By three methods we may learn wisdom:
First, by reflection, which is the noblest;
second, by imitation, which is the easiest;
and third, by experience, which is the bitterest.
– Confucius
That’s how the film Up The Yangtze, by writer/director Yung Chang, starts. But how did Yung himself get started? The early biography of this gifted young filmmaker suggests not all experience must be so bitter.
Yung Chang was born in Oshawa, Ontario, in 1977, grew up in the Whitby area and later attended boarding school in Toronto. He went to Concordia University in Montreal to study film, graduated in 1999 and made his first short documentary, Earth to Mouth, in 2002. He made another short documentary, The Fish Market, the same year. From 2002 to 2004, Yung took a break from filmmaking and went to New York to study the Meisner Technique, a type of method acting, for a year and a half. Up The Yangtze is his first feature-length documentary. Since its completion, the film has garnered the Best Canadian Documentary Award at the Vancouver International Film Festival; has been honoured by the Toronto International Film Festival Group as one of Canada’s Top 10 films of 2007; was a finalist for the Joris Ivens Award at the International Documentary Filmfestival, Amsterdam, and is in competition at the Sundance Film Festival in January, 2008.
According to Confucius, wisdom can be learned by experience, although it might be bitter. However, going through a bitter experience does not always bring wisdom, especially if an individual or a government refuses to look honestly at the experience. With Up The Yangtze, Yung exposes to us the bitter reality behind the “glorious” Three Gorges Dam in China, in hopes that someone might glean wisdom from an experience that has been bitter, even devastating, for hundreds of thousands of Chinese citizens.
Up The Yangtze was conceived in 2002, when Yung Chang, a first-generation
Chinese-Canadian, went on a “Farewell Cruise” on the Yangtze
River with his family, to get to know the China that his grandfather
told him about. Instead, he found a China that is virtually unknown to
his ancestors, a country in which the landscape of the past has undergone
drastic change. Farewell cruises are trips that offer tourists a chance
to visit the scenic Yangtze banks and area before they are flooded to
make room for the Three Gorges Dam. This enormous dam, one of the largest
engineering projects in modern history, is supposed to provide power
generation, water control and navigation advantages, although its tangible
benefits are still being debated. What has preceded these possible outcomes
is the forced re-location of almost two million residents, mostly farmers,
who have had to move from low-lying farmland to dry highland, where farming
is not a reliable way to make a living. Thus, a change of skills and
employment are now called for, on top of resettlement disputes, which,
due to corrupt housing officials, have left tens of thousands homeless.
Yung wanted to document the experiences of residents whose
livelihood has been affected by the dam. Unlike Jennifer Baichwal, whose
Manufactured Landscapes focuses on the environments around the dam, he
wanted to do it through human stories. He spent about three years getting
the finances in place before principal shooting started in 2006. Understanding
that a documentary can only be as interesting as the subjects on screen,
he began by shooting six subjects from different social strata: a farmer,
a factory worker, an antique dealer, a government official, and Yu Shui
and Chen Bo Yu, the two cruise ship workers who ended up as the protagonists
in the film.
Both Yu Shui and Chen Bo Yu, or Cindy and Jerry as they were renamed on the ship, were recruited in March, 2006, by the Victoria Cruise Line. The new recruits went through training before they embarked on the ship in August, 2006, and Yung took advantage of this gap to establish rapport with his subjects.
The director began by spending an entire month with the Yu family, subsistence farmers who rely heavily on the wet soil to grow their daily food. The name “Yu Shui”, means “Bountiful water” in Chinese, a propitious name since water is critical to the livelihood of farmers. Yu is the eldest of three kids and was sixteen at the time she met Yung. She wanted to attend high school but her family couldn’t afford it. Her parents needed her to work, at least for a while, to save some money, as they all knew that they would have to move up to the dry highland pretty soon, with the water level rising around their house – really a hut – everyday. Growing their own food would be impossible in their new living environment. Being a rural girl, Yu found the glamorous ship and sophisticated working environment alienating and smothering. She also spoke very little English and was forced to toil in order to keep her job working in the galley.
Chen Bo Yu, the other protagonist, comes from the middle class. Nineteen years old at the time of the shoot, he is smart, handsome and speaks conversational English. He seemed to be cut out for this job of serving foreigners until he found out that in the service business, he really did have to “serve” others, and that was something that he had never had to do before, being an only child. Like most other only sons in other single-child families – common due to the Chinese government’s one-child policy – “Jerry” had always things had always been presented to him on a silver platter, and he never had to negotiate to get what he wanted. His manager found him arrogant, conceited, self-centred and wasn’t impressed by his work performance.
The third protagonist, who was also going through a life-changing experience with the progression of the film, is hidden behind the lens. It is Yung himself. He expresses his thoughts along the way as we journey through the story together. Other times, he uses other peoples’ words to express the absurd irony he perceives; for example, in a training session at an English boot camp, where young Chinese recruits for the cruise ships, with their limited exposure to the western world, are taught about inappropriate questions or comments on international politics. These crash courses are insanely funny for the Western audience, but might be appropriate for some curious Chinese who thought they had some knowledge of international affairs. (A nice Canadian twist: the recruits are instructed, when dealing with us Canadian tourists, not to bring up the topic of… yes, Quebec separatism!)
Being a Canadian-born Chinese, it was hard for Yung to witness hardships befalling fellow Chinese like the Yu family. A defining moment in both the production and the film came when he saw the Yu family hauling their furniture uphill from their flooded house to dry land, and he became tongue-tied and silent. “I was about to stop the shoot and help them with the move,” Yung said, “but then I realized what I was about to capture might generate more help as more people experienced what I felt.” Through bitter experience, wisdom was learnt. Confucius was right again.
The whole film wisely juxtaposes irony with stone-cold facts and human warmth. Nothing ended up as planned in the beginning. One of these unplanned results is the prolonged survival of the “Farewell Cruises”, which were supposed to be the last good-bye to the river and neighbouring landscape. What they have actually become is a permanent tourist attraction as the river is now widened and there is more landscape to be discovered with the newly raised water level. These cruise lines are now promoting themselves as an exploration tour to “rediscover the uncovered beauty of the area”! Maybe the outcome of the Three Gorges Dam will not be the way the government officials hoped for either, but we will have to wait and see.
I can’t help but wonder what is happening to Cindy and Jerry now, as I seem to have become friends with them through watching the film. Yung says that Jerry is still in the cruise ship business, with another cruise line. He is a bit older and wiser now, and is doing better than before. Cindy went on to work on the ship for an entire year, and then finally quit to go to high school. Yung has helped her financially with her tuition for three years. Yung has also set up a fund-raising website for her family through GIVE MEANING, to help the Yu family with a five-year health plan, as Cindy’s father is having eye problems and is unable to work.
Some documentary filmmakers have been criticized for capturing the story and running, leaving their subjects to their own devices. Canadians should be proud that we not only have, in Up the Yangtze, an excellent documentary and one of the best films of 2007, but also the emergence of a humanitarian. Bitter experience did bring wisdom into the heart of a talented and dedicated young filmmaker. Confucius is always right. Now it is up to the power-hungry and greedy government officials to open their ears to his words, and to ennoble themselves by reflecting on how the Dam has affected the lives of the Chinese people.
Starting just as the buzzing Hollywood market at Sundance ends, The International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) sits in a rather unique position on the world festival circuit – two weeks before the mighty Berlinale, three months before king Cannes. Although Dutch programmers have the privileges of discovering first-time and sophomore filmmakers for their VPRO-sponsored Tiger Award competition, mounting filmmaker retrospectives (this year focused on fourth-generation Chinese directors), and indulging a strong passion for experimental cinema, installations and shorts, the primary circuit options available to them are not quite as fresh to the underground cinema world as they were at their Cannes, Venice or Toronto premieres between six and nine months ago. Juno and I’m Not There still debut here now, as well as others yet to receive theatrical distribution in North America and Europe: Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park; Carlos Reygadas’ Stellen Licht; Sokurov’s Alexandra.
An hour-long train ride south of Amsterdam, Rotterdam has long been Europe’s largest port, with a population of 600,000 and weather reminiscent of a Vancouver winter. Best known internationally as a catalyst for modern architectural developments (largely owing to the near complete flattening of Rotterdam’s centre in World War II), the city hosting its 37th edition of the IFFR from January 23 to February 3 draws all manner of emerging and influential filmmakers, producers, programmers and critics from around the world. Walking among them, I soon discover Rotterdam’s peripheral charms: it has incredible frites (or, rather, mayonnaise), it still allows smoking indoors, and it provides peacefully barren late night streets.
My first screening is one of my best in Rotterdam, and also one of those original Cannes premieres from 2007: the Prix Jean Vigo-winning La France (Serge Bozon). A war movie about a young woman (Sylvie Testud) who chases her lost beaux by pretending to be a man and joining a wandering group of French troops during World War I sounds pretty straightforward. But the twist – and this is a massive spoiler alert – is worth the viewing: every so often the henchmen casually morph into a literal band of brothers, playing melancholic ’60s and ’70s Euro-pop on instruments manufactured as they would have been on the field of battle. Testud gives a devoutly forlorn performance, but it’s the haunted blue-uniformed soldiers who steal the show amidst a gorgeous French countryside.
After La France set the bar so high, my next few days of screenings quickly became a blur of darkened rooms, nap-inducing narratives, and Belgian beer-inspired ruminations on the state of contemporary cinema. Pen-ek Ratanaruang killed my buzz at a previous festival with Invisible Waves, a droney mystery of dreamy non-connections, and did it again here with Ploy. Scenes of dream deaths, selfish accusations and personal attacks permeate a hotel room rented by a couple just returned to Hong Kong. I think I understand enough of what Ratanaruang is trying to do with his oblique reality/dream portraits of insecurity and atmospheric danger – the same way I think I more or less get what David Lynch does – but would it kill him to move things along with more energy than a narcoleptic slug?
Festivals in foreign-language locales often mean I end up in at least one screening with subtitles in a language I don’t fully comprehend. At Montreal’s Festival du Nouveau Cinema this year it was Christian Pui’s Cannes-winning 4 months, 3 weeks, 2 days – in Romanian with French subtitles – and in Rotterdam I sat in the top row of a packed Dutch audience for Swedish master Roy Andersson’s epic, joyful You, the Living – subtitled in Dutch. In these cases I find realist films that favour visual dramatic development are the most easily accessible (both the Dardennes Le Fils and N.B. Ceylan’s Distant previously passed this non-verbal test with flying colours). Constituting a strange, highly visual surrealist language, Andersson’s impressive frame designs reminded me of the power of pure mise-en-scène – specifically the great depth of field he produces, largely in a studio setting. The crowd was hanging on each setup, too, so I’m guessing Andersson doesn’t have to worry about the festival’s audience ranking system that allows viewers to vote on public screenings on a scale of 1-5 – including choices for both “bad” and “very bad.” Gatherings for cinematic chats and industry deals take place all day and night in de Doelen, an airy and comfortable convention centre a block from the central train station. Some friends from Montreal are here, as is Stéphane Lafleur, the director of Continental (Un Film Sans Fusil), one of the best films to emerge from Canada in 2007. Everyone here seems to be pulling double duty, watching and pitching films, even admitting they just really want to act – which is all respectable considering the general worldwide box-office climate, and the decreasing appetite for art-house fare in particular.
Another day, another bad film to start it off. Two, in fact: an obnoxiously self-important short film from the point of view of two kids in the middle of an ambiguous domestic dispute in a Texan backyard; and SkyJacker, a retro ’70s tale of plane hostage-taking between Seattle and Tacoma, featuring vintage attire and blippy beats. Shot on a prosumer grade camcorder for just over US$20,000, it’s one of those films more inspiring for its production details than the final content. While the visuals do maintain a unique feeling of uneasiness, the stilted and square framings (it takes place in a plane, after all), as well as a predictable second act powered by tension over whether the skyjacker may actually push the button or be in love, grows more tedious thanks to a focus on close-ups, smoking, and non-existent romantic tension. While at first quirky and amusing, the retro score and weak stewardess’ voiceover become more awkwardly painful the more they’re used. At only 70 mins (including a 10 min nap in the middle) it unfortunately feels like one of the longer films at the fest.
In search of some energy after a middling few days of mediocre narratives, it’s time for a late night cut of Argentine beef at Los Toros, and the audible assault of legendary grunge originators The Melvins, jamming along to short films by experimental American auteur (and Rotterdam artist in residence) Cameron Jamie. Screened at the fabulous Luxor cinema, the first short, Kranky Klaus, turns out to be the best of Jamie’s three on the evening. The silent (save the Melvins’ shredding) film showcases the bizarre Austrian Krampus festival (prior to Christmas), in which men dress up as eight-foot oxen and assault groups of children and adults – in restaurants, outside – for being bad all year. St. Nicolas, also in their company, then comes along and assures everyone things will be peachy.
By now the festival is through its first weekend, and by mid-week many new friends have left, particularly as CineMart comes to a close. But with the Melvins’ noise assault still ringing in my ears, I’ve regained my cinematic joie de vivre for the following day. I figure I can’t really go wrong with LYNCH, a biography on David Lynch by someone called “blackANDwhite” (quite possibly Lynch himself). Though nominally a high-quality DVD extra, the doc reminds me of the kind of films (by the kind of directors) I’m looking for in cinema. Following Lynch around before and during the production of his latest dream opus, Inland Empire, the film manages to capture the unbridled enthusiasm and confidence of one of cinema’s most significant contemporary directors. With unprecedented access, LYNCH catches the maestro of dark dreams working out ideas and courting actors inside his office, at work dismantling a set, telling tall tales of a rough start to adulthood in Philadelphia, and constantly searching for the narrative links he’s confident are buried in his subconscious. Lynch is an unassailing perfectionist with the knowledge to trust his gut – otherwise known as his daily transcendental meditation kick of the past 32 years – and LYNCH is as much a bio-pic as it is a slice of life; a glance into the ceaselessly developing mind of a man who can compare himself to Einstein on set without skipping a beat.
Cameron Jamie’s overtly aggressive tendencies of the other night offer a sobering contrast with the studious and reflective work of James Benning, an American pioneer of landscape motion picture photography. Describing a Benning film is often as easy as taking the title at face value – I’ve previously seen his collections 10 Skies and 13 Lakes. Casting a Glance, his new film at Rotterdam, is the 80 min compilation of footage from 16 different trips Benning made to Robert Smithson’s 1500 foot-long landscape installation “The Spiral Jetty” in Great Salt Lake, Utah. Using only the sound of the water and the surrounding land (a rare nearby explosion; a plane flying overhead), Benning masterfully frames the jetty from a wide range of angles through different seasons, mostly eschewing close-up details in favour of a depth of field that remarkably contextulalizes this 37-year-old piece of hardened land. Benning is a bit like yoga for the visual palette, helping me cleanse my overdosed-on-narrative-cinema mind.
The cinematic sky continued to open up for me, and my final two days provided my favourite screenings of the fest. Fim da linha (The End of the Line, Gustavo Steinberg), a modern tale of overlapping lives in São Paulo, starta with an Indian tribal chief demanding payment in return for the rain dance his people currently perform for free. By his logic, without water the city’s energy grid would collapse, and until the donations start rolling in they’ll continue to hold out. At the same time, back in the city, the news reporter on their case is reprimanded by his wife for harbouring grander documentary ambitions – ie. for not making enough money. The tale is soon passed between multiple characters via a collection of flowing money and lottery tickets, offering a subtle satire on money’s continual fluidity as a conduit for power. By the end, a perfectly complimentary tune by Spoon (“My Mathematical Mind”) accompanies glorious pans across flowing hydro-electric damns and power lines; the strike has been averted, and the tribe is now forced to move their new donation collection tables under a make-shift rain-roof.
Late that night I join a couple friends for JunkFilms, the collected short shockumentaries of Tsurisaki Kiyotaka. Once a porno director, Kiyotaka has since become known for his photographs of the freshly dead, whether through battle or accident. These video images immediately assault our senses: brutal roadway deaths, urban stabbings. Following ambulances to the scene of an accident, Kyotaka hovers over crime scenes and their relatively pedestrian clean-up. Catching a glance of a dead man’s split-open face, including in close-up, is not exactly captivating – or even possible to watch for very long. Eventually the reflections somehow transcend preconceptions of fabricated gore, even if they get no easier to watch: a vegetarian festival in Phuket celebrates extreme facial piercings and self-torture (think the handle of a broad sword through a cheek, supported by friends nearby; or a man shaving his tongue); the public digging up of rather fresh graves and communal removal and washing of remaining flesh and bones in Cambodia. Walking outside with my friends afterwards, we’re left without words to describe this intense visual experience; wandering about, we wonder how we’ve become so sanitized to view cinematic reflections of the dead – and in particular their flesh and bones – as something not real. The split-open face, at first cinematic instinct, was just a Cronenberg-inspired special effect, right? Moving on with the night, if not away from JunkFilms’ haunting images, we hit up the closing CineMart party at a flashy mansion with free drinks and an awful DJ (who doesn’t know he’s playing bad music). Life plus 3-4 films a day for a week now officially equals a series of never-ending juxtapositions.
What I’ve learned over the past few years of travel to festivals as exotic as Cannes, Austin (SXSW), and Rotterdam, as well as domestic offerings in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, and Whistler, is that like frites, cinema has that trick of making me want to eat just one more – to see if the next one could somehow be better. And so on my final day in Rotterdam I’ve become a bit nostalgic for my first of over 20 films from a week ago, and am wondering if I should stay longer to see even more the next day. With the reality of a weekend in Paris my other option, I decide two films tonight will have to be my wrap on the festival.
Starring an original Degrassi member as the singer of the band Psycho Key, Harvest is a pseudo-Canadian film (not because it stars Viggo and is set in London) that is appreciatively pointed out to me by a handwritten note in my press box from director Nicolas Jolliet. I can’t tell you how excited I am to catch the film with the most buzz at the festival. Unfortunately, though enjoyable in awkwardly humorous flashes, over half of the film is comprised of Jolliet’s reggae-rock band performing songs written for/about the film, often with footage from the film projected live, behind them. What began as a desire to write music for film – as Jolliet noted in the Q&A – turns into a film starring its drummer as a ganja grower in the mountains of St. Lucia, in need of the right connections to sell his stash before American helicopters chase him down to destroy it. The most curious selection amongst all the programs I see in Rotterdam, mostly for its starkly amateur production and narrative elements, Harvest at least refreshes my confidence to keep working on my own ideas.
Leave it to Brazil to save the night again. My final film, Deserto feliz (Happy Desert), caught at a late-night press screening for a mere handful of journalists, turns out to be a real grower and ultimately one of the best I see at the fest. Teenage Jessica escapes her ramshackle life with her mother and abusive step-father to work the streets of the coastal town of Recife, starting a new life while sharing an apartment with fellow ladies of the night. Despite her more experienced friends’ warnings, dreams of marrying a rich foreigner are always on Jessica and her new crew’s minds, and before long a group of German tourists enter the town in search of a cacophony of good times: drugs, and the girls. Sooner than she could have imagined, Jessica is headed back to Berlin with the fun and engaging Mark, for, at first, more drugs and sex. Calmer moments in Mark’s luxurious loft and in the city paint an isolating portrait of Jessica in a new land, just as climatic changes in her attire (it’s winter in Germany) reflect Jessica’s growing uneasiness at escaping poverty so efficiently. Her new experiences are charmingly rendered, most simply through scenes of her walking alone in a German park and zoo, seeing snow for the first time. By the time Jessica tries to learn German, making an effort to integrate into a new society and culture, Mark has ironically already lost hope for the genuine communication of a relationship, and, with a mild show of remorse, is ready to divorce himself from her situation. Filmmaker Paulo Caldas’ mostly realist style is nicely complimented by the odd visual experiment, including a camera placed on the back of Mark’s head as he exuberantly spins Jessica around first in Recife, then again back in Berlin. Deserto feliz is haunting and challenging for its open ending, amongst the other questions it raises about the delicate sacrifice of power necessary for movement between different social spheres.
After a late night tea with a friend near the end of my stay, I convince myself that I know Rotterdam well, and promptly get completely lost on my walk home. (I do this often in foreign locales, and have yet to be worse for wear.) Rotterdam, like the cinema it places a focus upon, feels like a city forever under construction – always looking to build from a palette of tangentially expanding designs. Hopefully the programmers at the festival continue to echo Rotterdam’s ceaseless development by constructing alternative screening programs, whatever the available materials may be. If not, there’s always the frites.
Long live the new talkies; the new talkies are dead. Essentially a re-branding of the recently buzzing “mumblecore” movement – films with people chatting, hanging about, and chatting about hanging about – an August, 2007 series at the IFC Centre in New York, dubbed “The New Talkies: Generation DIY,” seemed to acknowledge a rising appetite, among American programmers and critics, to validate an emerging genre in American independent cinema. Leading the charge among filmmakers is Andrew Bujalski. Though the films aren’t readily available in Canada, or even all that popular in most of the world, Bujalski’s Mutual Appreciation (2006) and Funny Ha Ha (2005) are legitimate cinematic achievements amidst a group of films that also includes a good share of awkward, dialogue-based clunkers. Other directors involved in this genre (which was profiled in Rolling Stone’s 2007 “Hot Issue,” so you know we’re not making it up) include Aaron Katz, Joe Swanberg, and the Duplass brothers. Orphans (2007, Ry Russo-Young) is the debut female-directed film from the group, and a unique example in that it’s light on the talk.
Yet just as the movement had placed a toe in the doorway of underground American cinema, critic Amy Taubin recently offered a no-nonsense reproach in Film Comment that suggested the hype was all talk. According to Taubin, most of the films eagerly categorized as mumblecore are simply the result of cagey programming by SXSW programmer Matt Dentler, in need of an alt. Sundance movement; overeager bloggers excited by alternative cinema download on demand; and an extremely effective marketing strategy to help sell unknown, low-budget films as a group or series, rather than on individual merits. Movements have a way of reappearing in cycles, of course, so it’s also easy to see mumblecore as an extension of older talkies and even the underground work of Cassevettes (though only Bujalski shoots on 16mm).
Regardless, with an American critic having decided to write a re-appraisal, it would be no surprise to see Canada, mighty land of the friendly chat, laying claim to some of the movement’s nascent entries. Way back in 2001, New Pornographer keyboardist Blaine Thurier’s debut feature film, Low Self-Esteem Girl, won SXSW, just a year prior to the Duplass brothers’ The Puffy Chair, a mumblecore staple and the instigator of the movement’s swift minor-stream ascent. It seems worth pointing out that many of the devices employed in the movement were initially borne out of the need to squeeze a ton of imagination into (or out of) a tiny production budget, and Thurier’s debut is no different in that regard. Starring, like the mumblecore films after it, a collection of his non-professional actor friends in key roles, including musicians Carl Newman (The New Pornographers) and Dan Bejar (Destroyer), this romp around Vancouver has more energy than a Hollywood action film, framed though it is within a lo-fi production aesthetic. Meanwhile, the majority of above-average cinema from Canada’s West over the past decade, including both Gary Burns’ (The Suburbanators; waydowntown) and Bruce Sweeney’s (Dirty) ouevres, as well as Reg Harkema’s debut feature A Girl is a Girl – none of which exactly fit the mumblecore mold – typically revolve around characters who more or less talk through their lives (if not their flaws and issues) on screen. In addition to hype, Taubin takes issue with the waspy, apolitical nature of the movement’s creators and actors, and with the exclusion of films like So Yong Kim’s Toronto-set In Between Days – a unique tale of frustrated teenage communication that could fit perfectly among the American mumblers.
However, aside form its low-budget incentives, the benefits of Canada claiming such a movement as a foundation upon which to build a sorely needed cross-country cinematic language are questionable. For starters, since Thurier’s debut (perhaps because it’s so hard to find, with one noteworthy exception), no one has really consciously explored the concept, and – the few above examples aside – serious Canadian films about the present, starring chatting twenty-somethings and set in even relatively recognizable locales, let alone an urban centre, don’t really exist outside of Quebec.
Which, surprisingly, leads us to Regina in 2007, and an interesting experiment by Mark Wihak, currently a professor at the University of Regina, and a debut feature filmmaker with River, a tale of two friends with lofty dreams of becoming artists, possibly even moving to New York. Stan (Adam Budd), a writer, and Roz (Maya Batten-Young), a tall hippie with funky fashion, fulfill many mumblecore tropes. Both are white wannabe creators/artists – Stan even dresses all in white as a “look” – who communicate in a private vacuum of personal stasis, biding time before making meaningful life decisions. The two meet at a late night coffee shop, and soon become friends and then roommates. Despite quickly sharing intimate personal dreams and histories during time trolling around the city, attending art galleries, exploring grafitti alleys and empty farm fields, even a healthy dose of experimental cinema doesn’t spark the verbal or physical realization of a sexual relationship. Which is all fine until Roz hooks up with a guy at their house party and the next day Stan is questionably outraged; the emotional fallout of his projections of Roz soon lead to the most awkward conversation of the film and, eventually, well-deserved silence.
Although these two are tytpical mumblecore characters, it’s not to say they (and their familiars in other films) are not accurate representations of a particular age or even generation. At times, they’re so true to life and the moments so ordinary that they make a viewer wonder why they’re even on screen. This surely has as much to do with popular cinematic expectations as it does mumblecore films in themselves; like River, the talky films that work often challenge these expectations through direction and a story that helps the actors overcome their own inexperience and sometimes naïve improvisations – both tools that can be leveraged for relatively little money.
River was produced for a mere $70,000, once again proof that the most innovative ideas in the Canadian feature film industry are consistently produced outside of its funding agency-approved Hollywood production model, the method preached through training institutes like the Canadian Film Centre. Wihak views this very production model as the most suspect of methods for creating audience-friendly cinema. “Films made that way don’t reach audiences,” he says. “I think that approach is a waste of time and talent.” Instead, after casting, he hosted a two-month screenwriting workshop with non-professional leads Maya Batten-Young (a student in one of his film classes) and Adam Budd to flesh out brief character outlines. A crew of five then shot the actors improvising dialogue over 20 days. Wihak chose his production crew carefully and with good taste, enlisting talented cinematographer Patrick McLaughlin to uniquely frame the relationship drama, and the quiet, underground music of Michelle McAdorey (Crash Vegas) and Eric Chenaux to emphasise and counterpoint the visual and emotional atmosphere.
Borne out of this alternative aesthetic, the film has its share of benefits and drawbacks, mostly related to two key elements of the script: dialogue and narrative development. Dialogue as exposition (or obvious metaphor) is often the most problematic, amateur element of the film, yet of course it’s occasionally necessary at times to establish some basic rules of the characters’ world, including how they relate to one another and why. Interestingly, in a “new talky” film, cringe-inducing dialogue often feels right, just as it inherently feels wrong; perhaps both because it’s usually never heard on screen and because it seems to at least be giving a unique voice to life in a specific space (in this case Regina). At the same time, there are many scenes in which awkward dialogue doesn’t work for being awkward, including a beautifully shot moment on top of a parking garage, with downtown Regina framed in the distance, as Roz and Stan shout their favourite artists’ names at the skyline. This scene actually reminds me the most of mumblecore stumbles, partly for feeling too imbued with the voice of the director, but mostly for being far too precious. The most interesting aspect of River’s story development involves the penultimate party scene that rapidly shifts the time of the narrative, focusing emotions and interactions on the fallout of one particular night. Throughout the film Wihak has a unique knack for advancing the time of the narrative – the growth (or lack thereof) of Roz and Stan’s relationship – through tiny cues of sudden shifts in the relationship.
As often as the characters speak, though, reflecting inadequate communication, director of photography McLaughlin consistently reminds us of the beauty of the sound of silence. Making a name for himself in the Canadian cinema scene over the past five or 10 years for his impeccable visual design, McLaughlin’s career spans most of Gary Burns’ ouevre, including the ace car driving perspective of The Suburbanators (1995), the recent docu-drama Radiant City (2007), and the slippery Six Figures (David Christensen, 2006). Repeatedly infusing individual scenes with haunting, subtle movement, and entire movies with dually suspicious and curious studies of the everyday, Mclaughlin gets, in River, free reign to capture the elements of a scene from occasionally counter-intuitive fictional narrative perspectives. As Wihak suggests in his director’s notes, the nature of the production often felt like shooting a documentary – with unprecedented access to the subjects. If a conversation or scene was working, there was no pressure to stop filming, or worry about continuity and shoot a reverse shot for coverage. Similarly, since the majority of River was shot chronologically, scenes could be adjusted to take advantage of local conditions (thereby capturing the undeniable joy of a Shriner’s parade), or to steer the narrative along alternative paths as the characters and story developed simultaneously.
The resulting footage, therefore, often floats between characters’ faces during dialogue scenes, eliminating the need for cutting, or motivating cuts in a documentary fashion due to a lack of coverage. In either situation the end result benefits both the non-professional actors, who don’t have to worry about fulfilling the technical requirements of a frame, and an editor (in this case Vonda Schmockel) who can play dialogue off of reactions, details, and even over a character’s silence. McLaughlin’s freedom is expressive of the importance of capturing good visuals vs. incredible coverage. Wihak was also smart to create a visual design that contrasts the openness of the surroundings – Stan and Roz riding bikes around a rural silo – with the boxy nature of buildings on the endlessly flat prairie. These square still frames also resurface within art galleries, when Stan posts his poems on storefronts, or when Roz works away in her office cleaning job. McLaughlin’s eye for detail within the moment of a scene – notably following a bug on the windowsill of the parked car as Roz and Stan tell emotional stories about their dads – combines with the awe-inspiring square frames of the surrounding space to carry the film along in a fluid, Terrence Malick-esque visual prairie dream.
