And then who the hell was I?

I can't understand why I am exposing us all in this way . . . . Is this the tsunami that she unleashed when she went, and all of us still flailing in her wake, trying to put her together in the wreckage, and her slipping away, over and over, just as we begin to see her face? - Sarah Polley, in an email to her father Michael Polley

Looking to see what family connections there possibly could be connected to me and enjoy building hopefully a happy picture - From the profile of a recent DNA match to the Resident Fan Boy

Stories We Tell has that quality shared by all of my favourite films: the ability to draw me back, again and again, noticing new details every time; being a completely different movie every damn time.

The subject is the gradual revelation of a family scandal, and how widely the narrative varies: from those directly involved, to the those affected by it, to those who witnessed aspects of it.

We tend to screen books, music, and movies through our own uppermost concerns, so my first viewing of Stories We Tell, about ten years ago, reminded me of the myth-making and myth-busting of family research and the resulting clashes of narratives and identity.  More personally, I had a similar, but not identical, revelation in my own family at almost the same time, resulting in everyone affected having to rewrite their own family story.  I think few amateur genealogists fully appreciate the risks of their research, but this risk applies to anyone setting out to tell the story of their relatives.

Our changes in perception are constantly evolving, so a few months ago, I re-watched the film following the tsunami in the wake of the death of Alice Munro, the Nobel Prize-winning author who died last spring. The figurative family bombshell that hit Sarah Polley's family about a decade and a half after the death of their matriarch is not of the legacy-tarnishing quality as that affecting the Munro family, but it was also deliberately kept out of the papers, initially to protect Michael Polley, Sarah's father, and then, because this documentary was being made.

Sarah Polley in the 1980s with parents Michael and Diane

Diane Polley, an actor and casting director, died in 1990, when Sarah Polley, then a busy child actor and now an award-winning writer, was eleven.  Diane had four older children:  John and Suzy Buchan, from her first marriage, and Mark and Joanna Polley, from her second marriage.  They all take their seats at the beginning of the film, like a family gathering at an intervention - except none of them are in the same room; this is footage from separate interviews, during which Sarah Polley asked each to "tell the whole story, from the beginning", as if to someone who is hearing it for the first time.  The backing music is "Skinny Love" by Bon Iver:  And I told you to be balanced/ And I told you to be kind....  

And the late Diane Polley also seems to take her place as well, via footage of an audition from the mid sixties.  But she doesn't say a word.

Someone who doesn't take a seat is Sarah Polley herself, who deliberately keeps silent through most of the film, aside from the occasional question or brief comment, and appears in the occasional re-enactment of events, but with no soundtrack. Sometimes this makes her presence seem oddly impassive, but, as her father astutely points out, she has the ultimate control over what makes it into the film.

Here, I must alert you to spoilers, if you're planning on watching this movie -- and you should.

Polley moves back and forth in time, revealing the surprises and twists out of sequence, but closer to the timeline of their discovery.  She illustrates events with authentic family movies and (*first spoiler*) reconstructed Super 8 footage, using actors.  The Resident Fan Boy didn't notice the latter, but I did, mainly because I recognised Rebecca Jenkins, a friend of Diane's, an actor who also sang back-up for Jane Siberry in the eighties.

Polley is careful to illustrate the differences in  the many narratives about (*big* spoiler) finding out the identity of her birth father. The stories are similar, but vary in small, but important, details, revealing, in particular, the biases of her father, actor Michael Polley, and her birth father, producer/writer Harry Gulkin.  At one point, Gulkin tells Sarah, with some intensity, that the story belongs to him, because he's the one surviving person who experienced it directly.  (I have to restrain myself from shouting at the screen every damn time - if the story belongs to anyone, it's Sarah Polley herself.)

One of Polley's greatest assets is the thoughtful articulateness of her interviewees, particularly her siblings, all evidently very bright people with greater comfort in front of a camera than most people.  It's particularly fun when her brothers give her a hard time, in the way that big brothers do.

Close to the end, we have another moving montage of the storytellers, this time to "Demon Host" by Timber/Timbre: All those messages you sent, clear as day/ But in the night, oh, I couldn't get it right.... The camera lingers on each bereft face: Diane's grown children, her husband, her lover, her friends, her brother.  Years later, she is clearly so missed.

Michael Polley and Harry Gulkin both died six years after the release of this film, within a few months of each other.

The unreliable narrator is a new concept for me, and I seem to be coming up against the term multiple times over the past few months.  (Don't know how I missed this while studying literature in university.) This film demonstrates that we are all unreliable narrators; human memory is just too malleable and mutable.

I think Harry Gulkin was mistaken.  The truth, while ever elusive, is closer through the mesh of narratives, rather than sticking to one voice -- even if that seems the more intelligible way.

But then, perhaps truth is never singular.

More story than history

We like to begin the year with a film, but this year, it just wasn't possible.

Elder daughter took off for Hades in the middle of the afternoon, and we're bound to drift off in an evening screening, so we delayed our film until midday today - well, after the twenty-five minutes of car commercials, public service ads, reminders to turn off our cell-phones dove-tailed into cell-phone service provider ads, and oh yes, several trailers.

Our choice was The Favourite due to the cast, the premise, and the fact that it's likely to figure heavily in the Oscar nominations, if the Golden Globes nominations are anything to go by.

The Golden Globe nominations are, predictably, rather mystifying for this film. For one thing, it's been nominated under the "Best Comedy or Musical" category, even though what humour is in it is very dark. The soundtrack features baroque stuff, of course, with a rather strange ditty from Sir Elton John playing out over the illegible, but highly artistic credits. There's also a dance sequence that is so weird, I wondered if it might be a fantasy brought on by one of Queen Anne's ailments.

This brings us to the second thing: Olivia Coleman has been nominated for a Golden Globe as a lead for her role as Queen Anne of Great Britain (1665-1714; reigned 1702-1714); her costars Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone are nominated as "supporting roles" - in a film with a title that indicates the story is about them - each is a "favourite": Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, and her less fortunate cousin Abigail Hill (later Baroness Masham). This sort of thing seems to happen a lot with women's film roles, lead roles are interpreted as supporting roles, so they can be fitted into the categories.

At any rate, it's a strange film, but quite a beautiful one. The camera angles are sometimes folded into panoramic shots, or stretched into oval fish-eyes, with the shadows, highlights and shades of Vermeer paintings, lots of dark blues, black-and-whites. You can't find fault with the acting. It's the sort of film that makes me say inwardly, as I gaze on tastefully filmed scenes of royal lesbianism and bunnies (not in the same scenes): Goodness, I wonder what really happened?

Because it's a mistake to equate film-going with a history lesson.

Don't get me wrong; do go see it, and then find out how much is likely to be true. I suggest you start here - a web site entitled History Vs Hollywood, which, currently, provides historical context on about 200 recent movies, most of them made since 2000, although films such as Jaws and Schindler's List are included.

If you're like me, you'll want to check afterwards, not ahead of time, as facts do get in the way of a good story.

Doing the subcontinental

A couple of years ago, I accidentally came across an extraordinary video. (I never actually look for these things; they always show up when I'm supposed to be doing something else.)

It's David Brubeck's "Take Five", but played on subcontinental instruments. I liked it so much that I shared it twice on Facebook.



It turns out that the viral video begat a documentary film and when it showed up on the calendar for the Bytowne Cinema, I knew I had to go!



I love that it's PG-rated for "violent images and smoking". (The violent scenes were from newscasts.)

The film opens with a man singing a haunting song, accompanying himself on a hand-pumped harmonium.  This is Nijat Ali, and the film introduces us gradually to him and several other Pakistani musicians struggling to keep their music alive in Lahore.  We learn that Lahore once had a thriving musical scene until a truly creepy guy named General Zia-ul-Haq took over and it was decreed that music was anti-Islamic.

Zia-ul-Haq eventually had his day, but it wasn't long until the Taliban stuck in their oars.  As a result, the musicians featured in this documentary were careful to play only in places with sound-proof walls.  Traditions were dying - it was hard to earn a living, and hard to train up sons (never daughters) in music.

Finally, a wealthy financier named Izzat Majeed, who remembered the "Jazz Ambassadors" visiting Pakistan when he was a young boy, made a bid to re-establish Lahore's reputation as a musical centre.  He remembered hearing Dave Brubeck all those years ago, and establishing the Sachal Studios and gathering musicians, recorded "Take Five", and put it on YouTube.  Brubeck, who heard this version before his death in 2012, sent a message expressing his admiration.

Not so long after that, they heard from Wynton Marsalis.  The second part of the film follows a select group of half a dozen musicians representing the Sachal Studio, as they make a great cultural leap in travelling to New York and performing with Marsalis and his jazz orchestra.  At Lincoln Center.  The men don't speak English nor read music.

The video below is one of the numbers they played, but is not from the film, but from a performance in Paris in August 2013.  (Which is odd, because as far as I can make out, the Lincoln Center performance took place in November 2013.)


There are three videos with the Wynton Marsalis Quintet and the Sachal Jazz Ensemble on Marsalis's YouTube station, but a fellow named Hassan Khan has a myriad of Sachal Orchestra videos, including several numbers with Marsalis, including this gem:



I was a bit worried about an aging violinist interviewed in Lahore in the first half of the film.  He wistfully tells us at the close of the documentary that the string section wasn't able to travel to New York. However, he is getting more chances to play; Sachal Orchestra has its own YouTube channel as well, and they've been recording their own versions of pop and rock tunes, among other things.



The documentary's co-director is Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, who is Pakistani herself and an Oscar-winner for her documentary Saving Face. The story of how a woman manages to make a film about an all-male group of musicians in a profession where women, if they participate at all, participate only as singers would make a documentary in itself. (You can read about the challenges here.)However, that's not just a Pakistani problem. You constantly hear Marsalis address his orchestra as "my brothers", because there's not a single female musician among them.

The music's great, all the same.