by Jarrod Jones. The 23rd annual Whistler Film Festival, based in Whistler, British Columbia, highlights films from all over the world — but especially Canada. DoomRocket is here with short-burst reviews of a few of its selections. In review: Bruce Sweeney’s She Talks to Strangers; Sean Garrity’s The Burning Season.
Canadian readers can join The Whistler Film Festival for online screenings December 4-17. For more information, click this.
SHE TALKS TO STRANGERS
If you can manage it, go into She Talks to Strangers blind. Definitely avoid reading its clumsy plot synopsis at all costs, which is currently sitting on its IMDB page, ready to spoil the whole show.
With that, I will tell you about Vancouver director Bruce Sweeney’s latest film by divulging as little about its big developments as possible. I will freely say it’s a knotty, occasionally gnarly, and oddly compelling black comedy. Its performances are convincing, which is awesome and distressing, considering its characters are about as obnoxious as they come. The film’s first act has a rough go of threading Sweeney’s unseemly domestic situation in unpleasant ways. If you make it past its first 30-odd minutes, the rest unfolds pretty darn well.
I called the characters obnoxious, and they are, but the performances are solid. Camille Sullivan plays Leslie, who lives a frantic single life with her lovely Australian shepherd, John (so named for her departed father). Whenever work pulls Leslie from her pooch, she calls on her mother, Staci (Gabrielle Rose of The Sweet Hereafter), to keep an eye on him. Mother and daughter share a testy relationship; Staci is all hard edges and barbs when Leslie comes calling for favors. Staci, a widow, looks at the remainder of her life as one of diminishing returns, so she finds refuge in pilates and true crime podcasts. Leslie has John. Life isn’t remarkable for either woman, but at least they’re lonely?
Enter: Keith (Jeff Gladstone), Leslie’s estranged dirtbag husband, who ducks into Leslie’s basement one night and declares he lives there now. Keith needs money for various reasons. We know he owes all over town, but he dreams of buying a new guitar for that album he’s going to finish one day. (Oh, and he also wants a boat.) Leslie looks like as good an ATM as any. For Leslie’s part? She says she’ll cut, rip, or otherwise violently remove any body part, be it hers or someone else’s, before he gets a single loonie.
Keith establishes his dominance in an appalling scene that made me hate him. You’ll probably hate Keith, too; Gladstone makes for an effective sleaze. Everyone in this movie starts off miserable, and by the midway point, things only get worse. It’s a real trip down misery lane. Yet Sweeney’s screenplay tucks away little character beats for this terrible trio that might surprise you. In She Talks to Strangers, people let relationships linger in shambles for far longer than they should because… well, there’s never a rational answer for things like that. Clean breaks, if they ever come at all, can be brutal. They’re brutal here.
Now, about that title. Leslie occasionally airs her dirty laundry to virtually anybody who approaches her. This, at first, seems like a distracting writer’s conceit, and it remains that way. This behavior possibly speaks to Leslie’s personality, which is manic on a good day, but there’s nothing revelatory about these sequences, no big epiphany that might give this devilish story additional muscle. Sweeney could cut them out and not miss a trick. Might I suggest a better title for his American release: Leslie Fuckin’ Loves Her Dog.
6/10
Written and directed by Bruce Sweeney.
Cinematography by Callum Middleton.
Starring Camille Sullivan, Gabrielle Rose, Jeff Gladstone, Agam Darshi, and Paul Skrudland.
Produced by Ali Froggatt, Jeff Gladstone, Tracy Major, David Pelletier, Rafi Spivak, and Bruce Sweeney.
Unrated. Contains rough extended moments of domestic violence and full-frontal nudity.
THE BURNING SEASON
The Burning Season is a love story that becomes a tragedy and is also, somehow, a tragedy that becomes a love story. It’s a movie that takes its biggest dramatic moments, juggles them around, and uses them to bookend a story told backward. It’s natural to overthink a story during its first draft. Sean Garrity’s The Burning Season was overthought well after the final edit. Hell, I’m sitting here overthinking about it right now.
Two teenagers (Natalie Jane and Christian Meer) fall in love at a lake resort. Their brief (and I do mean brief) fling ends in disaster. Fast forward a whole bunch of years, and it’s clear Alena and JB (Sara Canning and Jonas Chernick) have yet to move past this one hot summer for reasons that remain vague and insinuating for a good chunk of the film. The most pertinent information we’re given: whenever Alena and JB, now adults with new relationships, are left alone for longer than two minutes, they can’t help but jump all over each other in that heavy-breathing, limbs-flailing, clothes-rending way that can only possibly scandalize lovers of airport romance novels and/or the raunchier offerings from The Lifetime Channel.
That leaves Alena and JB’s significant others (Joe Pingue and Tanisha Thammavongsa, respectively) to wander through repetitious sequences (in both place and scenario, i.e., lots of talking in woods), conveying little more than sweet and understanding obliviousness. The story, a labored, exhausting thing to grapple with, was written by Chernick and Diana Frances and presumes the bare minimum lent to these support characters is enough to warrant our emotional investment in their inevitable disappointment and anguish. It presumes too much. (Distressingly, this won the Best Screenplay award at this year’s Whistler.)
If it sounds like I wasn’t captivated by The Burning Season, in my defense, it’s not like I didn’t give it a fair go. The film is broken into chapters and is presented in reverse, with a prologue tossed in at the end that attempts to tie the smoldering passions of Alena and JB (young and old) to the dark secret that keeps these two knuckleheads together. I waited until the credits to decide if this worked for me. I came away with two questions: does a gimmick like this make the story better? Or would the story have worked the same (which is to say, not very well at all) without it? My answer to both: no.
3.5/10
Directed by Sean Garrity.
Written by Jonas Chernick and Diana Frances.
Cinematography by Eric Oh.
Starring Sara Canning, Jonas Chernick, Joe Pingue, Tanisha Thammavongsa, Natalie Jane, and Christian Meer.
Produced by Andrew Bronfman, Jonathan Bronfman, Jonas Chernick, Bruno Dubé, and Geoff Ewart, et. al.
Unrated. Contains drug use and frequent instances of *gasp!* adultery, with all the naughty language that comes with both.
Canadian readers can join The Whistler Film Festival for online screenings December 4-17. For more information, click this.
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Arrow Video’s 4K upgrade lets Barbarella shimmer in the way it was always meant to
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