I personally know the assistant director who worked on this film (Eli), so my thoughts will probably be biased with regards to Fortescue. Either way I had the opportunity to see it – in a photography studio of all spaces, which made for a very intimate environment. Very small but cozy. It was the last screening being held in Toronto before it tours and travels its way to London in the UK, so I knew I had to make the trip for it.
It’s a story of two best friends Lea and Gabby, women who enjoy being in each other’s company partaking in many fun activities including painting, staging a play and performing as well as swimming and enjoying the outdoors. The film was shot in Haliburton County, and that entire region of cottage country out in the woods is something I have familiarity with. My family did not own a cottage but I spent many summers as a child in those areas, and the cinematography does a nice job of capturing the green lushness and distinct beauty of those Ontarian forests and lakes.
Their peace and harmony is then interrupted by the arrival of Lea’s boyfriend. Lea devotes more of her attention and affection towards him which affects the dynamic of her relationship with Gabby and their co-existence. I appreciate the director Rebeccah Love’s emphasis on the female gaze as a way to further drive that division home – the boyfriend taking his shirt off, swimming and chopping wood. Some aspect of this disruption in dynamic also reminded me of Christian Petzold’s Afire, another movie also involving a bunch of friends living in a cabin in the woods as well. There’s a similarly funny moment here involving Gabby being interrupted in her sleep by the sex happening next door.
Eventually the tension culminates and it soon affects their efforts towards putting on a play for the community, which includes getting the director of the Stratford Festival to see their play in the hopes that it’ll gain them more respect and opportunities in that direction. Their rendition of Rapunzel involving Lea’s boyfriend and Gabby is a strange one indeed – not exactly following in tradition of the original fairy tale as they go along, and things get pretty adult for the unsuspecting families with the children in the audience. The Stratford Festival director leaves unimpressed, and soon afterwards the boyfriend takes it a bit too far. We see this during earlier moments in the film where he’s grabbing Gabby into the water despite her fear of swimming, and now in this instance he is restraining Lea and hurting her. Lea breaks up with her and he relents and leaves. The ending cycles back to how things were before at the beginning – them sharing their time together.
The bipolar disorder portrayal through the character of Lea was very well-done and felt quite realistic. The way Lea would devote away her attention and devotion towards the different people in her life in one moment (from Gabby to her boyfriend), to her fleeting passion towards staging the play when things don’t appear to be going her way. It wasn’t a surprise to find out during the Q&A at the end that the director Rebeccah Love herself also is bipolar and was largely basing it on her own experiences with the disorder. Many themes throughout the film involving not just one’s own individual mental health struggles, but also the burden that can also have on the others close to you.
P.S. I’m also told by Rebeccah Love herself that this will be arriving to CBC Gem for streaming very soon.