This weekend I saw my first Canadian movie of the year. And, delightfully, it was in a theatre. The High Cost of Living is a drama set in Montreal, and stars Zach Braff (yep, that American guy from Scrubs) and Isabelle Blais. It’s Deborah Chow’s first full-length film, and it won Best Canadian First Feature at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival, where it debuted.
Braff plays aggressively against type as a scruffy American with an expired visa, dealing drugs from his dingy apartment in Montreal’s Chinatown. Braff and Blais’s characters are involved in a car crash that spins their lives off in new, unexpected directions.
Here’s the trailer:
The High Cost of Living is seriously dark, in a tradition of bleak Canadian movies like The Sweet Hereafter and Crash (the one with the autophilia and without Brendan Fraser). Men With Brooms, it is not. It’s also a bit dull–not enough happens to satisfactorily fill the film’s 93 minutes.
In looking at film and television (and theatre and radio, I suppose) this year, I’m principally interested in how Canadian a movie or show is. I’ll provide a bulleted list of Canadian elements, and then rate its overall Canadianess out of five. Five poutines, that is.
How Canadian was this movie?
The High Cost of Living was this Canadian:
- Though the city is never explicitly named, it’s set in Montreal.
- Roughly half the dialogue is in English, and half is in French.
- People use Canadian money.
- It snows.
- The film subtly criticizes the Canadian medical system.
- An American discusses the differences between Canada and the US.
- An American star slumming it in a recognizably Canadian film, reinforcing our inferiority-complex about homegrown films.
For these and other reasons, I’m giving The High Cost of Living three out of five poutines.
Poutine photo by Rosanna Mignacca.
Great! Now I’m craving poutine!
hm. i wouldn’t call being in a canadian film “slumming it” … we have got some of the best filmmakers in the world up here! not to mention some of the biggest stars in the industry that hail from the great white north. Don’t propagate the idea that our film industry here is inferior. Just because we have a penchant for films with actual plots, and intelligent dialogue and a lot fewer fireworks, doesn’t make them inferior to hollywood counterparts. And, well, Zach Braff isn’t Ryan Reynolds, now, is he?
p.s. Check out some Sarah Polley films if you want to see some particularly good canadian work.
Hey, it’s that cupcake poutine image, isn’t it?
https://www.flickr.com/photos/2vu/4128144792/
So that makes it a three sweet poutine rating
Wow! How did you remember the photo!
Kera: I should emphasize that ‘slumming it’ had to do with how much Mr. Braff was likely paid, not necessarily that he was starring in a shoddy film.
Martine: Indeed it is–totally forgot the Creative Commons attribution. Also, as I’ve never eaten poutine in my life, I didn’t actually notice that it was an abnormal example. I just picked it because it was shaped right and had a clean background.
Yeah, I don’t know about your criteria when applied to creative works. Does a film have to be set in Canada to be Canadian? Does it have to snow? Does it have to fulfill every one of your preconceived negative notions?
Nancy: I wrote about my criteria here.
Which preconceived negative notions are you referring to?