The river wild

>> Lynne Stopkewich manages a sturdy follow-up with the mysterious Suspicious River

by MATTHEW HAYS

Second features have proven mighty tricky for Canadian filmmakers. Expectations run high. Everyone wanted the world from Anne Wheeler after Loyalties. And Mina Shum’s Drive, She Said tanked after her arthouse debut Double Happiness.
But surprisingly, Lynne Stopkewich doesn’t sound the least bit fazed while chatting about her latest feature, Suspicious River. I guess I was expecting a wee bit of nervousness about the project, considering the waves her first feature, Kissed, made upon its release in ’97. And the jolts generated were hardly unexpected—the film featured Molly Parker as a woman turned on only by corpses. That being said, the bold first feature was an exercise in laudable cool restraint—a nonexploitative movie about necrophilia. Kissed had auteur written all over it, and critics rightly heralded Stopkewich as a visionary.

“So many people have asked me that,” she concedes of the second-feature question. “But it takes so long to get a film off the ground. I wasn’t really thinking about Kissed at all. This project jumped out at me. It didn’t feel a hard choice.”

Passing on Tinseltown

Stopkewich says she was approached by some L.A. producers who’d caught Kissed when it played there. They had the rights to the Laura Kasischke novel, and thought Stopkewich would make the perfect match. “I read the first chapter and was completely sold on it,” reports the Concordia film school grad. “There wasn’t a whole lot of convincing. I really wanted to do it.”

Told with the same cool detachment of her first film, Suspicious River is a taut tale of one woman’s trek into erotic danger. Again casting Parker in the lead, Stopkewich has her playing an emotionally tortured woman working in a grungy motel in a small town. She turns tricks for the occasional customer to make a few extra bucks, but when Callum Keith Rennie shows up, she’s smitten—despite the fact that he likes to slap her about. It’s an odd little love story—one virtually devoid of any love at all—yet strangely affecting. In other words, sheer Stopkewich.

After Kissed, Stopkewich did get a number of offers to make bigger-budget Hollywood movies. She turned down Ever After, the Drew Barrymore vehicle. She also turned down Girl, Interrupted, the Angelina Jolie-Winona Ryder movie. “I had basically made Kissed out of my basement, on a shoestring,” she says. “I didn’t really want to then end up on a set where the stars were calling all the shots. I wasn’t into learning more about filmmaking that way. I’m in a much better position to take on that level now, after doing another feature.”

Dark waters

Though Suspicious River, like Kissed, is page-to-screen adaptation, Stopkewich says this project presented different challenges. “Kissed was a short story, so I was in the process of expanding things, writing new things into the plot. But writing Suspicious River meant cutting things down, finding ways to tell her story, a story that takes place over a long period of time.” As well, Stopkewich says many of the scenarios in River hit close to home for her and, she suspects, for many women generally. “I don’t know any necrophiles. But I walk out my door and see women who are drawn to this sort of thing. That makes representing it more difficult.

“People must think I’m a very dark person by the films I’ve made, but I’m not. The other challenge for me here was filming all of the extreme situations she puts herself in. This is a very dark and violent book. I wanted to do it without being exploitational or explicit. I wanted the violence to be implied—for people to fill in the blanks in their own way. To me, it was a stronger choice to pull back. Even at that people find the movie really hard to take. The novel is way harsher.”

Stopkewich, who settled in Vancouver after doing a master’s degree in cinema at UBC, says she still longs for Montreal, her home town. And she says it’s fitting that Suspicious River will have its Montreal run at the Cinéma du Parc. “[Parc programmer] Don Lobel is actually the reason I went into filmmaking. He was my teacher at Dawson and really encouraged me down this path. I’m not sure I would have done it if it hadn’t been for him.” :

Suspicious River opens Friday, June 7 at Cinéma du Parc