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Direct, she said >> Mina Shum on expectations and second helpings by MATTHEW HAYS
"Prior to making my first film," she explains from her Vancouver home. "I assumed no one cared about anything I did ever. Then came Double Happiness." Shum's first feature swept the fest circuit, with many a critic declaring it a landmark in terms of its representation of the second-generation immigrant experience. Shum, a graduate of UBC's film program, then embarked on her second feature. Shum describes Drive, She Said as an "epic female hero journey," her "version of a Western, of Hitchcock, of Truffaut..." Sounds pretty ambitious, and it is. Moira Kelly plays the film's protagonist, a hick-town bank teller who's in the midst of realizing just how routine, simple and downright dreary her life is. Then she gets taken hostage in a bank robbery that fails, and she's on the lam with her captor (Josh Hamilton), a man she finds herself increasingly attracted to. You're probably pausing--and with good reason: the Stockholm Syndrome? In the middle of a movie about a woman's liberation? "The bank robbery is the way she got out of this life," Shum explains, "but she is not a victim. Sometimes the most important leap of spiritual growth is when you lose control. This is the ultimate loss of control. In the end, she benefits." Shum says another major influence on the film was Wim Wenders. "In his films, the environment and landscape often dictate what their emotional state is. They're not very talky films." Shum says collaborating with her cinematographer, Peter Wunstorf, was sheer pleasure. "Peter understood that I wanted to convey things through compositions. He shares a certain European sensibility: 'Let's create an alternate world.'" For all of the mixed responses Drive, She Said has garnered, Shum says she's proud of the film and is now moving on to her next feature. Titled Fry Girl, it's the semiautobiographical story of an Asian girl who wins the best hostess title at McDonald's and uses the cash prize to fly to Britain to see her fave band, the Clash. "You can't let negative responses to films get you down. Drive, She Said is a bit like second album syndrome. You buy the second album and expect more of the first. It doesn't always work out that way." Drive, She Said opens Friday, November 20, at the Cinéma du Parc. See repertory listings for showtimes
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Mina Shum describes herself as naïve: it was one of the reasons she was dumbfounded by the terrifically mixed reaction her second feature, Drive, She Said, got at the 1997 Toronto Film Festival.