Saturday night At The Movies

SIFF-ting Through Celluloid-Part 3

By Dennis Hartley

I am continuing my series on a few of the highlights from the 2007 Seattle International Film Festival, which ran nearly 400 features and shorts May 24-June 17 this year.

This week, we’re heading north of the border and taking a look at a new Canadian film that I am hoping will find wider distribution in the near future.

“Monkey Warfare”, written and directed by Reginald Harkema, is a nice little cinematic bong hit of low-key political anarchy, tailor-made for a cult audience (think: “The Big Lebowski”).

The film stars Don McKellar and Tracy Wright (the Hepburn and Tracy of quirky Canadian cinema) as “off the grid” Toronto slackers Dan and Linda, who dutifully hop on their bicycles every morning at the crack of dawn to go dumpster-diving for “antiques” to sell on the internet. They live in a ramshackle rental, filled with the type of posters and memorabilia that suggest an aging hippie mindset, with a particular interest and nostalgic attachment to 1960’s radical politics.

The longtime couple’s relationship has become platonic; they interact with the polite diffidence of roommates making a conscious attempt to avoid pushing each other’s buttons. We quickly get the sense that Dan and Linda also have a stronger bond that transcends the relationship itself; perhaps a shared secret from their past that feeds a just-barely palpable sense of chronic paranoia tempered only by smoking pot. A lot of pot.

Panic sets in when their regular dealer is suddenly hauled off to jail. Despair quickly turns to relief when our heroine rides into town-not on a white horse, but on a bicycle (merrily flipping off honking motorists like Emily Lloyd in “Wish You Were Here”). Enter Susan (Nadia Litz) a spirited twenty-something pot dealer/budding anarchist who keeps her basket full of some heady shake she calls “B.C. Organic”.

When Dan invites Susan over to make her first pot delivery, she notices and becomes quite intrigued by his extensive library of subversive literature. Dan, who is deliriously baked on the B.C. and flushed by the attention of such an inquisitive young hottie, decides to give Susan a crash course in revolutionary politics, which (hilariously) includes dusting off his old MC5 and Fugs LPs. However, when he loans her his treasured “mint copy” of a book about the Baader-Meinhof Gang, Dan unintentionally triggers a chain of events that will reawaken long dormant passions between himself and Linda (amorous and political) and profoundly affect the lives of all three protagonists.

“Monkey Warfare” is not exactly a “comedy”, but Harkema’s script is full of great lines and the actors deliver them in that peculiarly Canadian deadpan manner that sort of sneaks up on you (Bill Murray is probably the most universally recognized practitioner of the affectation I’m referring to, which I like to call the “time-released zinger”).

Another thing I like about this film is how Harkema cleverly makes political statements without being overtly political. For instance, I love the fact that all of the principal characters (including a gang of eco-terrorists) ride bicycles. Obviously, Harkema is thumbing his nose at the oil companies, but he’s not hitting us over the head with it; it’s almost subliminal. There is also some basis in reality; the director partially modeled the Dan and Linda characters on the real-life “Vancouver Five”, members of the Canadian anarchist scene who were arrested in 1983 for their links to several politically motivated attacks, including an explosion at a Litton Industries factory where a component for the U.S. cruise missile was being manufactured.

By the way, if you do get an opportunity to screen this film (outside of Canada), be sure to hang around until after the credits roll. There is an audacious scene tacked on the very end in which a gentleman demonstrates, step by step, how to make a Molotov Cocktail as he prattles on in non-subtitled French (The scene was greeted with some nervous titters, even though it is mostly played for laughs- it’s certainly not something you see every day at the multiplex.) According to the director, who was at the screening I attended, this scene has been censored by the Canadian government and must be excised from any prints that are to be distributed in his home country. (Welcome to our brave new world.)

If you are a regular visitor here, you know I don’t use a rating system, but I am going to give “Monkey Warfare” an honorary “Eh?” plus!

Clearly Canadian: Roadkill (1989), Hard Core Logo, Highway 61,Last Night , Kids in the Hall - Brain Candy, Videodrome , Crash (1996), The Adjuster, Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter , I've Heard the Mermaids Singing, Why Shoot The Teacher, The Decline of the American Empire, Jesus of Montreal, Mon Oncle Antoine, Goin' Down The Road (Signature Collection), Apprenticeship Of Duddy Kravitz, Due South(TV series on DVD).


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