>>PREVIEW
MONKEY WARFARE
Calgary International Film Festival
STARRING Don McKellar, Tracy Wright and Nadia Litz
DIRECTED BY Reginald Harkema
Tuesday, September 26
Uptown Screen
The Black Panthers, the Red Brigades, the Baader-Meinhof gang – they might not have brought down their respective establishments but at least they looked cool trying. The would-be revolutionaries of the ’60s and ’70s remain objects of considerable fascination. And while young people today may have trouble figuring out exactly why they’re so mad at the Man, they know that looking cool is half the battle. In the world of Monkey Warfare, the other half requires Molotov cocktails.
A radical-minded comedy that adds some heat to the Calgary International Film Festival, Monkey Warfare is the second feature by film editor turned filmmaker Reg Harkema. Real-life couple Don McKellar and Tracy Wright play Dan and Linda, two embittered bohemians living in a house in Parkdale, a grubby but gentrified neighbourhood in west-end Toronto. Their place is filled with evidence of their chosen vocation – selling off finds from local garage sales and junk piles to online collectors. After their dope dealer is arrested, Susan (Nadia Litz) becomes their new source for B.C. bud. Though she seems cool enough, Susan’s deepening attachment to the couple – and to Dan’s Baader-Meinhof books, Fugs records and other holy relics of radicalism – inspires incendiary ambitions. Bike-riding, balaclava-clad Bolsheviks are soon making the city unsafe for SUVs.
Acerbically funny yet imbued with surprising emotional heft, Monkey Warfare comes equipped with some Godard-tested tactics (jumpcuts, onscreen text, agitprop slogans), a mighty cool soundtrack (Comets on Fire, Pink Mountaintops, Leonard Cohen) and an instantly famous "hot chicks on bikes" montage. All the revolutionary action upends Toronto’s staid civic image, as does the sheer amount of clutter on display. Harkema, who moved from Vancouver to Toronto three years ago, was fascinated by the affinity of Torontonians for tossing junk to the curb.
"In Vancouver you’re not allowed to put garbage out on the streets," says the director in a series of interviews with Monkey Warfare’s creator and cast. "You can’t just put stuff out and wait for people to take it. So it was a new phenomenon for us, particularly for my girlfriend, who’s such a pack rat. I thought, ‘Someone could live off the grid by doing this.’ "
He connected that idea with two others. One originated in a screenplay that Harkema had written with Aeryn Twidle (who’d starred in Harkema’s first feature, A Girl is a Girl).
"That was about this pot dealer chick who was into radical politics," he says. But by the time the script was ready, it was September of 2001 and world events made it very difficult to pitch a movie that ended with a suicide-bombing at Toronto’s Molson Indy. (Harkema’s luck wasn’t much better with Better Off in Bed, a tour documentary about the New Pornographers that remains available only in Samizdat form since the band members won’t authorize its release.)
He was also keen on developing a movie vehicle for McKellar and Wright. Though the two have been romantic partners and artistic collaborators since the late ’80s, they’ve rarely played couples. The editor on McKellar’s features Last Night and Child Star, Harkema was struck by the chemistry they displayed in their few scenes together in the latter. Says Harkema, "Plus, I’d known Tracy and edited her before and I was like, ‘Fuck, why isn't anyone in Toronto featuring Tracy Wright in a movie?’ When she was in that Miranda July movie (Me and You and Everyone We Know), it was like an outsider had realized her brilliance but even that was a small role. So I was like, ‘I have to write something for Don and Tracy… what could it be?’"
The answer would exploit his fascination for ’60s and ’70s radicals (their images are scattered throughout Monkey Warfare) and his worship of another movie about a fraught love triangle, Jean Eustache’s New Wave classic The Mother and the Whore. Made on a microscopic budget, Monkey Warfare savvily celebrates and ridicules the ideals Dan and Laura have abandoned and Susan is all too happy to reclaim. McKellar and Wright are terrific as a couple who exist in a haze of guilt and pot smoke until Susan comes around.
Yet as absurd (or stoned) as their activities may seem, the characters are played without a trace of cheek or condescension.
"I think it’s definitely the case here that the comedy comes out of the situations, misperceptions and conflicts of the characters," says McKellar. "They’re all serious characters."
"I just read that Stanley Kubrick didn’t want to do Dr. Strangelove as a comedy," says Litz. "He shot it as a drama, but the more serious people were, the funnier it was. It almost worked that way for this, too. I certainly didn’t know the tone of the movie would be as funny as it was."
"We certainly didn’t want to feel like we were making fun of these characters or their aspirations or politics," says McKellar.
"That would be reprehensible," adds Wright.
More serious than it may look, Monkey Warfare returns repeatedly to questions about how one is supposed to go about changing the world and whether violent acts are ever justified. While Litz doesn’t necessarily agree with Susan’s methods, she connects with her nobler instincts. As the actor says, "Just because I feel like I’m part of the problem doesn’t mean I can’t be part of the solution." For Wright, the movie is partly about "the difficulty in acting politically – in doing anything." Yet McKellar says they don’t want this film to seem "defeatist" – by the end of Monkey Warfare, the trio have even become something of a family though, he reasons, maybe only "in the Manson sense."
Meanwhile, the director is pleased to have pulled off his own act of cinematic subterfuge.
"I like to think this is less a movie called Monkey Warfare than an act of it," says Harkema. "If a bunch of kids is inspired to start trashing SUVs, I’d be in the corner saying, ‘It’s not my fault,’ but I’d definitely be chuckling. In many ways the movie is my ‘Straight Outta Compton’-style revenge fantasy, leavened with a huge amount of cynicism." |
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