Long Live the New Flesh
Let’s get it right out of the way: by any non-subjective metric—which is to say in spite of my own personal opinion—the Canadian filmmaker of the decade is Xavier Dolan, who placed six features (including two major Competition prizewinners) at Cannes between 2009 (let’s give him a one-year head start) and 2019, all before turning 30. Prodigies are as prodigies do, and debating Dolan’s gifts as a transnational melodramatist and zeitgeist-tapper is a mug’s game, one that I’ve already played in these pages. If the five years since Mommy have seen our proudly quétaine (anti-)hero humbled a bit, it has as much to do with his lightning-rod persona as the qualitative decline (such as it is) embodied by the misbegotten English-language salvage job The Death and Life of John F. Donovan (2018), a movie that inadvertently self-allegorizes as what one of its characters calls a “First World mishap.” One point for your consideration: on Donovan, Dolan had the guts—and the bottom-line creative control—to snip no less than Jessica Chastain out of the final product. Good luck finding anoth-er working Canadian director (short of, say, James Cameron) with the stroke to even cast that level of actress, much less leave her on the cutting-room floor.
Youth, they say, is wasted on the young, and Dolan’s impending battles with his own encroaching maturity will undoubtedly figure into his (likely exclusively en français) 2020s output. But when taking a wider look at the past decade in Canadian cinema, the common denominator uniting exciting and vanguard work across a variety of regions, modes, and film-industrial contexts was a youth movement—one that placed the contemporaneous struggles of ex-vanguard veterans and comfortably subsidized lifers in sharp relief. Of the seven individuals with films from 2019 tapped for this year’s Canadian Screen Award Best Director prize, only one, Antigone’s Sophie Deraspe, is over 41. Add in Kathleen Hepburn and Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers (The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open), Calvin Thomas and Yonah Lewis (White Lie), Matthew Rankin (The Twentieth Century), and Kazik Radwanski (Anne at 13,000 ft)—the latter three considered at greater length in Cinema Scope 80 and 81—and it’s got to be the youngest Best Director crop in history, and not just dating back to the mid-decade inception of the CSAs as a new name for the Genies, an angular statuette last seen wielded fatally against Julianne Moore in Maps to the Stars (2014).
God willing, won’t be David Cronenberg’s last directorial credit (and he was robbed of an acting nomination for his Ursula Andress-inspired cameo in Albert Shin’s [2019]). All in all, the 2010s were not too shabby for English Canada’s greatest living filmmaker: underrate the late-stylin’ trio of (2011), (2012), and at your peril (I did, and in print, to boot) while noting [2016] was a late-career peak), the incorrigible Guy Maddin (maintaining his postmodernist mojo with the help of the Johnson brothers, Evan and Galen), and the incomparable Michael Snow (who called back to [1971] with the IMAX-subsidized [2019]), DC was the only major Canadian director with significant credits in the 20th century to do anything like hold serve in the 21st.
