Love hurts: Canadian romantic comedy

TAKE ONE, Spring, 1999 by Steve Gravestock

Joe's Wedding is curiously divided--representative of a peculiarly diffident Canadian tendency. It almost seems as if it's ashamed to be part of such a commercial genre. This division shows up in a certain amount of confusion about just who's being satirized and why. Art and artists get it big time--but they also represent a freedom lacking in the workaday world. An arts council jury is too dim-witted to realize Joe is being held against his will; Rankin's wife, Barbara (Jayne Eastwood), is obsessed with her filmmaking classes and tries to turn the wedding into a bad experimental film. There's also a nasty (and very funny) gibe at performance artists. Yet the most successful, energetic scene in the film revolves around Uta's dreaded performance piece; similarly, Joe's ongoing interest in head-banging music is lauded. Uta turns out to be depressingly sane with her own career path. In other words, it's good to get crazy but not too crazy. Probably the most telling thing about the film is the couple's decision to take off for Venice immediately. They find true love, in anywhere but Ontario.

In the underrated Drive, She Said, Mina Shum again subverts the conventions of romantic comedy in the name of self-discovery. Bank clerk Nadine Shipp (Moira Kelly) is trapped in a nowhere relationship with co-worker Jonathan (Sebastian Spence). Then she meets the enigmatic Tass (Josh Hamilton), who's obviously very interested in her. A few days later, she's abducted by a bank robber who turns out to be Tass. A scant few miles down the road he takes off his LBJ mask and asks her to help him escape. She fumes a little, then agrees. The next few days are virtually idyllic until Nadine gets involved in a shoot out. Overcome by guilt, she turns herself in (after allowing Tass to escape).

Drive, She Said has a beautiful, ethereal quality. The film begins with hypnotic, overexposed flashbacks to Nadine's childhood, and the atmosphere carries over to Nadine's reverie with Tass. However, Nadine's idyll with Tass has a fatalistic, doomed quality--it's just too much like lotus eating. The real point of the movie isn't the relationship with Tass, but Nadine's decision to take responsibility for her own actions. (The flashbacks aren't just atmospheric; they're there to outline how Nadine let her life get away from her.) Everyone, or rather every man, tells her that she's not responsible and that things are going to be fine--even when they won't be. Her victory comes when she refuses to listen to them and makes her own decisions. The point is driven home by the theme song which features the plaintive lyric "all I want to do is belong." At the film's conclusion, she turns the song off. Nadine's character suggests a female Lorenzo, but she represents a real break from it. Tass doesn't rescue her so much as he wakes her up.

John Kalangis's low-budget Jack & Jill takes place in a very different milieu than Shum's film, but like Drive, She Said, Kalangis's film has a doggedly antiromantic outlook. Kalangis depicts a Toronto so overrun with neediness and neuroses that it's amazing anyone can purchase a carton of milk without major psychic damage. That appears to be a conscious decision on Kalangis's part. Only one major character is seen working; everyone is stripped to his or her need for love and attention. Every major character is insanely selfish, egotistical, cowardly or simply oblivious to anyone else--especially Kalangis's Jack (played by Kalangis himself). The film opens with Jack telling Jill (Shauna MacDonald) that he can't marry her by leaving a message on her answering machine. (In a neat reversal, Jill later tells Jack, through voice mail, she's marrying someone else.) Jack waffles over his relationship with Jill until it's too late. In the interim, he dallies with a beautiful young woman he picks up in a bookstore, and his friends pair themselves off to all and sundry. (At times, the film seems determined to disprove Shelagh Kelly's Singles dictum: "Desperation is the worst sort of cologne"; in this film, everyone gets laid no matter how sad sack they seem.) Most memorably, Jack's sardonic waitress friend falls for a demented hoodlum who tries to steal a kid's football. There's no conventional happy ending, at least for Jack, who finally decides it's probably better if he tries to grow up a bit before he gets involved in another relationship. At heart, Jack & Jill hearkens back to pre-screwball comedies. It's less about finding love than about the infantile lengths we go to get it.