>>REVIEW
STARRING Don McKellar, Tracy Wright and Nadia Litz
DIRECTED BY Reginald Harkema
Opens Friday, May 18
Uptown Screen
First, there was Cronenberg – the Canadian filmmaker who paved the way for contemporaries like Atom Egoyan, Bruce McDonald, Francois Girard, Guy Maddin and Don McKellar. Working in unison, they have spent the past three decades producing some of Canada’s finest films, while simultaneously setting the stage for a new generation of talent.
Enter Reginald Harkema, who got his start cutting iconic Canadian films like Hard Core Logo and Last Night. Having made the successful switch to the director’s chair with the Godard-inspired A Girl is a Girl, Harkema’s latest film, Monkey Warfare, pays tribute to many more of the great counter-culture films of the ’60s and ’70s, all but securing a place alongside Sarah Polley and Andrew Currie. He’s joined the ranks of Canada’s new wave of intellectually challenging filmmakers.
Don McKellar and Tracy Wright are Dan and Linda, two aging ex-radicals who have spent their latter years hiding from their checkered past while carving out a quiet, monotonous (if not tedious and hypocritical) existence scavenging discarded antiques to sell on the Internet. All is bearable until their pot dealer is busted, leaving them suddenly vulnerable to the harsh realities of their existence and increasingly lacklustre relationship. Desperate, Dan enlists Susan, an impressionable, young pot dealer and budding revolutionary, as their new supplier and so begins a dynamic relationship of innocence versus experience versus "the man."
Essentially a character study freed of resolution, Warfare plays like a requiem for the disillusioned – blending stark realism and dark biting humour with a touch of cheery, sexually based optimism to produce a bittersweet reflection on the notion of freedom.
Drawing heavily in terms of tone, theme and style from American anti-establishment films like Easy Rider, not to mention the French new wave films of Godard, Harkema grounds his characters in the problems of today, while simultaneously leaving them to yearn for the idealism of yesterday.
More than anything else, this picture triumphs because it practices what it preaches. Shot with a skeleton cast and crew on a shoestring budget (the film was financed by a line of credit), Monkey Warfare was liberated from all the restrictions inherent to outsider funds. A film whose production was made possible, not so much by capital, but by impassioned belief in a shared ideal – Monkey Warfare is a Canadian film worthy of its cinematic heritage. |
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