National disaster

>>The heavy-handed drama Fugitive Pieces
sums up everything wrong with
English-Canadian film

by MALCOLM FRASER

I must begin this review with a confession: I am perhaps the least qualified critic in the land, if not the world, to review Fugitive Pieces, due to an apparent deficiency in nationalism. Every so often, I catch heat for allegedly being too hard on English-Canadian film and/or literature. When my standard defence—that I think that all forms of art, wherever they come from, need to be held up to the same high standards—falls flat, I can occasionally be forced, through rigorous interrogation, to admit that there are certain tendencies in mainstream Canadian narrative art that I do personally find distasteful.

In CanLit, these factors are an excessive reliance on melodrama (why have one tragic death when you can have several?) and an overly precious and poetic tone, overflowing with flowery language and sketchy metaphors, usually heavily derivative of Michael Ondaatje. In CanFilm, it’s the use of heavy-handed imagery, an unrelentingly bleak and sombre storyline, and an atmosphere of angst-soaked alienation, usually heavily derivative of Atom Egoyan.

You can therefore perhaps imagine my feelings of dread when confronted with the prospect of Fugitive Pieces, based on the novel by CanLit author Anne Michaels, and written and directed by Jeremy Podeswa (of the shamelessly Egoyan-biting The Five Senses). But I am a professional, serving at the tyrannical whim of my editor, and what films he assigns me, I must attend.

Fugitive Pieces begins during World War II in Poland, where young Jakob (Robbie Kay) watches from a hiding place as Nazi soldiers kill his parents and abduct his older sister. Fleeing into the forest, he’s discovered by kindly Greek archaeologist Athos (Rade Serbedzija), who spirits him away and raises him on a Greek island.

This story intercuts with the travails of the adult Jakob (Stephen Dillane), now a writer living in Toronto and still haunted by his past. His obsession with his childhood trauma drives away his girlfriend Alex (Rosamund Pike), and when Serbedzija dies, he returns to the island to try to exorcise his pain in a book.

Though Podeswa has been honing his craft in cable TV land in the years since The Five Senses, the film is strangely choppy. The storyline jumps back and forth, Egoyan-like, between different periods of the characters’ lives, forcing the viewer to fill in a lot of blanks. That’s not such a bad thing in and of itself, but only a master craftsman or a bold experimenter can pull it off, and Podeswa is neither.

A lot of subplots are left dangling or abruptly end without development, and Podeswa’s ham-fistedness leads to such moments as one where Dillane steps into a room and has a traumatic flashback, during the course of which he has another traumatic flashback to an even earlier scene.

This clumsy editing is matched with bland shooting, alleviated only by the occasional random camera movement. The actors, for their part, can only do their competent best with the leaden dialogue. All this could be forgiven if the film weren’t so self-important. But the inclusion of not one but two scenes where characters break into tears while reading Dillane’s writing push it over the edge into unintentional, and unfunny, self-parody. But if you’re a fan of mainstream anglo-Canadiana—and hey, who isn’t?—then don’t take it from me.

Fugitive Pieces opens
this Friday, May 2

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