Keith Behrman's flower & garnet: bridging the gap between the inner and outer worlds

TAKE ONE, June-Sept, 2003 by Dale Drewery

"A study in contrasts." That's the note I make to myself as I slide into the booth of a Vancouver restaurant. Perhaps it's because the man who is sitting across from me, film director Keith Behrman, manages to look both young and middle-aged at the same time. He's dressed in a tidy denim shirt, corduroy pants and carries a peaked cap, protection from the city's inclement March weather. But it's his eyes that are at the root of my confusion. Although the creases around them betray his 40 years, the eyes themselves are those of a child--clear, curious and trusting. My conflicting impressions are further entrenched when he orders a beer followed by a chocolate milkshake.

Behrman is celebrating, and he has every reason to. At the time of our interview, his feature debut, Flower & Garnet, is about to open across the country and the critical response has been tremendous: a Genie Award for best first feature, the Telefilm Canada Award for best emerging Western Canadian director at the Vancouver International Film Festival, three Vancouver Film Critics Circle Awards and a place on the Toronto International Film Festival's 2002 Top Ten list. The debut director is finding it all a little overwhelming. "Sometimes all this attention is too hard," Behrman says. "It takes a lot of energy to deal with that for one thing, to always remain open to the attention you get under those circumstances. And there is also something about just accepting it. Sometimes it's hard to accept praise."

That praise is well deserved. Flower & Garnet is a gem of a film, a quiet tribute to one family's struggle with loss and love. A mother dies in childbirth, leaving her devastated husband, Ed (Callum Keith Rennie), to cope with a new baby boy. But Ed has grown incapable of caring, and Garnet (Colin Roberts) is brought up by his sister Flower (Jane McGregor). The story, often shown through Garnet's young eyes, takes us on a strangely compelling journey into a world of emotional isolation and fear, a place Keith Behrman is well familiar with. "I grew up feeling like the world I lived in made no sense to me and I made no sense to the world. I had a lot of conflict growing up, and I always felt that, when I was speaking, I was speaking in a bubble. People would give me these weird looks and no one seemed to understand what I was saying. So I felt that I had something to prove, to set the record straight. I think that my films were somewhat motivated by an attempt to create a world where the things I thought and fe lt actually made sense."

Behrman grew up in the small farming community of Shaunavon, Saskatchewan. Although he failed grades three and eight, he excelled at English, and his mother suggested he become a novelist. In 1984, he moved to Vancouver and began work on a book. "I was writing a novel," he says, "and I was writing every day for about six hours and I was getting more and more frustrated with the fact that I couldn't articulate what I was seeing in my head. One day I was in my room and I said to myself, 'if this were a movie I would just show that, that, that and that, and it would be done!' Then I thought, maybe I should look into film. But, since we had only one movie theatre in Shaunavon, I thought John Wayne was the height of cinema."

He enrolled in Simon Fraser University's film program where he began working with actors and was thrilled to finally discover a way to accurately reflect the goings--on in his head. "We have this sort of inner world," he says. "It's one that we are in, and no one else is. We have experiences in that world, perceptions of ourselves and other things, and then there is the outer world. My films are about trying to bridge that gap, connect the outer world to the inner world, and to communicate across that chasm."

Keith Behrman's first short film, Thomas, deals with a family waiting for a snowstorm to abate in order to bury their eldest son. It's a stark, lonely story and more than a little reminiscent of Claude Jutra's classic Mon oncle Antoine. His second short, White Cloud, Blue Mountain, was equally well received, and Behrman was encouraged to apply to the Canadian Film Centre in Toronto. "I had this whole story in my head about how I shouldn't bother applying," he admits, "because they weren't really going to get my style, they'd want to change me and they wouldn't really understand me. It was just sort of a narrow-minded point of view of what would happen. After I really examined it, I realized I was just afraid. I wasn't afraid to apply because I'd be rejected. I was afraid to have to go there and say this is what I do."

Behrman did apply and was accepted, but he held on to that sense of being an outsider. Shortly before the Centre's industry screening of his short film Ernest, "I was talking to someone," he recalls, "and I said 'I don't see my films are ever going to be embraced by the mainstream. They'll never be appreciated.'" When the film screened two days later, "it was really successful, and I was getting calls from producers," he says. "I realized my excuses weren't working anymore. So it's been a slow, gradual thing of understanding that it's all a bunch of bullshit. It's just this veil that keeps me from being in the world and with other people."