Cinema Canada (Sep-Oct 1978)

has been made while rehabilitating in Okala. Through meetings in topless bars, featuring tasteless shows almost comic on screen, Brennan’s circle of contacts grow. They lead him into violence — a jewelery store robbery, ridding the street of “Frenchie” competition — and then into employment suited to his professional training, cutting drugs for street distribution. But he reveals a sort of Hawksian ethics: he only cuts the drugs with pure materials, and refuses to bend when grilled about the high costs. These developments are intercut with Brennan’s long treks through nameless streets, effectively building suspense while he searches documentarily filmed passersby for the face of his daughter. Often, he visits the methadone maintenance clinic to exchange his urine sample for his surrogate drug and to report his findings to Larry, disguised as a doctor. “Dr. Fraud” Brennan puns on their first meeting, one of many one-liners offering comic relief. The effective one liner, de rigeur in the fast cutting TV milieu, seems a forte of scriptwriter B.A. Cameron. When Brennan’s virility is questioned, one character quips “He couldn’t get it up with spray starch and splints.” During an early restaurant stop he witnesses a theft from a car. In what at first appears to be a documentary long shot, a girl, played by newcomer Sarah Torgov, takes a camera but is caught by a black man, ironically wearing a white hat. Arguing, the two conveniently enter Brennan’s restaurant where he overhears the man offer to take the girl home and put her up with the help of his woman. The audience knows the girl, Anne, is the archetypal runaway. Her fate, despite that easily identified with signs of middle class success — beauty, poise and, for a teenager, pimple-free skin — will be that described earlier by Larry. Predictably, too, her fate becomes entwined with Brennan’s. She shows up as a waitress in his haunt, then as a shy, reluctant participant in a topless stage show. At first she is shielded by Shiela, the hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold played by Jayne Eastwood with her usual super competence. But Sheila’s shield is as short-lived as Sheila. She is terminated violently for squealing to the police after refusing to allow her daughter to stand-in for a member of a pedophilic daisy chain, staged with a drugged Anne for the benefit of porn-tographers. Only an inventory could do justice to the many ways Anne is degraded. At one point she is referred to as a “facility,” a term to raise the ire of even a closet feminist. Brennan is aware of this; the fatherly concern he should have shown for his daughter is inexorably transferred to Anne, even as her addiction is slashed into our consciousness by the close-up of needle tracks along her delicate white arm. Most of this would be straight TV formula, tame or violent enough for Kojak, were it not for Spry’s skill and wit in rendering the material. He has such feeling for form, he can make socio-political statements, nouvelle vague references, and toss off a few nods to the NFB — all without eroding the entertainment values treasured by the apathetic, unpoliticized “home viewing audience.” In sex and violence Spry tells all but shows only just enough. A man’s eye is poked out. Several shootings take place. Using a montage in which shots of perpetrator and victim (always backing away from the camera until stopped by a wall ) are intercut with steadily increasing rapidity, Spry never includes the explicit shot of bullets Or instrument striking. This shot is filled in by the viewer from that fund of experience informed by the glut of violent photographic images seen daily, or the apparently innate capability of humans to visualize gore. The moment of violence occurs between frames, in the mind of the viewer primed by fast cutting. Where the sharp instrument is used, the thug wielding it says more people will be wearing eye-patches, on the last word there is a witty cut to a fig leaf on an alabaster David in the bar, an eyepatch if ever there was one. Later the same thug says, “The citizens have their police, we have ours.” Criminal violence differs little from socially sanctioned violence. In this bizarre world, where promises to do anything in return for a fix are honored, Anne is put to the test with FILM REVIEWS the sexually imaginative (or perverted, if you prefer). However, the explicit shot is filled in again by the viewer, who may discover his/her sexual imagination has a wider range than earlier thought. The casting of almost grotesque lesbians seems questionable, perhaps designed to confirm male chauVinist prejudices. Brennan’s treks through the streets are done in long takes, Francks forcing the action towards the camera in another mandatory TV technique which forces the camera to reverse dolly and create an attention grabbing, always changing backdrop. Invariably, these shots are filmed in hazy overcast, a lightwhich mutes the colors and adds a bluish cast expressive of Brennan’s alienated state of mind. In these sequences a notable time transition has been used: he stops to study strip joint pictures for his daughter’s likeness; there is a cut to a subjective shot, hand held; and when the objective shot follows, it is night. This is smooth, yet, momentarily an expressive disorientation in time. Several distancing devices are used, also with irony. Several times two large neon yellow A’s appear behind Brennan; they grab attention, invite only impossible interpretations. A neon record flashes behind his head, becoming a halo — a crassly commercial one. Later, Brennan is hooded and violently shoved into a back seat, but the low angle composition of the shot emphasizes the “Keep Ontario Beautiful” on the license plate. The plot progresses while with simple juxtaposition Spry criticizes the head-in-the-sand attitude to socially reality manifest by bureaucratic sloganeers. The plot is resolved neatly, as expected from a made for TV flick, but not without more gut-grippling moments of suspense, the seemingly obligatory chase scene, and the somewhat implausible way Brennan leads police to the king pin’s mansion. Some questions, however, remain. Casting a black (Calvin Butler) as a pimp, white stetson not withstanding, might confirm the racist prejudices now bubbling below the smug. surfaces in Canada — unless this is a marketing ploy for stateside acceptance. Torgov is a remarkable young actress. Cinema Canada/71