by MATTHEW HAYS

Advance hype can certainly be daunting for a filmmaker. If the project doesn’t live up to the talk, a virtual media backlash can occur, while audiences may walk away resentful of burdened expectations.

If first-time film director Michael Mackenzie is at all nervous about his debut, he isn’t showing it. And there has been much talk of The Baroness and the Pig, produced by none other than local media guru Daniel Langlois, a full-length feature stage-to-screen adaptation that was shot entirely using High Definition Digital technology. “I’m happy with the film,” says Mackenzie, sitting down with a coffee to discuss the work. “In particular, I love the performances.”

Mackenzie has good reason to be happy. The seasoned theatre vet has taken his celebrated stage play of the same name and transformed it into a wondrous film experience, an astonishing film directorial debut. In a fitting use of new technology, Mackenzie has two very different women dealing with sea changes in society in 1887. The baroness (played by Patricia Clarkson, who is also fantastic in Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven as Julianne Moore’s duplicitous neighbour) is a wealthy American woman who moves to Paris with her husband (Colm Feore), where she attempts to begin a radical salon. The baroness finds the French aristocracy mighty difficult, especially after she takes an enfant sauvage under her wing, a woman who has literally been brought up by pigs and thus must be reprogrammed to exist within the elite. Set to a hypnotic score by New York-based demigod Philip Glass, the film is a clever contortion of themes of technology, identity and social progress. In a delicate high wire act, Mackenzie has managed to float numerous lofty ideas while never seeming too distant or academic; instead, audiences will find themselves thoroughly wrapped up in his characters and their various dilemmas. This is one of those rare films that makes you think by making you feel something.

Wiping away that theatrical residue

“For me, it was important to take the movie as far away from the play as possible,” Mackenzie says of the adaptation process. The writer had already had some experience with moving things from stage to screen, sharing the co-screenwriter credit with Robert Lepage on the Quebec City artist’s Le Polygraphe. “I’ve certainly seen a fair amount of stage-to-screen that has a theatrical residue. I’m not sure I always like that. It’s a very complex relationship. A film that I hold up is Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Mike Nichols has this incredible reverence for the original theatre piece—every word is reproduced. But he makes certain choices that I think have a lot to do with his influence by German expressionism, taking that whole hot house interaction psychological intensity and putting it on screen. You can analyze that film shot by shot and see how he visualized it, the way he combined technology with theatricality. That’s an example where it really works well.”

The adaptation task wasn’t quite so straightforward for The Baroness and the Pig. “The original was simply two characters on stage. Also, on stage I’m quite comfortable with the conceit of people speaking English who are supposed to be French. On film, I’m far less comfortable with that. It’s a problem I have with a film like Schindler’s List, where the actors are all speaking English with German accents. For some reason that really doesn’t work for me. Thus the Baroness became an American in this version.”

But key to this adaptation is the very medium Mackenzie’s working in. “The year 1887 was this extraordinary time. They were just about to get into moving pictures. They were just about to go into commercial cameras—the Kodak camera would come out the following year. Suddenly the whole notion of photography was becoming about mass consumption. The automobile wasn’t far off. There was this uproar: what was the next step? There was a great deal of experimentation going on.”

Techno-nostalgia

As Mackenzie points out, technology deeply effects and informs our sense of nostalgia, as well as our sense of identity and forms of storytelling. “When you look at a film like Memento, you can really see how technology affected that story. It had access to a reality that was full of click-on links. You followed that story in a way that would not be unfamiliar to someone who is used to being on a computer, going through something that has multiple points of access.”

Setting an historical drama in a digital medium—isn’t that a wee bit contradictory? Precisely the point, says Mackenzie. “Yes, the film has contradictory goals. You’re meant to be aware that you’re watching the new technology, and you’re meant to be abruptly put in a place where you’re feeling like those characters did, amid all this sweeping technological change.

“In Merchant Ivory films there’s a tremendous sense of going into the past, but I wanted this film to have the sense of contemporary people going into the past, rather than an historical epic piece. Glass’s music is perfect for that, because I feel there’s something timeless about it. If it had been a 19th century romantic score, I think the audience would get sucked back into that time. The idea was not to do that.”

For Mackenzie, there was a great deal of gratification after screenings at both the Toronto International Film Fest and Montreal’s New Film Fest. “This has been a fantastic experience as a first-time director, one I’m very grateful to Daniel [Langlois] for. One of the greatest responses I get is when people say they were expecting something very intellectual arthouse, but then find that they’ve become caught up in the story, the way that you can’t always in a Greenaway film. That’s been very satisfying.” :

The Baroness and the Pig opens Friday, Nov. 22 at Ex-Centris

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