by SARAH ROWLAND

Take a nap. Chill with some friends. Pop a pill. Come up. Be at one with the dancefloor. Come down.

If you’re a sensible club kid, now is where you put away your glow stick and call it a night. If you’re not, however, this is when you regroup, crush more pills, snort them, chase the initial high, grind your teeth, make false promises to change your life for the better and profess your love to someone who you’ll later identify in NA as “spiritually toxic.”

Then spend the next day in the foetal position, cringing at every bullshit word you uttered the night before. Eventually, your appetite returns, self-loathing subsides and normal urination patterns resume. And by the following weekend, you’ll be ready to do it all again.

But the darker side of raver life is one that Montreal filmmaker Jim Donovan had no intention of exploring in his new film Pure, and he makes no apologies for it.

“Yes, I’m guilty of making a naïvely positive film,” says Donovan, who was a regular on the Montreal club circuit in ’99 and 2000. “But it would have been impossible for me to make a cynical film about clubbing because my experience was so positive. What I remember the most from that period was walking home with my girlfriend after the parties at like seven or eight in morning on a quiet Sunday with nobody on the streets. Sometimes we’d go to the park and just talk. So for me, the day after was the best part of it all—when you felt all warm and fuzzy inside.”

Which is exactly how you’ll feel too after watching his life-affirming, raver-friendly film about Misha, a botanically hip beauty who is trying to get off the party train so she can go back to university and study the science of plant behaviour. But an evil ex (Tim Rozon of Instant Star), incorrigible friends (including Karen Simpson of Saved by the Belles) and her own appetite for E keep pulling her back in.

Puffy party

Though Pure screenwriter Eugene Garcia affectionately refers to the movie as “puffy” viewing, the film’s star Laura Jordan insists there’s a bit more grit to his script.

“It’s definitely no Requiem for a Dream,” admits Jordan, referring to Darren Aronofsky’s 2000 drugbot drama. “Nobody overdoses or dies. But I think that Misha gets to a pretty dark and desperate place by humiliating herself pretty bad before she starts to rise again.”

Misha’s catalyst for change comes in the form of a life-threatening accident, a narrative tool that parallels Donovan’s personal experience.

“I was in motocross accident in ’98 that ended up leaving me bedridden for a month. But when I was on the ground waiting to go to the hospital, I thought I wouldn’t walk again. My mind was really playing tricks on me at that point,” he says, catching himself quoting a line from his own film. “But yeah, when you visualize yourself being paralyzed for the rest of your life, you start thinking, ‘Okay, this is really fucked. If I make it out of here in one piece, I gotta use this new opportunity to really do something.’”

Up until that point, Donovan was mostly shooting music videos, commercials and whatever people would pay him for, leaving very little time for filmmaking. “I was too focused on just working and not focused enough on cinema and I think the accident gave me that kick in the butt.”

Graver groove

Not only did dislocating his hip rejuvenate his filmmaking aspirations, it also served as a foyer into his raver life. It was shortly after he was discharged from the hospital that Donovan’s friend and former Concordia classmate Garcia introduced him to Yoda Den, Playground and Sona all in the same weekend.

“That put me in the rabbit hole for maybe two or three years,” says Donovan, who was in his early 30s at the time. “But I was lucky because I don’t have an addictive personality, so I enjoyed my time there, trying things out. But I was sort of older than the average clubber—I was what they called a graver. So I knew that my body could not have sustained being addicted to the stuff.”

“But I remember some club nights seeing some 15-year-old who was probably high on GHB, and I’d be thinking, ‘What the fuck is going to happen to this kid?’ So I guess being more mature helped me get through that phase.”

Although a lot of the film is based on Donovan’s own experience, he admits that, unlike Misha, he never had any problem getting off the party train.

“It was more like a gradual fade-out,” he says. “I fell in love and married that same girl I was partying with back then. After we got married, we would go out less and less, and our friends would come and go. But what really put the nail in the coffin was having children.”

Club guides

By 2003, he and Garcia were ready to make a movie based on their heyday, using a female protagonist. All they needed was a lead.

“I really wasn’t finding Misha,” recalls Donovan. “Everyone who auditioned was too much of an actor or just not right. Laura has a rebellious edge that a lot of people didn’t. She’s nuts. She’ll do anything. And when she read for the part, you felt as though you were watching someone who had partied a lot in her life, and as it turned out, she had.”

However, her all-nighters mostly revolved around rock shows.

“I didn’t have experience in the hardcore-techno-ecstasy-raver scene,” says Jordan, calling from a movie set in Poland. “But I was really interested in it because it’s such a huge part of Misha’s character. So I of course wanted to find out what it is she loved about it.”

So days before rehearsal was to start, most of the cast took the Toronto native out to some of Montreal’s finest clubs. This gave her enough to draw on as an actress; however, it didn’t do much for her rhythm. “I’m not really much of a dancer—Jim can second that,” she says. “I think that he was really upset that I was never able to pull off some cool dance moves and I’m truly sorry for that.”

What the film lacks in choreography it makes up for in beats. The soundtrack is a who’s who of local electronic talent, from Chromeo to Eloi Brunelle, and considering Pure’s budget, that’s no easy feat.

“I knew Maüs, Mateo Murphy, Misstress Barbara from back then,” says Donovan. “But it’s one thing to know the artist and quite another to have to deal with all the publishers and management teams that surround them. We were never really sure whether or not we could actually get a track from them until the very last minute, so it was surprising that someone like Misstress Barbara would practically donate a track to the film.”

As for Donovan’s future films, don’t expect to see his name on any other white-on-white projects any time soon.

“Pure was meant to be an experiment,” he says. “Eugene and I wanted to see if it was possible to make a movie that stays light and happy all the way through, just for this one film. And now that I got that out of the way, I have the rest of my life to make masculine films with plenty of blood, conflict and death.”

Pure opens Friday, Nov. 11

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