Oddball drama delves deeply into creative process

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 04/12/2020 (2112 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If pressured to come up with a easily grasped analogy for the movie Black Bear, the result would be a little tortuous.

It’s Run Lola Run meets Day for Night?

So yes, this is an odd, unique feature from writer-director Lawrence Michael Levine, but then, it’s at least partially about the creative process, which is as big and dark and mysterious as the title ursine.

Aubrey Plaza, best known as the goth trickster April of TV’s Parks and Recreation, is Allison, a filmmaker on a retreat to an idyllic lakeside property run by struggling musician Gabe (Christopher Abbott of Girls and The Sinner) and the pregnant Blair (David Cronenberg regular Sarah Gadon).

It is revealed Allison is a former actress who has become a director of small films no one sees. Her entrance into Gabe and Blair’s world is a catalyst, turning fissures into fractures.

Gabe complains about the fall of the traditional family. Blair needles Gabe about his lack of achievement. Allison, who is in the drama business, seems to be invigorated by their tension and acts on it, in destructive ways.

The second part of the film refracts elements of the first chapter. Allison and Blair are both actresses working on a film directed by Gabe. This time Allison is in a relationship with Gabe. Gabe enlists Blair to enact a kind of flirtation designed to take Allison to the same place as her violently jealous character. Again, that leads to terrible repercussions.

One thing to note about this second chapter: It’s a beautifully accurate depiction on what life is like on a movie set, as Francois Truffaut’s Day for Night nailed that milieu back in 1973, albeit on a much larger scale.

The film’s main reason for existing, apparently, was to create a dramatic vehicle for Plaza, a singular actress whose dry, deadpan delivery has occasionally landed her in movies that were beneath her talents, such as the especially egregious Dirty Grandpa.

Plaza’s characters often have a mischievous, conspiratorial quality to them. Here, that flowers into something more dramatically complex. Allison, in her first iteration, is a provocateur who sees the tensions between Gabe and Blair and subtly turns the volume up on them for her own perverse gratification.

In her second iteration, she is the one being provoked, leading to the kind of emotional fireworks that cross over from drama into real life.

Plaza tears into both characters with courage that no doubt extends from her willingness to have taken on disagreeable characters from the get-go. In both her roles, Canadian actress Gadon plays a kind of negative imprint of Plaza’s character, which requires equal degrees of commitment and skill that Gadon delivers.

Abbott, last seen as a drug dealer possessed by an assassin in Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor, gets a little more to do here as a man who manages to find himself the love object of two women. He injects a little comedic sauce into Gabe, the director, with notes of egotism and neuroses.

But it’s largely Plaza’s show, and she proves compellingly watchable, whether gazing at the water from a pier, or in full-bore breakdown mode.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing