Balaban a Saint in complex role

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This article was published 02/11/2001 (8951 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I’LL go on record: Liane Balaban is Canada’s Next Big Thing. After her strong debut in the gentle, off-beat New Waterford Girl, she masters a much more complex role in this grimly poetic look at Montreal’s mean streets.

With natural truthfulness and can’t-take-your-eyes-off-her screen presence, Balaban plays Jude, a teenage girl whose only way past heroin addiction and hustling may be to burn some bridges in the most spectacular way.

Kicked out of her dad’s house and on the run from a dope dealer she’s ripped off, Jude walks through the days and nights of her tough neighbourhood, making a sad parallel to Dorothy’s skipping journey down the Yellow Brick Road.

Jude is part of this world but also set apart by her watchful, wary intelligence. She shoots heroin, but never three days in a row. She watches strange distortions of sex and love with a world-weary acceptance painfully at odds with her fresh face.

Director John L’Ecuyer (Curtis’s Charm) depicts hard lives without falling into sentimentalism or mere Tarantino style — not an easy thing to do. Though aspects of this film are ugly and upsetting — particularly the matter-of-fact depiction of a pedophile — the final tone is one of terrible compassion for people locked into relationships of violence or desperate need.

The film’s deepest feelings are kept for children and their vulnerability. “The answer ‘no’ isn’t allowed,” says Jude at one point. “On the street you’re only allowed versions of ‘yes.'”

Set against this despair are the film’s consistently strong performances, L’Ecuyer’s vital sense of place, and finally Heather O’Neill’s script, full of gallows humour and tortured lyricism, a marvel of dark hope.