2004-01-18

Canadian Film Festival, Day One

Falling Angels

I knew this would be weird the moment I found out it was based on a Barbara Gowdy novel. She wrote the short story "We So Seldom Look On Love," on which the movie Kissed was based. It starred Molly Parker as a mortician who is obsessed with the sexual nature of death and eventually turns to necrophilia. I've never seen Kissed, but I did read the story years before they made it into a movie, and I remember thinking it was pretty good. But weird. The same can be said for Falling Angels.

The movie starts with a funeral: a woman (Miranda Richardson) lies dead in a funeral home, and her husband and three teenaged daughters have come to view her body. The father is drunk and scuffles with a reporter who asks about the mother's death: apparently she fell off the roof. The rest of the movie is basically a lead-up to the moment in the funeral parlor, although there is a brief epilogue as well.

The strengths of this movie are in the characterizations of the three main characters: the dad, Jim (Callum Keith Rennie), the oldest daughter, Norma (Monte Gagne), and the middle daughter, Lou (Katherine Isabelle). Jim is a tinpot tyrant who, in the ultimate control-freak move, builds a bomb shelter in the back yard (it's the late 1950s) and forces his family to suffer through an emergency drill that lasts for two weeks. During this time, they run out of water (he miscalculated the amount to keep in supply) and get very hungry, but Jim won't let them out. If that weren't bad enough, Norma gets her first period and he won't let her mother go get some pads for her; instead, he starts to rip up sheets, saying, "What do you think the pioneers did?"

Ten years later, it's 1969, and the middle child, Lou, still hasn't forgiven him for holding them hostage in the bomb shelter. She is the typical rebellious daughter, and Isabelle does a good job of portraying her sullenness, while never making her unlikable. Lou yearns to break away from her weird family, and finds some friendship and refuge in a new student at school who introduces her to Che Guevara, VW vans, pot, and the poetry of William Butler Yeats.

Youngest daughter Sandy is extremely naive and trusting; she idealizes her parents and their relationship, glossing over the fact that her dad is a controlling drunk and her mother is a catatonic, depressed drunk. She desperately wants love, and when she doesn't get it from her parents, she thinks she's found it in an incredibly creepy Mark McKinney (formerly from The Kids in the Hall, a married shoe salesman who is at least twice her age, if not older. Their scenes together are icky but fascinating, and when, at one point, he tells her that he "has a surprise" for her...well, he's not kidding. It's quite a shock.

Oldest daughter Norma is the most understanding of the three. It is Norma who, while she doesn't approve of her father's actions, accepts him for who he is and manages to bond with him over a basement renovation and driving lessons. She doesn't idealize him the way Sandy does, but she doesn't demonize him the way Lou does, either. In the end, it is Norma who finds out the real reason why her mother has been so depressed for all these years, and sheds some light on why she may have gone up on the roof.

I haven't really talked about Miranda Richardson much, but her role is pretty much confined to looking like a mannequin and wandering somnolently between rooms in the (exquisitely rendered in garish 1970s Technicolour) family home.

Overall, I thought Falling Angels was interesting, fairly well-paced (though a little on the slower, more meditative side), and well-acted. I give it four empty whiskey bottles out of five.

Mambo Italiano

Several wags have referred to this film as My Big Gay Italian Wedding, but I actually think that dismissal is unfairly harsh. I laughed a lot during this movie and found it had good writing and good production values, both things to be cherished in a Canadian movie (especially the latter, unfortunately).

Angelo is a good Italian son who still happens to be single at the age of 27. Therefore, he still lives at home with his Italian immigrant parents in the "Little Italy" section of Montreal. There is a really funny scene at the beginning where Angelo's dad, played with great scenery-chewing relish by Paul Sorvino, describes how he and Angelo's mother left their little village in Italy and thought they were going to the United States, but actually ended up in Canada.

One day, Angelo decides to move out on his own, a decision which moves his mother to tears, but he stands firm. He moves out and, after his new apartment is broken into, reunites with Nino, an old friend from high school who has become a police officer. The two go on a camping trip, and it turns out that lo and behold, they are both "Italian and gay--a fate worse than death." The two move in together, on the condition that no one will know they are lovers but themselves.

Of course, that doesn't last for long, and the rest of the movie deals with what happens when Angelo and Nino's very traditional families find out that they are gay.

I wouldn't go into this movie expecting anything particularly original or profound, but I really enjoyed it all the same. The cinematography is bright and cheery; the acting is broad but well-executed, and the entire cast is very likable; the pacing is fast and the movie clips along appropriately, with no sags or lags; Angelo is a very sympathetic (and attractive) character; the dialogue is often hilarious, and finally, the movie's ending doesn't settle for the totally obvious cliche. I give Mambo Italiano three and a half head-slaps out of five.

Posted by polarcanuck at 1:22 a.m.

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