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Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Wavery Canadians

posted by on April 11 at 16:35 PM

So, Northwest Film Forum has been doing this series on Canadian nouvelle vague-inflected films from the sixties. It is awesome. Due to an ill-timed editorial meeting, I missed the press screening for the movie screening this week, Nobody Waved Goodbye. Apparently every other film critic in town did too, because when I went to see the movie last night, the lone press clipping posted on NWFF’s window was my sad rewrite of their calendar boilerplate.

Let me make amends. Don Owen’s 1964 film Nobody Waved Goodbye, financed by an unwitting National Film Board (which thought it was producing a documentary), is a slangy juvenile delinquency tale about a gap-toothed smart aleck named Peter (Peter Kastner) from the Toronto suburbs. Peter takes his father’s car for a joyride, is arrested for reckless driving, and spends the night in jail. Let’s just say he doesn’t quite get the message. The movie is unimaginative visually—actually, it reminded me of Mutual Appreciation, with its I-hate-personal-space close-ups and negligent mise-en-scène—but the acting is top-notch and the dialogue is hilarious. It’s definitely worth catching, especially if you’ve seen Rebel Without a Cause too many times and are still feeling restless. Showtimes are 7 pm and 9 pm tonight at Northwest Film Forum.

NobodyWavedGoodbye.jpg

Today I went back to the Film Forum to see next week’s entry, Michel Brault’s Entre la mer et l’eau douce. Apparently the francophones totally get mise-en-scène: There are so many amazing shots in this film, from the boatload of freshly cut logs making the voyage from the Quebec hinterlands to a doorway crowded with three fleurs-de-lis—in two corners of the molding and on a banner hanging just between them on a hallway wall. The plot concerns a sexy country boy named Claude Tremblay (Claude Gauthier) who goes to stay with his brother in Montreal for the winter, working petty jobs as he tries to make it as a folk singer. The road to fame is strewn with pretty girls: the Native woman he was embarrassed to be seen with at home, the waitress and dance instructor who hooks him up with an agent, the TV personality with an unhappy marriage. The story is sort of unsatisfying, but it’s so beautiful you won’t care. Entre la mer et l’eau douce screens next Tuesday and Wednesday at 7 and 9 pm.

Entrelamere2.jpg

And the week after that is the most amazing movie in the series, better than even the amazing Le chat dans le sac: The verité (which is to say, surely partially staged and definitely operatically edited) documentary A Married Couple, by the director of Warrendale.

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1

The road to fame is always strewn with pretty girls.

Posted by Will in Seattle | April 11, 2007 5:59 PM
2

I saw Nobody Waved Goodbye at this cool Canadian 60s New Wave series NWFF is running. (I also saw last week's fantastic Le chat dans le sac.)

Annie's Rebel Without a Cause comparison for Nobody Waved Goodbye is accurate. I'd actually go with Blackboard Jungle. Although: both of those American JD movies, while done nearly 10 years earlier than 1964's Nobody Waved Goodbye, deal with starker and racier subjects. (Nobody Waved Goodbye is about short-changing customers and cutting class.)

I dug Nobody Waved Goodbye a lot. Weirdly, while it is very "1950s," it also looks ahead. It hints at the languid/intropsective/gritty movies that dominated the screen in the early 70s. The reason I liked Nobdody Waved Goodbye (in addition to the fab acting that Annie notes) is that it has a chop chop plot clipping along at a speedy color-by-numbers pace. Those 70s movies often have vague, implied, slow plots. And so it was nice to re-imagine those great 70s movies with a poppy, bubble gum plot moving the ennui along.

Posted by Josh Feit | April 11, 2007 6:20 PM

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