Cinema Canada (Apr 1976)

photo Paul Appleby Lomez) after a party for Tom, and thinks she is still pining for her old fiancé, who jilted her. (Eulalie) chooses (Tom) because he understands her; he can hear the beauty of her music — he sees her as a total being and she him. Tom’s character in the film is completely based on Tom Thomson. But the film doesn’t deal with the facts of his life... He was a great mate for Eulalie. The rustic English Canadian woodsman with the pure products of French Canadian culture. JW The following criticisms may be applied to the narrative: 1. Eulalie is snobbish and exclusive in _ her appreciation of art. She is haughty to the housekeeper, who informs her that “it’s a working world, ma’am.”’ (But Eulalie is working, at her music. No one expects her to clean the house. The point is that she’s interrupting Ross’ serious work, his plan to rape the land for silver.) 2. The film is simplistic in its equation of progress with destruction. Surely bridges and roads and sewers are needed. (A just point, but outside the framework of this film. Wieland’s point is that Ross and Cluny, old army buddies, are as unthinkingly violent and irresponsible in their civil engineering as_ they were in war.) 3. Although Eulalie tells Ross that music is all she needs, she throws everything away to be with Tom, knowing that Tom’s painting is what 22 / Cinema Canada The artist Tom (Frank Moore) is visited by his patron Ross (Larry Benedict) and wife (Céline matters most to him. Had she not swum the lake, Tom would have pushed on north without her. Once again, women are portrayed as obsessed by men. Men have their work, women dabble. (Another just point, unanswerable. There were a few independent women of the period who chose to follow their work — Emily Carr was one. And there were many workingclass women’ who had no choice. Wieland’s feminism is obscured here by her emphasis on art — her point is that both Tom’s painting and Eulalie’s music are considered frivolous by the others. Eulalie does not have Tom’s option of taking her art into the wilderness. ) 4. The clearcut portrayal of character in conventional melodrama is rendered ambivalent here by psy photo Paul Appleby Eulalie (Céline Lomez) plays Debussey while Tom (Frank Moore) listens appreciatively chological undertones. Ross is pitiable, and Eulalie is arrogant. Tom and Cluny are more clearly drawn as opposing figures of white and black — Tom’s affinity to the land and Cluny’s lust and cruelty are more in keeping with melodrama than Ross’ uncomprehending love for Eulalie and Eulalie’s aristocratic disdain for Ross’ ignorance. Matters would be simplified if Eulalie were a simple village girl and Ross a cold-hearted villain. But, it is precisely this ambivalence, brilliantly caught and extended by Douglas Pringle’s musical score, which brings The Far Shore into late twentieth-century consciousness and avoids the pitfalls of period nostalgia, costume romanticism. I’m working with Doug Pringle the composer, having meetings listening to the score. It’s a delicate matter, talking music. But we look at the image and he tries to illustrate, sketching music and discussing what’s necessary. JW At the midpoint of the film there is a closeup of Eulalie’s face, pained by Ross’ insensitivity, lonely for the absent Tom. Iris in to her face in cameo, iris maintained while her face dissolves to a long shot of a canoe moving across a lake. Dissolve to a closer shot of Tom in the canoe, seen against a landscape of trees and water, strikingly reminiscent of the painting Tom gave Eulalie. (This shot was based on an actual painting by Tom Thomson, which has rarely been shown.) The sequence contains the essence of the film’s strength: a loving portrait of the land in which music and art could flourish, rooted in human love and _ natural beauty. It is a fable expressed in the form of a melodrama, shot in a clear, carefully framed yet flowing style, edited according to a structure of large segments composed of scenes linked by dissolves, beginning with a frame filled with sky and clouds, ending with a frame filled by dark water. Within the ambivalent frame of natural elements there is the frail construction of human life. The Far Shore is grounded in Canadian history — it is based on Joyce Wieland’s vision of the painter Tom Thomson, whose canoe was found overturned in a northern lake; on the character of Joyce Wieland’s motherin-law, a Quebecoise who was reared in a convent and prevented by her family from becoming a_ concert pianist; and on the melodramatic stories of James Oliver Curwood, a popular novelist of the period. Cur