>>REVIEW
RADIANT CITY
STARRING Daniel Jeffrey, Bob Legare, Jane Macfarlane and Ashleigh Fidyk
DIRECTED BY Gary Burns and Jim Brown
Opens Friday, March 30
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Gary Burns pays attention to this city’s urban realities. After taking a satirical look at downtown office life in his 2000 film Waydowntown, the local filmmaker turns a timely and critical eye towards Calgary’s steady crawl across the province and delivers a perspective on suburban living and sprawl with his new film, Radiant City, co-written and co-directed with journalist Jim Brown.
And in case you’ve just moved here from, say, Toronto, real estate in Calgary has been a big deal for the past while. The scramble to own something – anything, it seems – is near rabid, and the explosion of both the economy and population seem very able to support the city’s growth for some time to come. Prosperity is fuelling Calgary’s outward spread as young professionals hitch-up and settle down to start families, each couple wanting their own private chunk of the good life, and planners and developers leap-frogging new communities further and further across the prairie to meet the demand for something "new" and "big," two words that are now pretty much synonymous with Calgary. With this in the background, Radiant City seems a perfectly timed critique, cleverly blending the line between documentary and fiction to tell its story.
Burns’s film is named after a 1930s urban plan conceived by the French-Swiss architect, designer and planner Le Corbusier. He imagined a future Modernist city where personal space and urban life were pretty much blueprinted and formulated down to the metre in a hyper-capitalist and programmed environment where nature became secondary, something controlled and subdued in the name of organization, progress and efficiency. Le Corbusier's Radiant City represented a regimentation of living in the city, and Burns knows this.
Shot locally, the film centres on the day-to-day of a young family, the Mosses, who live in Evergreen, a new community on the periphery of the city. Ironically, when the camera pans around the neighbourhood, there’s a surreal depiction of grey asphalt, concrete and tarmac, but there sure isn’t a lot of green.
While wife and mom Ann tells the audience why she desires the space that living in the suburbs allows her family, her husband Evan is heading up a play that pokes fun at the very type of place they live in. Interspersed with the community members’ perspectives on suburban life, Burns weaves in opinion and statistics that tell a rather bleak story about the communities that are sprawling across North America.
Burns captures the perspectives of Calgary architect Marc Boutin, as well as the thoughts of several other experts including the head of the University of Calgary’s Urban Design program, Beverly Sandalack, as well as James Howard Kunstler, author of "The Geography of Nowhere." Kunstler delivers several hilarious, deadpan speeches about the inanity of continuing to develop unsustainable, car-centric communities on the eve of an "era of energy scarcity."
Radiant City does allow the fact that these new communities have certain attractive elements, offering homes with greater room for families that provide an affordable opportunity to own and build equity. However, the statistics cited, the experts spoken to, and the images of the communities themselves tell a greater story of what suburban sprawl really costs, beyond a down payment or monthly mortgage. Radiant City makes you wonder if ownership is really worth the lifestyle trade-off or the long-term consequences of the unchecked growth. |
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