Canadian Enough for You?

Some personal news: I’m a big shot now! I’ve just been named TIFF’s acting lead programmer for Canada, which is an honor both profound and terrifying. Mostly terrifying. I’ll also be programming our Industry Selects series again, continuing to co-host Secret Movie Club and working on plenty of other stuff throughout the year, but the Canadian file is the big deal, for obvious reasons. It’s also why this week’s newsletter is a little late, as you can imagine.

But it’s exciting, and it offers me a whole new angle into our national cinema – just at a point when we’re collectively debating what Canadian cinema even is. Although I suppose we’ve always been doing that, as a nation. Canadians love nothing more than to argue about definitions and quantifications – I think we got that from the English – and the current concern, at least in cultural circles, is whether said culture is Canadian enough to survive the deluge of foreign content that streaming has created.

I’m guessing a good percentage of you will have heard about Bill C-11 by this point, and maybe even have an opinion on it; personally, I think it’s a good idea to get streaming services to contribute to the production and distribution of Canadian content for Canadian subscribers. The only downside is that someone will absolutely try to reboot The Trouble with Tracy and The Starlost out of spite, and a lot of good people will suffer. But at least they’ll be Canadian.

See? It’s messy. Or it will be, once the CRTC gets involved and starts calculating funding support with a points system based on how many Canadians are at craft services at any given moment. And realistically I assume any actual impact from the bill is still several years away, because that’s how government works.

In the meantime, we can focus on another curious aspect of Canadian arts culture, which is the way we don’t fully appreciate our artists until they’re recognized elsewhere, and then can’t wait to tar them as sellouts. This week, for instance, the fact that Sunday’s Academy Awards ceremony will feature more Canadians than usual – many of whom have a pretty good shot at winning something – has led to some weird pearl-clutching around another fact, which is that most of the projects for which they’re nominated aren’t technically Canadian.

Domee Shi’s wonderful Turning Red is a Pixar production. Sarah Polley’s Women Talking was financed by Brad Pitt and Dede Gardner’s Plan B. And of course James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water is a Disney joint, because what other company could afford to fund an Avatar sequel?

Does that make these films less Canadian? Probably! Does it make the Canadians who made them less deserving of praise and attention here at home? Of course not! But As Barry Hertz wrote in The Globe and Mail, it’s complicated.

Let’s focus on Women Talking, and not just because it arrived on Blu-ray this week in an excellent transfer, though disappointingly without a single supplemental feature. I’m hoping this means a proper special edition is in the offing, because a film as powerful and relevant as Sarah Polley’s piercing adaptation of Miriam Toews’ novel deserves that sort of presentation.

Yes, Women Talking was produced with American money. (Frances McDormand bought the rights to Toews' book; of course U.S. financing would be the first logical step.) But it’s weird that this is a sticking point for anyone, because that’s how a lot of movies get made – especially Canadian movies that require budgets of a certain scale.

Women Talking wasn’t expensive compared to the Avatar or Top Gun sequels, but most Canadian productions can only dream of its $13 million budget. And it’s distinct from the other projects mentioned above because every frame of the picture was shot in Canada with a predominantly Canadian cast and crew. If it’s somehow contentious for Sarah Polley to make a movie here and get a foreign entity to pay for it, just wait until people hear about David Cronenberg and Norman Jewison’s studio work in the ’80s and ’90s.

But is a film somehow less Canadian because we didn’t pay for it? I didn’t see anyone suggesting we distance ourselves from Guillermo Del Toro’s The Shape of Water – which, like Women Talking, was an American production made entirely in Ontario – when it won Best Picture (and Best Director, and Best Production Design, and Best Original Score) a few years back. Maybe it speaks to the inherent distance of that film being set in the U.S., featuring a largely international cast and being directed by a Mexican filmmaker. A Mexican filmmaker who made his home in Toronto for a decade or so and built a damn studio here, but whatever. Somehow it’s more of a surprise to hear Women Talking isn’t fully Canadian.

And maybe that’s because it’s a Sarah Polley movie, and if there’s one thing people know about Sarah it’s that she’s Canadian. It’s hard to find a profile of her that doesn’t point out she passed up a career in Hollywood to stay in Toronto, and while that’s technically true it also kind of sells out the other side of that truth, which is that one can have an entirely decent career making movies in Toronto, creating work that stands equal to the shiniest American productions when Oscar comes calling. The Shape of Water is proof of that, after all. So is Women Talking, whether it wins or not Best Picture.

Best Adapted Screenplay feels like a lock, though. That’ll be nice.

Women Talking is now available on Blu-ray from Universal Studios Home Entertainment. The 95th Academy Awards take place in Los Angeles on Sunday, March 12th, and damn right I am excited to see what happens.