (Coincidentally, this quiet revolution and its aftermath were examined in detail and foreseen by one of Taylor’s subjects, the iconoclastic writer and first true champion for gay rights in Canada, Scott Symons.)

In the brief period leading up to and following the unleashing of Frank Cole’s A Life in 1988, it is safe to say that a quiet revolution was very much in full swing among a small band of cultural insurrectionists – the best and brightest of Canadian cinema. Movies in English Canada were changing and this was not lost upon critics, programmers and audiences outside of Canada (though much less so within). I feel strongly that Frank Cole was at the forefront with his quiet and quietly revolutionary A Life.

The promotional material generated for the launch of A Life during the Festival of Festivals in Toronto declared that Frank’s film charts ‘a man’s survival amidst death in a room and a desert.’ Both room and desert seem rather appropriate metaphors for Canada itself and certainly within the movie, both locations have the claustrophobic properties of a prison cell – one with literal walls, the other fortified by an all-seeing force of nature with the power to bestow both life and death upon those who dot its immense and virtually infinite landscape.

Survival, it would seem, is (and was, and perhaps in his afterlife, will always be) Cole’s primary concern – whether it be within physical man-made borders of walls or the ostensible limits of the immeasurable.

Early in the film Cole’s off-camera voice queries a jowly, liver-spotted old gentleman in a pointed yet strangely genial tone: ‘Are you afraid of dying, Grandpa?’ The old man seems perplexed, perhaps even slightly intimidated by the camera, and replies, quivering and moist-eyed, that he is indeed not fearful of death.

The camera truthfully captures its subject in an evocatively grainy monochrome and with such a tender, personal eye that the old man’s reaction tells us one thing verbally, but visually, his answer feels rather inconclusive (or perhaps, all too conclusive). In a similarly styled approach near the end of the film, Cole assaults us with the image of an old woman lying on her deathbed gasping for life (or, perhaps, death) while an off-screen voice pleads, ‘Live!’

These two gut-wrenching sequences, so strangely moving, yet disturbing and finally, irrefutably life-affirming, are bookends to a journey that is bleak, barren and sometimes harrowing.

The voyage proper begins after the black and white sequence with the old man. The monochrome yields to full colour, focusing primarily on the interior environment of the film’s central figure, a buff, poker-faced young man played by Cole himself. A series of oddly composed shots of inanimate objects greet us and in each one, they are shoved out of the camera eye; Cole appears to be ridding the Spartan room of what little it has in it.

We’re then battered with a group of strangely disconnected images; a bare, white wall as a nail is driven into it, a telephone call that never really comes and is never really answered, a lithe young woman with a handgun stuffed into her panties and, most disturbingly, a little girl who runs headlong into plate glass – at first in silence, then followed a few beats later with the sickening, almost excruciatingly painful sound of the glass smashing.

All images described above are cross-cut with recurring shots of Cole chiselling, hammering, measuring and sanding. The sound of his labour becomes increasingly grating. Adding to our ever-heightening disorientation and anxiety is the fact that we’re never sure what he’s building and that he’ll never leave this barren interior. In terms of pace, this is expertly timed. We feel like this self-imposed banishment will last for the rest of the movie. It’s uncannily and precisely at this moment when Cole shifts gears – not necessarily in terms of pace, but in locale. We move from one tomb to yet another.

The first exterior shots are simple optical manipulations as a series of sun-dappled head-and-shoulder freeze frames of Cole place him directly in front of several backgrounds that flicker behind. It’s as if the camera itself is sealing him in a crypt, though Cole’s off-screen narration explains it (or, if you will, not at all) when he proclaims, ‘I did this to feel alive’.

Perhaps the very process of making the film is what keeps the on-camera Cole from pulling the trigger of the same gun that was previously stuffed into the woman’s panties and is used later by her as she writhes on the floor and then shoots herself in the eye – a steely phallus delivering death through the one orifice that allows for the only on-camera persona to witness and/or participate in the proceedings.

After putting himself through the most rigorous paces in the interior sequences, Cole transplants himself into the Sahara, risking his life and cheating death to provide a series of stunning exterior images to contrast and parallel the claustrophobia of the room. In the room, for example, we see a snake slithering helplessly and aimlessly across the hardwood floors, while in the desert we see Cole crawling desperately across grains of sand. In the room, we hear the sound of wooden matches being repeatedly struck and extinguished, tossed onto the hardwood floor as the snake slithers over them, while in the desert, a jeep is doused with gasoline and torched as the camera slowly pulls away until the jeep becomes a flickering speck on the infinite horizon of the Sahara.

Cole’s vision is daring, psychologically complex, thematically layered and created by someone with a clear command of the filmmaking process and endowed with a supreme form of artistry. Given the stately pace, we have the option to think about what we see as we see it, or leave those thoughts until after viewing the film and instead allow a series of terrifying, lonely and often beautiful images to wash over us and to open up emotionally, viscerally to a cinematic world that cries for some sense of understanding and passion, not merely for the subject, but for the world, for all of us.

A Life is particularly revelatory in the sense that death, as a final act on this earth, is one of solitude, where we are truly alone with our body and spirit, and when the body goes, so does the spirit – alone into an infinite void.

The film’s emotional core comes from Cole’s seeming sadness and desperation, yet one oddly leaves this experience with a sense of elation, of fulfilment and with the feeling that perhaps there is A LIFE beyond the mere drudgery and suffering and pure survival that Cole so evocatively and painfully explores.
This is a film of lasting value and Cole must be forever remembered as an artist of uncompromising bravery and vision.

His small core of collaborators must also be commended – Jean-Yves Dion’s desert photography, Carlos Ferrand’s interior work and Vincent Saulnier’s stunning sound design are of a level and quality so far beyond the mediocrity of most films made in Canada – far beyond anything seen when the film was made, and now, nearly a quarter century later, that fact has not changed.

These days, it’s very difficult to see Frank’s films. To launch the recent publication of Life without Death: The Cinema of Frank Cole, an exquisite book from the Canadian Film Institute in Ottawa edited by Mike Hoolbloom and Tom McSorley, there have been a handful of screenings of A Life (in addition to full retrospectives at film festivals in Rotterdam, Wroclaw and Jihlava). The book itself includes a DVD copy of Korbett Matthews’s fine documentary film, The Man Who Crossed the Sahara and numerous writings on Frank’s work from a myriad of writers including John Greyson, Peter Mettler, Mike Cartmell, Geoff Pevere and my own original review of A Life published in 1988 in Cinema Canada magazine – a review that I have here revised extensively based on both my initial memories and a recent screening of the work.

Time always declares the final verdict on such matters, but it is safe to say enough time has passed to declare this film a masterpiece. In fact, A Life demands the sort of enshrinement that few Canadian films genuinely deserve. It has its own life. It continues to pulse, breathe, and survive.

Its spirit lives on.

Forever.

From the Dominion of Canada,
On the northernmost tip of the Bruce Peninsula,
I bid you a hearty:

‘Bon cinema!’

Greg Klymkiw