This week marked one of the many events that gives Kingston its claim to fame: the Kingston Canadian Film Fest. I was lucky—or irresponsible—enough to ditch my various academic obligations and check out some of this year’s delicious festival fare. And what a feast it was. Of the 15 films on offer, I can attest that the three I reviewed were absolute gems. While none of these films won the People’s Choice Award—that accolade went to One Week, a film directed by Michael McGowan in which Ben Tyler (Joshua Jackson) sets out on a road trip across our home and native land when he discovers he is terminally ill—all three were nonetheless total treats in their own rights.
That said, it was a little curious that all three French-language flicks dealt with absentee mothers and childhood angst in the suburbs of the 1950s and 60s. Although I only had the pleasure of watching C’est pas moi, je le jure! (It wasn’t me, I swear!) and Maman est chez le coiffeur (Mom is at the hairdresser’s), the synopsis of Elle Veut le Chaos (She wants Chaos) indicates it was also about a mom who skips town, leaving the children and father to pick up the pieces, to varying degrees of success. While Maman focuses the traumatic experience through the lens of an adolescent girl, C’est pas moi filters it through the eyes of a young boy with a penchant for suicide attempts. The mother in Maman, suspecting her husband of some closeted hanky-panky with his “golf buddies,” jets off to London, England where she becomes a news reader, while the mother in C’est pas moi—in a fit of rage after years of domestic dissatisfaction—skips town to Greece where she tries to make her dreams come true as an artist.
Regardless, both films detail the various trials and tribulations associated with mothers, fathers and being the weird kid on the block whose mom wants more than a prescribed cookie-cutter reality. The main difference between Maman and C’est pas moi is the degree to which their stories are fleshed out. Maman ends with a glimmer of hope that the children will search out and find their mother while C’est pas moi ends with a sort of fatalist feeling that the protagonist will continue bashing himself up till the cows some home and, for all his efforts, his mother will never come home.
Switching gears, Who is K. K. Downey? satirizes the sordid lives of Montreal scenesters from the unnecessarily flamboyant coifs to absolute parental financial dependence. Unfortunately for Terrence (Darren Curtis) and Theo (Matt Silver), their dreams far outstrip their talent and they’re left with few options. When a publisher tells Theo that nobody will publish his gratuitously sexual and violent novel Truckstop Hustler because it was written by a white kid from the ’burbs, the guys decide to take matters into their own hands and create the novel’s protagonist—K.K. Downey—as the actual author of the book, to be played by Terrence for the sake of media appearances. Naturally, the novel catapults to cult classic status, filling the bookshelves of the side-swept-bangs from Cote-St-Luc to the Plateau. Naturally, all of the usual problems spring up when people play around with their identities and you can expect much hilarity revolving around the utter pretention of 20-somethings in pseudo-artsy communities.
KingCan offered up multi-faceted slices of Canadian cinematic story-telling, taking on the lighter and darker sides lurking the urban and suburban streets.
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