Canadian Cinema Canon: Trigger

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Canadian Cinema Canon: Trigger

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Written by April Yorke

Wednesday, 22 December 2010 00:00

Canadian Cinema Canon is an examination of what makes Canadian cinema Canadian and what it says about our country and its citizens.

yorke_trigger_love The opening credits of Bruce McDonald's Trigger are a microcosm of the central relationship: two women share the stage. They're Canadian punk rock outfit Trigger at the height of their success. The stage show starts out lovingly: the crowd loves them, they love the crowd, they love each other. Slowly things disintegrate with swears and blows exchanged until Vic (Tracy Wright) smashes her guitar and storms off stage while Kat (Molly Parker) screams.

Not that we hear any of this.

For all its talk (and screen- and playwright Daniel MacIvor has turned in a very talky script), it's amazing what Trigger does with its silences. That night in London 20 years ago. Kat sitting alone in a high school AV room. Quiet moments on a park bench contemplating the infinite. It's powerful and mysterious and heartbreaking. And it's all down to Wright and Parker.

To say that there are next to no good parts out there for women any more, especially women of a certain age, would be a cliché if it weren't so painfully true. Moreover, any mildly interested moviegoer must be aware of how often filmmakers stumble in attempting to realistically portray female friendship. MacIvor, perhaps by initially imaging this story as a sequel to Hard Core Logo and thus for two male leads, succeeds brilliantly. He strips down the canvas; characters only exist to illuminate the relationship between Vic and Kat.

That relationship, rich with history and subtext, is beautiful. Parker's Kat aches with unspoken disappoints: in herself, in how her life turned out, in friendship lost. She's a punk rock princess turned corporate sell out, and the way Vic laughs off her offer of "jingle work" cuts deeper than Vic could ever intend.

Wright is right there with her every step of the way, aching for the same reconciliation that she doesn't know how to offer. Knowing that this was Wright's final performance lends it some extra heft, but her work doesn't need it. Vic is knee deep in finally allowing herself to find her place, and you feel every moment of fear and freedom that go along with that without ever seeing the work.

yorke_trigger_late McDonald, who this year presented Canadians with two Toronto music movies, has a stronger grip on place and creating an atmosphere than most directors working today. Movies that span a short period (a day, a few hours) can be difficult to pull off, but McDonald does it with style. It seems not like chance but fate to film the movie against rainy, snowy muck of mild winter. Somehow he makes not the backgrounds but the air breathe Toronto in all its urban wildness.

More so than other movies considered for the Canadian Cinema Canon, Trigger spends no time distinctly marking itself as "Canadian." Instead, it simply allows Toronto to be: a player in a story about those who rise and fall in its shadow. Would these girls still have formed a band if they grew up in Flin Flon or Happy Valley Goose Bay? Perhaps, but they wouldn't have been The Shut Ups. They wouldn't have been Trigger. They are as much shaped by their unnamed, instantly recognizable surroundings as they are by their talent and ambition.

In that, Trigger succeeds in being Canadian much more handily than most other Canadian films. The story -- two former bandmates meet up after 20 years under the guise of a night celebrating women in music -- could take place in nearly any other major Canadian or American city. Yet between McDonald, MacIvor, Wright, and Parker you feel like that wouldn't work. Something about the Etobicoke School of the Arts and that greenhouse from Chloë and the guy from Year of the Carnivore tells you that it has to be Canada. Or maybe it's that they take an exchange like this:

Vic: This is love: I secretly believe that I'm unlovable, and then I meet you. You tell me that you love me. I love you because you love me, but that has nothing to do with you; it's about you loving me. I only love you because I imagine myself unlovable, and you, against all odds, love me. And then, and some point, you do something that makes me think that you don't love me, which I'm more ready to believe than you loving me because I'm unlovable, so I stop loving you; I only love you because you love me, and I'm unlovable.

Kat: What about the other person? The person who loves you?

Vic: It's the same thing. Everybody is doing the same thing. Everybody thinks they're unlovable, too.

Kat: I'm not unlovable. I am all lovable. I am the very meaning of lovable.

And spend the rest of the movie proving Vic wrong. This is love: a swan song rushed into production that tells one beautiful, true story about the hope that some things, no matter how damaged, can never be broken. Great performances outlive their performers. Great art outlives us all.