Settling the score

>> Clément Virgo and Rossif Sutherland on
Poor Boy’s Game, their Halifax-set story
of boxing, violence and racial tension

by MATTHEW HAYS

Clément Virgo says the first time he worked in Halifax, the experience proved quite shocking. The Toronto-based filmmaker was there to work on a CBC special in 1998, and it was there, he recalls, that he found racial attitudes to be different from those back in T.O.

“I certainly had some bad experiences there,” says Virgo, while in Montreal to chat up his latest film. “In Toronto, it’s a lot more subtle. But in Halifax, you’d go into a restaurant, and someone would look at you, like, ‘This space is not your space. This space belongs to us and you’re not welcome here.’ I was quite surprised.”

Virgo decided that he wanted to go back at some point to make a film there. He also noted a different make-up of the black community in Halifax: “The blacks there have been there for a long time, they’re not recent immigrants. It’s much closer to a U.S. city in that respect.”

Virgo found his chance when he heard a pitch from a writer, Chaz Thorne. “The pitch was surrounding race, class and forgiveness. It was in some respects a film about white guilt. I wanted to change it a bit, to reflect the struggles of two families, one black, the other white.”

The result is Poor Boy’s Game, a boxing movie that confronts issues surrounding the racial divide in Nova Scotia with elegance and precision. The film stars Rossif Sutherland (son of Donald) as a young man who gets into a nasty brawl with a black youth in Halifax. The African-Canadian lad is badly hurt, suffering mental damage that will affect him for life. Sutherland then goes to prison for several years, where he learns to box.

But after many years, Sutherland is released, and the black community has not forgotten what he did to a member of their community, who will now be disabled for life. Complications arise when the man’s father, played by Danny Glover, decides to help Sutherland train as a boxer, despite the tortured past they share. A promising young black boxer challenges Sutherland to a round in the ring, to settle the score once and for all. Will Sutherland be stupid enough to take the challenge? Will the fight help to resolve the racial tension that grips this community or will it simply make things worse?

What makes a man

Without being earnest, Virgo attempts to make an honest plea for forgiveness rather than perpetuate the cycle of violence and grief that grips this small community. And it raises many of the same questions that Virgo’s films have done so artfully in the past, including his audacious 1995 feature debut, Rude. “I like to explore questions around what being a man is, about what kind of posture you’re expected to take as a man. I’m constantly trying to break that down. What are we supposed to be?”

Never one to shy away from the sensitive or potentially controversial, Virgo features a same-sex, interracial sexual tryst between Sutherland and another prison inmate early in the film. “There was pressure to take that scene out,” Virgo confirms. “I was like, no way. That’s part of what makes this guy real.”

Sutherland takes issue when I suggest his character is sexually confused. “He’s not confused. He’s a sexual individual, and he’s spent a lot of time in prison starting at 17. My character has this need to be held. I don’t see it as confusion, I see it as his being open enough to have that experience.”

But it wasn’t the homo sex scene that had Virgo on edge while he was making Poor Boy’s Game—rather, it was the boxing sequence. He knew he had a kick-ass cast in place. “I thought that Rossif had this amazing quality, like a Montgomery Clift or James Dean.” (Sutherland appreciates the comparisons: “I’ll take it.”)

“But the boxing scenes scared the shit out of me,” says Virgo. “There have been some great boxing sequences captured on film, so the bar has been set pretty fucking high. But you have to confront yourself. You have to go out of your comfort zone to figure out how to do it. As a result, the best, most interesting things come out of that risk-taking.”

Poor Boy’s Game opens this
Friday, Nov. 30

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