Viewpoint St-Charles

>> Local drama The Point features
disadvantaged teens telling their own stories

by MALCOLM FRASER

Montreal-based filmmaker Joshua Dorsey has been most recently noted for directing the Internet porn documentary series Webdreams. But if his hands are at all dirty from porno-mongering, his other activities surely symbolically rinse them: he’s also the co-founder of Oxygen for Creativity, an organization that provides arts education to disadvantaged kids. In 2003, he workshopped the low-budget, improvised short feature One Day with his young charges; The Point is his follow-up, set in the proletarian, multicultural southwest Montreal hood of Pointe St-Charles.

Like its predecessor, the film stars a cast of non-professional actors made up of kids from the neighbourhood; this time around, rather than go for full-fledged improv, Dorsey and his co-writers developed a screenplay based on the young participants’ own stories. The multi-character narrative seems like an ambitious attempt to address every topic in a Pointe St-Charles teenager’s life. Amidst a web of typical adolescent issues—hook-ups, breakups, family problems, partying and general angst—and the hard-knock life of The Point, a handful of characters emerge to the fore.

Particularly memorable are Julian Kumarasinghe as a barely pubescent pot delivery boy, Jaa Smith-Johnson as a nerdy kid torn between his studies and the demanding social life of his friends, Taylor Baruchel as a socially phobic dépanneur clerk, and Tanya Bedard as the leader of an all-girl graffiti crew who make nightly murals in an about-to-be gentrified abandoned building that’s being cased out by a sexual predator.

The effort to squeeze in so many issues, combined with the unmistakably genuine but unpolished performances, sometimes makes The Point feel like a feature-length episode of the old-school Degrassi. But in the particular context of this film, where the process is as important (or more so) than the finished product, to criticize the content would be to miss The Point (excuse the pun).

It’s inspiring to see the kids collaborating to tell their stories; the enthusiasm they bring to the film makes up for its rough edges, and Dorsey has a good eye for the colour and character of the location. The result is a lively, sometimes ramshackle slice of Montreal street life that’s as earnest, energetic and charming as you’d expect from its adolescent talent.

The Point opens this
Friday, Nov. 30

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