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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Domestic charade masks turmoil

Canadian filmmaker's story dragged down by gloomy tone

By: Randall King

Posted: 09/21/2012 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 | Last Modified: 09/21/2012 10:21 AM | Updates

Supplied photo From left, Kristen Harris, Kassidy Love Brown and Ethan Harapiuk play happy families in Shelagh Carter�s set-in-the-�60s drama.

Movie Review

Passionflower

Starring Kassidy Love Brown and Kristen Harris
Cinematheque
PG
94 minutes
3 stars out of five

Writer-director Shelagh Carter's semi-autobiographical drama commences with a scene depicting perfect family life circa 1962. Perfect mom Beatrice Matthews (Kristen Harris) keeps dinner waiting for her stoic husband David (Darcy Fehr). She's dressed in a provocative little number. She engages in distracted, desultory conversation with her young son Thomas (Ethan Harapiak) and her precocious eldest child Sarah (Kassidy Love Brown). Within a minute of dad's arrival, dinner is served.

It is, of course, a painstakingly constructed attempt at domestic bliss. It soon becomes clear something is wrong here. Mom's outward perfection is subsumed by inner turmoil. There is a desperate undercurrent to Beatrice's sexual flirting, whether with her husband or other male dinner guests.

Sarah, who sneaks around the house at night, occasionally bears nonplussed witness to Beatrice's strange emotional meltdowns, which include her lying almost naked on the kitchen floor in the middle of the night, weeping inconsolably.

Sarah is herself feeling some emotional stresses. At school, her talent at art renders her a bit of an outcast, except in the eyes of a sympathetic boy named Charlie (Mitchell Kummen).

But Beatrice's emotional instability starts sending the family into a tailspin, with Sarah in particular compelled to act out in inappropriate ways, assuming you might be offended by a nine-year-old girl employing cheesecake pin-ups as paper dolls. (I say: Why not? They're already undressed.)

Carter's first feature film benefits from a couple of strong performances. Harris deservedly won Manitoba ACTRA's best actress award for the year, sensitively delineating the anguish of a unstable personality trapped in a social role in which she was not equipped to function. Brown also offers up a soulful portrayal of a childhood interrupted.

Unfortunately, the film carries the affliction of countless other Canadian dramas in that it is largely humourless to the point of being dour. Carter portrays the conservative early '60s as an airless, oppressive epoch, and that unfortunately means the characters don't entirely breathe within the film frame.

Even if their mutual impropriety is the result of inner conflict, could there not be a little anarchic exhilaration in the rebellions of mother and daughter?

Many first-time feature filmmakers necessarily start off their careers with examinations of their own creative roots. Carter does a solid job of achieving this goal, but one wonders if she wasn't too close to the story to capture all its facets. Should the story of an artist's creative hatching be so wanting the quality of joy?

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition September 21, 2012 D4

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Updated on Friday, September 21, 2012 at 10:21 AM CDT: corrects spelling of Harapiak

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