At a time when all Hollywood seems to be able to give us in this area is AIDS stories, along comes a refreshing blast of Northern air. Pardon me for waxing philosophic, but sometimes Canada seems like what the United States could have been if only we'd had a little more luck.
Pascale Bussieres plays Camille, a professor of mythology at a religious college. Her dog dies. So she puts it in the freezer and goes to the Laundromat to wash her clothes and cry. There she meets, and is consoled by Petra (Rachael Crawford), a circus artist whose touring company happens to be in town. Petra, smitten by Camille, slyly takes the professor's laundry in order to insure a second rendezvous. The stage is set.
Running interference is one of Camille's fellow professors, Martin (Henry Czerny), with whom she has had a lengthy, if somewhat dispassionate relationship. The dean has offered both Martin and Camille a joint position as pastor of the college. The rub is that they have to get married. Martin is hot for the idea. Camille is, well, she's exploring her feelings...and then eventually Petra's body. Will Camille throw her old life away to follow this vagabond circus artist? Or is she too afraid of change?
As you can see from my outline, if it weren't for the gender reversal of replacing the pursuing male with a pursuing female, this might appear to be a fairly stock love story. Fortunately, it's not. Director Patricia Rozema has a knack for unusual comedic touches that work on several levels to both defeat and embellish the stock plot line. For example, as Camille stands in her office arguing with Martin, Petra squats on a tree limb outside, grinning like a mischievous nymph. As a circus performer, Petra's soul is expressed through her sensuality. So there she squats, purely physical, on the tree of life, and in the center of this religious college, a bastion of the life of the mind. Her savage and colorful presence calls the entire gray stone college into question, makes it seem unreal, and silly. This scene also links subtly with an earlier scene in which Petra is shooting arrows with love notes on them through Camille's bedroom window, and in a Robin Hood cap no less!
Rozema is also careful to not neglect the visual. She houses Petra in a little black camper, shaped like an egg. When Camille comes to a circus rehearsal to trade her clothes back, Petra is practising a routine in which she dances behind a white sheet, while juggling projected eggs. Rozema even takes electrical transmission towers and transforms them from male to female symbols. The camera takes the viewer beneath the structure, and then up its insides. It reminded me of a conversation I had recently with a friend of mine, in which she claimed that the snake is actually a feminine symbol, because of the way it swallows things whole. After seeing this scene I'm starting to agree with her.
The director's visual sense remains playful throughout the film. When the girls get down to the love thang, she has them on a huge red velvet pillow. As the camera moves down from above we see that it resembles a sea shell. She's giving us Botticelli with a double Venus. And it's here that the film is at a make or break point. Love stories must rest upon the physical. We have to feel that simple thing, a sense of honest longing, when skin at last touches skin. A lot of films fall flat on their face at this juncture. And I'm not just talking about sex. The physicality of love can be adequately handled with a touch or a kiss, but get it wrong, and the crowd starts noticing things like the fact that there's a booger on the seat-back, or that the guy one row down needs to shave his neck.
Rozema does not screw this up. She screws. The scene of Camille and Petra's love-making is both sentimental and animalistic. In a daring visual move, high above the Botticelli half-shell, she intercuts the graceful movements of two trapeze artists rehearsing a stunningly sensual routine. And this is not done to inject life into a stale sex scene. Rozema can film sex.
All Thanks For This Review and Everything In It Goes To This Webpage: Click Here It saves me a heck of a lot of time explaining this great movie if someone else has already done it for me, and quite articulately, too. :)
