Review
WAITING FOR MARTIN
Featuring David Bernans
Directed by Magnus Isacsson and Sophia Southam
Monday, April 19
Uptown
It’s no secret that Montreal’s Concordia University is predisposed to student activism. Some of Canada’s biggest protests have found their wings at Concordia, with demonstrations erupting over everything from visits by former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the Red Cross’ exclusion of gay men at blood donor drives. It’s an activism to be proud of in apathetic times.
During Paul Martin’s term as finance minister, his scheduled lecture at Concordia was cancelled, due largely to growing fear over anti-globalization protest. It was one of several opportunities for debate sorely missed by NDP student activist David Bernans. Fortunately, filmmakers Magnus Isacsson and Sophia Southam were there to cover Bernans’s attempts to meet Martin, and followed his efforts over three more years before stringing it together into a poor man’s version of a Michael Moore film.
The result is Waiting For Martin, a choppy, one-hour documentary completed prior to the recent sponsorship scandal. With no support from the private sector, Isacsson and Southam completed the film against all odds, an admirable enough accomplishment given the film’s premise. Shot at private functions and public protests in Montreal, Toronto and Ottawa, Waiting For Martin is more about Bernans’s wait than any final showdown with Martin himself. But then, that’s the point.
Interspersed with Dada-inspired animation, Bernans’s cheesy folk songs and statistics on Martin’s slashes to health and education, Waiting For Martin fares poorly compared to say, Moore’s Roger and Me. As provocateur, Bernans is far less charismatic than Moore, with little admirable rhetoric of his own. Without insight into how Bernans can do things better, we watch him campaign in Martin’s own riding, behave like a media whore, and demonstrate at events like Montreal’s G20 Summit protests in 2000. His failure to meet Martin deserves attention, but Bernans spends so much time conversing with Paul Martin puppets, one occasionally forgives anyone for avoiding him.
The film does have decent enough moments for Martin naysayers – including a scene in front of Martin’s office in his own riding where Bernans camps out and meets some of Lasalle-Émard’s intriguing inhabitants. Bernans eventually poisoned the office as an election site, and later gathered the attention of Martin’s campaign manager and a strange brew of other party campaigners.
One would guess from the film’s title that an exchange between Martin and Bernans would happen near the end. It occurs much earlier, in a badly edited jump to 2003 when Bernans crashes a meeting of the National Press Club at the Ottawa Press Gallery. Any exchange is cut short when Bernans gets thrown out, humorously enough for being a freelance journalist and not a "real" member of the press. Yet Bernans is so out of step so often, with so little eloquence, that it’s hard to be sympathetic.
As a film about the dos and don’ts of student activism and protest, there’s a lot to learn from Waiting For Martin. Considering the more recent sponsorship scandal however (and the witch hunts predicted for election 2004), there’s a lot more to be learned about Martin on the boob tube these days. |
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