ONE WEAK INDUSTRY
by Daren Foster

***Canadian movies. Locked out.***

Finding myself locked out of the house one day this past week and with 8 hours to kill before anyone would show up to let me in, I decided to seize the opportunity and do something completely out of the ordinary. Maybe go and grab me some grub from a Mongolian hot pot. Or I could have a little sit in my local library branch and check out an old copy of National Geographic. How about a serious shop for some socks? I needed socks.

Instead, I head off to a movie. A movie? How out of the ordinary is that? I’m always watching movies. An argument could be made that perhaps I watch too many movies. And I really do need some new socks.

The thing is, I wouldn’t be wasting this chance to go see any old, run-of-the-mill movie. I would go and see a Canadian movie. A Canadian movie?! There’s a place you can actually go and see a Canadian movie?

For those of you non-Canadians who might believe, and logically so, that since I live in Canada I must see all sorts of Canadian movies, let me disabuse you of that notion. Canadians do not watch Canadian movies. In English speaking Canada, Canadian movies make up less than 5% of the total annual box office. Sometimes significantly less. Only in English speaking Canada could the country’s biggest film star make a $20 million film that grosses $5 million at the box office and still call it a hit.

While we may be insanely patriotic about our national pastime, our flavourless big brewery beers and toques, we do not hold our movies in such high regard. How can we when Hollywood takes up almost all screen time in every movieplex in the country? Tallying up their weekly receipts, Hollywood counts Canada as U.S. domestic box office. How’s that for the definition of ‘cultural imperialism’?

Now granted, there are other reasons why English Canada is so averse to its own cinema but this is an important point to underline. We don’t own our movie screens leaving us at the mercy of foreign distributors who tend to like to put high profile American films on as many of the screens as possible. Outside of the 3 major cities and some university towns, most Canadians couldn’t pay to see a Canadian film even if they wanted. When the occasional home-grown movie does catch enough attention and does stronger box office numbers than competing Hollywood fare, there’s no guarantee it will translate into a longer run where it can generate good word of mouth and allow more people to see it.

Having said that, there are other factors contributing to the overall lack of appeal of English Canadian movies for Canadian audiences. One possibility and how to say this delicately… they suck. OK, not all of them but enough that a pall of suckage hangs malodorously over the entire industry. I don’t think it’s intentional but it’s not always easy to tell. A culture of anti-populism runs rampant through the business. An art house aesthetic masks a basic inability to make a connection with significant numbers of viewers. Since we can’t compete with Hollywood (nobody can), let’s just make movies that only diehard film festival fans could sit through.

Any filmmaker who attempts to break free of that faces even further ghettoization. They don’t make a Hollywood film but they also don’t make a funding agency, film festival friendly film either. They’re orphans in an already orphaned film industry, ultimately forced to fall back on a completely manufactured sense of nationalism or an under-represented regionalism to get their project up and going.

Michael McGowan’s recent One Week smacks of that a little. Basically a solo road movie, it is little more than a travelogue wrapped in a stale conceit of the lead character dealing with a terminal illness diagnosis. A perfectly serviceable film produced on a shoestring budget, it ultimately ends up showing that McGowan may be a better director than screenwriter but that too is another questionable pillar of the Canadian film business: a slavish devotion to the auteur theory.

Check out the credits of any Canadian film (assuming you can find one) and chances are very good that the director will also be the screenwriter and quite possibly the producer, editor, star and maybe even the caterer. Part of that has to do with low budgets and it being cheaper for one person to do all those tasks, but there’s also a real expectation that if you are going to direct a film, you’ll be writing it too. It suggests a serious de-emphasis on the script as an integral part of the moviemaking process… I won’t dwell too long on this point lest someone take my criticism as nothing more than the sour graping of a failed screenwriter. Although, I think you can be both bitter and right at the same time.

Certainly, there’s no less dependence on auteurism in French Canadian films (it is their word after all) than there is in English Canada and I don’t think it’s a stretch to say our Quebecois confreres are much better at delivering the cinematic goods. Some of you may have noticed my specific referencing to English Canadian movies. The two solitudes definitely have two separate industries and entirely different identities. While perhaps not flourishing, the French Canadian film industry is -- comme dit on -- on the whole, better and more popular even outside Quebec and, surprisingly, much more mainstream than English Canadian cinema.

Sure, they have more of a captive audience than in English Canada. A unique culture and language looking to their artists to provide content they couldn’t get from anywhere else in the world. Rather than responding in an insular fashion, French Canadian filmmakers turn out movies that oftentimes resonate far more universally than their English Canadian counterparts.

It's Not Me, I Swear! (C'est Pas Moi, Je Le Jure!) is a new film out of Quebec that has caught the fancy of non-Francophones, being named Best Canadian Film by the Vancouver Film Critics and winning the Crystal Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. While not groundbreaking or earth-shattering, it is a very charming movie with some of the best child actor performances I’ve seen in awhile even though the movie’s lead does bear an eerie resemblance to the young Macaulay Culkin. A coming of age story -- which is to French Canadian films what incest is to English Canadian movies; so you’re getting a sense of why one is more popular than the other -- it deals with highly charged emotional family dynamics with a lightness of touch that invites audiences along for the ride rather than keeping them away in droves.

Still, It’s Not Me, I Swear! faces an uphill battle to actually be enjoyed by many folks in its own country. Relegated to a short run at a neighbourhood rep house, it can only hope to approach the audience it deserves when it reaches DVD and TV movie channels. (That’s where I end up seeing most of my Canadian movies.) It’s a fate that sends many filmmakers into full artistic retreat, creating movies that only their most devoted fans and a few guilt ridden family members will go out to see. Thus, a vicious downward cycle forms where more and more movies generate smaller and smaller audiences making it increasingly difficult for those willing and able to watch a Canadian movie to find one to watch.

Instead, we’ll go out and get ourselves a new pair of socks.