Cinema Canada (May 1980)

SS sssssssessssessssssssssnssesesesneseeseeeenmeneenesenamumamanun still in the bathroom trying to act employed and salve his dignity. Jocelyn Bérubé plays the soulful Armand with real sensitivity and restraint. This is the kind of role which leaves audiences feeling that acting is not really work, and at the same time, as if they've just been through a psychological sauna. Bérubé is great — in spite of the inconsistent script. There is a shot of Armand and Thérése coming out of arestaurant on the evening they are finally going to have together, that locks the image of poignant incongruity forever in one’s mind. Andrée Pelletier is not yet wholly at ease before the camera. There are times when her brightness seems false. In her sobered moments though, her voice and bearing have just the right cowed uncertainty about them. (She isn’t helped by the confusing shift of focus in the middle of the film; the Dorion character is almost lost while we follow the frustrated suburban housewife through her paces.) Pel letier brings a certain classiness to the screen, and this may prove an important role for her. There are other fine performances, by Marcel Sabourin and Gilles Renaud. For the most part though, Lanctdt’s secondary characters are disappointingly one-faced. While the music (by Francois Lanctét) is often predictably emphatic, thus obtrusive, the film affords two striking musical moments. The first, when Armand, at the height of his passionate courting, leaves Thérése alone in the kitchen while he plays her a violin serenade from behind the bedroom door. We are so conditioned into equating docility with weakness that we forget it can be heroic. And Gilles Vigneault’s closing ballad (“All roads lead to the city...”) is a winning movie theme song, in any language. Joan Irving Margaret Laurence, First Lady of Manawaka p.c. National Film Board 1978 exec.p. Roman Droiter p. William Weintraub d./sc. Robert Duncan art.d./research Ronald Blumer d.ph. Barry Perles cam.assist. Andy Kitzanuck sd. Michel Hazel, Bernard Bordeleau re.rec. Jean-Pierre Joutel mus.ed. Don Douglas ed. Sidonie Kerr elec. Don Caufield unit admin. Tamara Lynch col. 16mm running time 52 min. 52 sec. distrib. National Film Board. «Art, in fact, is never life.» Margaret Laurence To my mind, a particularly challenging form of documentary is the film which attempts to explore the life and literary work of an eminent writer. The special challenge that arises from this endeavor stems from the subtle interrelationship between the ‘events’ in imaginative fiction and the events in an author’ life. No matter how close an author's real life experiences are to his or her literary creations, it can be argued that, ultimately, the literature transcends those objective correlatives, to achieve its own life and symbolic meaning beyond the confines of biography. According to this view, the whole of the literary work is more than the sum of the author's life. Thus, the documentarist who would explore the life and work of an author must walk a fine line, balancing the tensions between two realities — imaginative and biographical. Two recent films which, in my opinion, have achieved this difficult and delicate balance are David Kaufman’s A.M. Klein: The Poet As Landscape and Donald Brittain’s Volcano: An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry. Because filmmaker Robert Duncan was producer for the latter work, I anticipated that his directing of Margaret Laurence, First Lady of Manawaka would merit a similar distinction. Duncan is a Scots-Canadian who came to Canada in 1967. He worked as a journalist for the Montreal Gazette until 1968, when he began writing for CBC productions. In 1974, he began his liaison SORT FILM REVIEWS with the NFB — writing for, producing, and directing several projects, including the Lowry film and the delightfully penetrating profile of ad-man Jerry Goodis, entitled Have I Ever Lied to You Before? for which Duncan served as writer. “First Lady of Manawaka was made,” says Duncan, “to help readers, students and admirers understand Laurence’s background and its relationship to her works.” Interviews with her childhood acquaintances — including a teacher, a neighbour, a piano instructor — recollections from Laurence herself, and information provided by a voice-over narrator, convey to the audience a sense of Laurence’s early life : the loss of her parents, the influence of the United Church, the importance to her of ancestry, her inner compulsion to write — which had already emerged by the primary grades. Laurence speaks of her sense of isolation until high school, when she found that she could write for the school paper. The excitement of this discovery made her feel that “maybe I actually have some talent that is socially acceptable.” We learn of the impact on her life of the Second World War, then university, work, marriage, travel, children, divorce. The film makes use of still photographs, old film footage of soldiers returning, newspaper clippings to create a feel for the past. By intercutting anecdotal recollections with readings from the novels, the film interweaves the biographical with the literary. But in doing so, it suggests a simplistic cause-effect relationship, as though we must find our way through her literature mainly by knowing her life. This is perhaps most evident and irritating in the decision to show us tracking-shots of modern-day Neepawa, Laurence’s hometown, while we hear on the sound-track actress Jayne Eastwood reading passages Council of Canadian Filmmakers ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING Wednesday, May 28, 1980 7:30 pm Art Gallery of Ontario Lecture Hall 317 Dundas Street West, Toronto, Ont. (McCaul Street Entrance) Membership available at the door For Information : (416) 869-0716 Cinema Canada/35