Aspirational auteur stumbles toward self-awareness

Opinion

I Like Movies, Chandler Levack’s no-budget feature film debut (now playing at Cinematheque) is a sincere but complicated ode to movie love, wrapped in a sweet but never sappy coming-of-age story. It’s also a funny valentine to the obsolescent video rental store, where the teenaged protagonist works.

Lawrence Kweller (played by terrific newcomer Isaiah Lehtinen) is a socially awkward 17-year-old cinephile who has a knack for pushing away everyone around him.

It’s 2003 in the spread-out suburbs of Burlington, Ont., and Lawrence can’t wait to leave. He plans to go to NYU’s exclusive, expensive film school, and he’s so certain he’ll get in he’s neglecting his loyal friend Matt (Percy Hynes White). Lawrence thinks that once he’s in New York he will find cooler friends with more obscure, more Kubrickian taste in movies.

In a bit of a Ladybird vibe, his harassed single mom (Krista Bridges) keeps telling Lawrence they can’t possibly afford NYU. When she asks why he won’t consider Canadian film schools, he tells her, with eye-rolling adolescent exasperation, “Because I don’t want to be a Canadian filmmaker.”

Wanting to save for school — and pay off an embarrassing and rapidly compounding late fee for Wild Things — Lawrence goes to work at a Blockbuster-like video rental store. The chain is called Sequels, which feels like an inside joke, because unless we’re talking Godfather II, cinephiles mostly disdain sequels. There he develops an unlikely bond with older store manager Alana (Romina D’ugo), whose own relationship to movies turns out to have a difficult back story.

As a video store clerk, Lawrence has strengths and weaknesses. He steers a young couple looking for a light, fun movie to Todd Solondz’s Happiness, an ironically titled black comedy guaranteed to induce existential despair. He initiates a Staff Picks shelf, not because he wants to boost sales but because he wants to publicly declare his love for Guy Maddin’s The Saddest Music in the World. He refuses to wear a banner saying, “Ask me about Shrek,” on the grounds he’s there “to talk about real cinema.”

After work, he heads to the mall multiplex where he loudly requests “a ticket for Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love,” making clear he’s there for PTA’s edgy auteurist vision and not just Adam Sandler.

Meanwhile, back at school, he and Matt are supposed to be delivering a film celebrating the 2003 graduating class, but Lawrence keeps stalling out. Matt brings in friend Jenny (Eden Cupid) to help edit, but Lawrence roundly rejects the idea of a girl editor, even after they’ve made their pitch by name-dropping Marty Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker. (“She edited Goodfellas. Goodfellas!”)

Levack understands the pleasure of nostalgia. (Full disclosure: I still own a VCR, and I once owned a Betamax. I remember browsing at the video rental chains, where the current hit movies would be visually signalled by endless repeating rows of Tom Cruise’s or Angelina Jolie’s head. I also recall the satisfying but slightly intimidating experience at Winnipeg’s independent Movie Village, where I always tried to pick up something by Tarkovsky or Sirk, just so I could get “the nod,” a barely perceptible movement of the head from the judgey film-wonk clerks.)

But Levack filters her nostalgia through ironic retrospective understanding. As with the scene where Lawrence is encouraged to think about long-term career prospects in the industry – “the next 30, 40 years” — Levack’s genuine affection for Sequels and its misfit employees is sharpened by the fact we all know video rentals are doomed.

Levack also examines how film love can be a way to explore the world but also a way to shut it out. Her sympathetic script and Lehtinen’s layered performance deftly balance Lawrence’s obnoxious film-bro entitlement with real vulnerability. We see how he uses his cinematic obsessions as a defence against emotions that can seem overwhelming.

As Lawrence stumbles toward self-awareness, Levack mixes comic satire with compassion to craft a quintessentially Canadian be-kind-rewind story. If you like movies, you’ll like-like this one.

alison.gillmor @freepress.mb.ca

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