Canadian Cinema Canon #4: waydowntown |
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| Written by April Yorke |
| Thursday, 27 August 2009 00:00 |
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When fellow (Cult)ure cinema critic Joe Lipsett listed "too much weird shit" as the final reason for Canadian cinema's lack of popularity among Canadians, he'd actually hit the first reason on my own list. I don't have a problem some of the other reasons he noted, including movies that are too dark, have low productions values, and/or feature no "stars." On the contrary, there are plenty of Canadian actors, writers, and directors that I've come to admire over the years. (Most of them have defected to Hollywood, but I still like 'em.) No, what keeps me away from our home grown cinema is the general belief that all Canadian movies are completely bananas (with the exception of Quebec cinema; Quebec's greatest triumph might just be the strength of its cultural industry). Canadian television I can get behind. Slings & Arrows might be one of my favourite shows ever, not in the least because it combines Paul Gross, Shakespeare, and a zany behind the scenes look at the inner workings of a thinly-veiled Stratford-like festival. Plum roles for actors like Don McKellar, Mark McKinney, and Rachel McAdams are just gravy. Actually, my love for zany behind the scenes looks at pretty much anything (I'd probably watch a documentary that promised me a zany behind the scenes look at taxidermy) lead me to waydowntown, the third feature from Canadian writer-director Gary Burns.* You see, the trailer for waydowntown appeared before State and Main, a zany behind the scenes look at a movie production's decent onto a small town (and a movie I find endlessly quotable). I am nothing if not a consummate trailer watcher, so I've been prepped for waydowntown dozens of times. The waydowntown trailer was sandwiched between one for Maelström (a French-Canadian movie about a hit and run, narrated by a fish) and Panic (a film I always forget about because it looks exactly like every other star-heavy Sundance thriller with a strange direct-to-video quality to it). Now, faced with this trailer, would you want to watch waydowntown?
The above trailer actually provides far more plot insight than the trailer that appeared before my copy of State and Main. This trailer, for example, reveals the bet -- the plot point that serves as the movie's main narrative thrust -- which was not even alluded to in the trailer I saw time and again. No, when my friends and I watched the trailer, the only thing we could agree upon was that waydowntown looked completely insane. That and Dom! Dom was a popular schoolgirl crush among Canadian girls of a certain age. Played by Fab Filippo, Dom was Busy's cute older brother on Global's Ready or Not, and therefore the cute older brother on whom her single child best friend Amanda (and every girl in the audience) had a crush. In later seasons, Dom developed a drug problem (or something . . . I stopped watching), but that didn't diminish the power of that initial crush. When Filippo turned up as Buffy's first post-Angel paramour Scott, we cheered, "Dom!" When violinist Ethan (Filippo again) lured Justin away from his eternal devotion to Brian on Queer as Folk, we nodded knowingly. That would be a synch for our Dom. But Dom . . . uh, Filippo wasn't enough on his own to draw me into watching waydowntown. No, the final straw was a repeated and insistent request from a friend that I see the film. If you were to draw a Venn diagram, the overlap between my friend's and my own pop cultural sensibilities would be about the width of a sheet of paper. Fortunately, what we both love, we both love a lot, so the wild disparity between our tastes hasn't destroyed our friendship (yet). 
Weird shit like this
Let's take the bet, for example: four low level office workers make a bet for a month's salary (about $10,000 in total) to see which one of them can stay indoors the longest. Because of the downtown core's interconnected series of office, retail, and apartment buildings, the bet could go on indefinitely. We open on Day 24 (though Filippo crosses Day 27 off his calendar) and fast-forward to lunch, where we remain for the rest of the movie. Despite the myriad costumes we see on actors Filippo and Marya Delver, it's always the same day for the characters they play. I can see some meaning in the costume changes. Unlike Gordon Currie and Tobias Godson, whose costumes don't change, Filippo and Delver's characters are rapidly falling apart under the combined strain of the bet and their harried workdays. The film is commenting on their soul-crushing, bureaucratic existence, where every day is essentially the same. Their innocuous outfits might as well be uniforms for all the personality and spark they bring to their owners (I suspect our own Frederick Hidell could relate). I get that the costumes change even though it's all the same day to make a point. But later, while sparking up in his car (dope keeps the edge off), a giant fish swallows Filippo's leg. That I don't get. This fairly equal balance of "get it" to "don't get it" is par for the course in this movie. Never mind the mechanics of the plot, for every scene that I can make sense of, there's another that I have yet to figure out. Some aspect of the movie seems bizarrely obvious (Filippo keeps an ant farm on his desk, for pity's sake), other moments are deliciously Canadian (Currie's matriculation at Carleton labels him a cheater), while still others continue to leave me at loss. Yet despite the film's inaccessibility at times (and despite its grainy digital-to-video transfer -- the technology's come a long way in the last decade), I still believe that waydowntown deserves a place in Canadian cinema canon. Like nearly all of our entries, the movie is more of a comment than a straightforward piece of narrative, and, despite its eccentricities, it makes that comment well. But what is it about Canadians that makes us unable to tell a story straight? Ah, well. Leave that to Hollywood. Let's go express our feelings about our parents through rocks and trees instead. *Full disclosure: Burns received some funding from the Canada Council for the Arts, where I now work, toward waydowntown. I was in high school at the time, so you can guess how involved I was with that decision. Previously in Canadian Cinema Canon:
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Comments (2)
Superman
I have to admit that I find this to be one of the more accessible Canadian films made in the last decade (outside of the completely accessible ones in the early 2000s like Men with Brooms and Ginger Snaps). Sure there are a lot of random images, like Fab's persistent hallucination of Superman, but the idea of an office bet that reveals the soul crushing nature of mundane office jobs is really just a Canadian twist on the same principles that made Office Space so endearing. |
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